2026-01-23 18:31:32
Building a loyal Instagram audience used to feel like a full-time job. Between content creation, editing, engagement, and managing collaborations, growth always came last on my to-do list. But like many creators, I hit a wall. My content was getting better, but my audience wasn’t growing at the same pace.
That’s when I decided to try https://www.pathsocial.com/ and see if it could help.
After months of experimenting with different strategies and platforms, I decided to try AI Instagram growth for 90 days. I approached it like a campaign, not a shortcut. This is what I learned—and how I went from stuck to scaling.
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Before discovering Path Social, I had 3,200 followers. I was averaging around a 2.1% engagement rate, but reaching new audiences was hit or miss. My Reels were performing well, but my posts rarely showed up on explore. My niche - wellness and mindful living - was a growing trend, but there were so many other creators targeting the same eyeballs.
And my most significant problem? Discovery.
No matter what I did: hashtags, shares, giveaways - I could not figure out how to get consistent access to the right audience.
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Initially, I was skeptical. I had witnessed the harm bots can do to accounts: ghost followers, shadowbans, and inauthentic engagement in general. What intrigued me about Path Social was their hybrid model of AI-based audience targeting + real humans involved in the process.
They were not convincing people to engage with bots or mass follow. They were providing targeted discovery of followers.
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After signing up, I completed a thorough onboarding form. I answered a lot of questions about my niche, important hashtags, competitor accounts, and even a few brands that I wanted to partner with. This gave Path Social some context for more precise targeting.
I also made sure my content library was optimized:
Then I waited.
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The first sign that something was working? My story views nearly doubled.
From there, engagement followed. In week one, I gained 230 new followers. Week two brought in another 300. But what stood out most wasn’t the number—it was the relevance.
People DM’d me about posts I’d published weeks earlier. Comments were longer, more thoughtful. It was clear: this was the right kind of audience.
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Followers: +3,480
Engagement rate: 2.1% → 3.4%
Shares: +61%
Saves: +42%
Brand DMs: 5 new pitch inquiries
Story Replies: +98%
My reach finally matched my content quality.
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The Path Social team didn’t just run traffic—they curated it. That was the difference. The AI system filtered potential followers by interest and behavior. The human side helped guide those choices based on feedback and performance.
It was like working with a talent scout for my audience.
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Don’t think “set and forget.” You want clear goals. In my case, more engagement and brand collabs.
When a new user lands on your page, you have just one chance. Make checks that your bio, highlights, and best pieces of content speak to that user.
When your new audience starts coming in, pay attention to what they are responding to. I learned that quick wellness how-to type content performed much better than aesthetic posts. This is what informed my calendar for the future with content.
Without content, growth is just wasted traffic. During my campaign, I maintained a 3x weekly posting and daily stories.
Not everything will spike overnight. But over time, the trend line matters more than the peaks.
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What impressed me? The inbound brand interest.
Because of the increased engagement and niche clarity, two eco-friendly beauty brands reached out about partnerships. One of those collaborations turned into a long-term ambassadorship.
Followers are the entry point. Real value comes from what they do after they follow.
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If you’re a creator who’s burnt out from chasing the algorithm, I can say this with full honesty: Path Social helped me reset my strategy.
It didn’t replace my effort—it focused on it.
With the right tools, consistent content, and a clear voice, growth doesn’t have to feel random. For me, Path Social wasn’t a growth hack—it was a growth partner.
I’d recommend it to any creator ready to take themselves seriously. Because the numbers matter, but the people behind them matter more.
:::tip This story was distributed as a release by Sanya Kapoor under HackerNoon’s Business Blogging Program.
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2026-01-23 17:25:09
For those who aren't aware, Mend Renovate (aka Renovate CLI aka Renovate) is an Open Source project for automating dependency updates across dozens of package managers and package ecosystems, 9 different platforms (GitHub, GitLab, Azure DevOps and more), and boasts support for tuning its behaviour to fit how you want dependency updates.
