Instagram follow / Unfollow

Hi there,

I've got an Instagram account of 3k followers, my engagement rate usually around the 7% range. I focus primarily on high-quality content but have built a lot of it utilising follow/unfollow.

My methods are to target an account in my niche and follow 9 people every hour for about 7 hours. I do this every day for a week then spend the next week following them (though I make sure I'm not unfollowing the most recent people).

Had a discussion about this on reddit and it was unanimously agreed that this would destroy my engagement long term. The thing is I've been doing this for 6 months and it hasn't affected it at all, it's helped me grow expon3entially with lots of engaged comments and DM's for my business.

Am I missing something?

I tried avoiding doing this for a week and my growth rate has slowed to a crawl and my engagement rate too.

Should I go back to the old method? Is there a slightly better way of doing it or is this a really bad way to build a community?

Feel free to be as harsh as you like, here to learn from you guys.