Instagram has become one of the world’s most popular mobile applications, with millions of users scrolling through its endless content to find out what their favourite celebs have been up to or to catch up on their friends’ latest antics. Now owned by Facebook’s parent company Meta, Instagram boasts almost 1.5bn users worldwide each month, according to market and consumer data company Statista.
Since it was launched in 2010, Instagram has become the perfect way to show off your recent endeavors to friends and family, whether that means sharing photos of last night’s party, or posting cute snaps of your furry friends. It has also been updated to allow a whole host of new functions, one of which is the popular Instagram Stories feature.
Instagram Stories allows a user to post an image or video to their profile that stays live for just 24 hours. After that time is up, the post will disappear forever and be inaccessible to your followers – unless one of them has taken a screenshot.
Unlike with regular Instagram posts, Stories allows a user to see a complete list showing who has viewed the post. Some users may wonder why the list is arranged the way it is.
Is someone cyberstalking you? And why is the profile of that person you barely know right near the top of the list?
Here, we explain what the order of the list of Instagram Stories viewers means.
Speaking to The Verge in 2018, product lead for Instagram Home, Julian Gutman, revealed the list of your Instagram Stories viewers appears the way it does based on what you do on the app. He said: “The people that show up on that list are not the people that stalk you the most, it’s actually based on your activity and the people you’re closest to.
“There are a lot of confounding factors. Do you visit their profile, like their feed post, comment on their feed post, view their stories?”
In other words, Instagram arranges the list so the users towards the top are those who you interact with the most, and those at the bottom on the list are the users who you interact with the least. Originally, Instagram would show the list chronologically – so the users on the list would appear in the order they viewed your Story.
But in 2016, this was switched to algorithmic, meaning Instagram’s algorithm would arrange the list to prioritise the accounts with which you have the most interaction. If you check the list more than once, you may notice it has rearranged.
This is to allow users to get more from the app by seeing new and more relevant information on each visit. Gutman added if a user checks the list of Story viewers several times, the algorithm “tries to show you a new set of people, it’s trying to give you new information every time you check the list.”
So, in the same way posts appear in your regular Instagram feed based on which profiles you interact with most, the list of Story viewers will appear in the same way. In addition, any users who have liked your story will appear first.
You will know if someone has liked your Story as they will have a small red heart next to their name and they will appear at the top of the list of your Story viewers. Here, we explain what happens if someone screenshots your Instagram Stories.
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