2026-01-23 15:11:07
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## AI Doesn’t Mean the End of Work for Us 
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I believe that AI’s impact and future pathways are overstated because human nature is ignored in such statements. Read More.
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2026-01-23 14:20:28
Miami, Florida, January 22nd, 2026/CyberNewsWire/--Halo Security, a leading provider of external attack surface management and penetration testing services, today announced it has successfully achieved SOC 2 Type II compliance following an extensive multi-month audit by Insight Assurance.
This certification validates that Halo Security's security controls are not only properly designed but also operate effectively and consistently over time.
"SOC 2 Type II compliance demonstrates our unwavering commitment to protecting customer data through proven, operational security practices," said Lisa Dowling, CEO of Halo Security.
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"Our customers trust us to help them discover and remediate vulnerabilities across their attack surface and this certification shows we apply that same rigorous security discipline to our own operations every single day.”
While SOC 2 Type I certification validates that security controls are appropriately designed at a specific point in time, Type II compliance requires continuous monitoring and verification over an extended audit period. Insight Assurance evaluated Halo Security's actual security performance throughout the audit period, examining not just policies but their real-world execution and effectiveness.
The extended audit period assessed:
Halo Security partnered with Genius GRC for expert guidance throughout the compliance journey and leveraged the Vanta platform to maintain continuous compliance readiness. The company also developed a custom integration between its platform and Vanta to streamline the audit process.
"We extend our sincere appreciation to Insight Assurance for their thorough evaluation and validation of our compliance efforts," added Dowling. "Their expertise and impartial assessment have been instrumental in verifying our adherence to the SOC 2 framework.”
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“Achieving SOC 2 Type II is not just about documenting controls. It is about proving that security processes are consistently executed over time,” said Eric Shoemaker, Advisory CISO and Founder of Genius GRC. “Halo Security demonstrated strong operational maturity throughout the audit period, with security practices that are embedded into day-to-day operations rather than treated as a compliance exercise.”
This achievement reinforces Halo Security's position as a trusted partner for organizations requiring comprehensive external security assessments. The company's vulnerability scanning and discovery solutions, combined with manual penetration testing services, help thousands of organizations worldwide maintain visibility into their attack surface security posture.
Halo Security is changing the way organizations manage their external attack surface. Instead of leaving organizations to figure it out alone, Halo Security pairs unprecedented visibility into internet-facing assets with expert remediation guidance.
The company's EASM platform is the next generation of vulnerability scanning. It automates asset discovery, includes auto-configured continuous vulnerability scanning, and delivers penetration-testing insights, all in one solution to deliver fast, measurable, and affordable risk reduction.
Since 2013, Halo Security has helped over 2,000 clients discover and remediate vulnerabilities in their external-facing assets before attackers can exploit them.
As a PCI DSS Approved Scanning Vendor (ASV) and SOC 2 Type II certified organization, Halo Security maintains the highest standards for both its services and operations. Halo Security is headquartered in Miami with a 100% US-based team.
For more information about Halo Security's SOC 2 Type II compliance or to request the company's SOC 2 report, users can contact a Halo Security representative or visit www.halosecurity.com.
VP of Marketing
Nick Hemenway
Halo Security
:::tip This story was published as a press release by Cybernewswire under HackerNoon’s Business Blogging Program. Do Your Own Research before making any financial decision
:::
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2026-01-23 13:00:03
I've been designing products for over a decade now, and I've noticed something: most design debt doesn't start with bad design. It starts with decisions that made perfect sense at the time.
A PM says, "Let's ship this for now, we'll clean it up in Q3." The team's underwater. The deadline's real. And honestly? Shipping something imperfect is often the right call. Products have to move. I've made these calls myself.
But somewhere between launching and scaling, something shifts. The usability issues that were supposed to be temporary become permanent. Not dramatically. Just quietly enough that users adapt, and teams stop seeing the problem.
"We'll fix it later" might be the most expensive lie in product development.
Because once a workaround actually works, it becomes normalized. Once users figure out how to compensate for bad UX, the friction stops showing up in your metrics. And once revenue is flowing, the urgency to fix it evaporates.
That's how UX debt sneaks in. Not through negligence, but through success. You shipped, users adapted, and now changing it would break more things than it fixes.
Tech debt will eventually crash your system. UX debt just slowly erodes trust until users quietly leave for something that doesn't exhaust them.
There's this romantic idea that need drives good design. I used to believe that too.
But what I've actually seen is that constraint drives good design. When you have limited resources, you're forced to be ruthless about what matters. You strip features to essentials. You design for clarity because complexity costs too much.
Then the scale arrives, and everything flips.
Suddenly, there's a budget to patch edge cases rather than solve them. New features get bolted onto old flows because rebuilding would take three sprints. Internal logic starts replacing user logic because, well, the team understands it and users will figure it out eventually.
The product still "works." It only works if you already know how to use it.
Here's what makes UX debt so insidious: users are incredibly adaptable. They'll memorize your broken flows. They'll tolerate awkward steps. They'll blame themselves when something feels confusing.
I've watched users in research sessions apologize for not understanding an interface that was objectively terrible. "Sorry, I'm probably just doing this wrong."
So the signals teams rely on - drop-off rates, complaints, rage clicks - often come too late. By the time you notice a usability problem at scale, it's not a design issue anymore. It's an organizational one.
Because now multiple teams depend on that flow. Changing it would break analytics, experiments, and Development scope. Nobody owns the whole experience. And fixing it would require coordination across product, eng, data, and legal.
That's your UX debt compounding with interest.
This is the phrase that should terrify you.
I've heard it in probably fifty meetings over my career, and it never means what people think it means. It doesn't mean the experience is good. It means the experience has successfully trained users to lower their expectations.
And once that happens? Innovation slows. Conversion plateaus. Support costs creep up in ways that are hard to trace. Retention erodes, but quietly, so you don't connect it to the UX issues you decided were "fine."
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==You don't lose users because your product fails. You lose them because using it is exhausting.==
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The teams I've seen handle this well don't obsess over perfection. They obsess over reversibility.
They ask questions like: Can we undo this decision later without breaking everything? Are we optimizing for speed or clarity right now, and do we have a good reason? What assumptions are we baking into this that future users won't share?
They treat usability like infrastructure, not polish. Because once UX becomes a "nice to have," you've already lost.
UX debt isn't about ugly screens or outdated visual design.
It's about extra cognitive load: the thinking users shouldn't have to do, the invisible rules they have to remember, the mental models that stopped matching reality two versions ago.
And cognitive load is expensive. For users, for support teams, for growth, for retention.
The irony is that teams often spend more engineering effort working around bad UX than it would take to fix it. I've seen entire features built just to compensate for a confusing core flow that should have been redesigned years ago.
Ask a new hire to use your product without any guidance. Just watch.
Notice where they hesitate. Where they say "Why does it work this way?" Pay attention to what they assume versus what's actually true.
That gap is your UX debt, fully compounded and charging interest.
Look, sometimes "good enough" design is the right call. I'm not advocating for perfectionism. Products have to ship.
But when "good enough" becomes your strategy, when you stop revisiting and improving usability even when things are working, you're building debt. And unlike financial debt, you can't see the balance. You just feel it in the slow erosion of user loyalty and the increasing cost of doing anything new.
Need might invent solutions. But sustained success requires that usability be designed, revisited, and defended, especially when metrics say everything's fine.
==Because the most dangerous UX problems are the ones nobody complains about anymore.==
2026-01-23 12:35:44
SemanticGen proves that smarter abstractions—not more GPUs—are the key to scalable, coherent video generation.
