The rise of the popularity of social media has given birth to a practice that most of us do but never admit it. Yes, the practice I’ll be talking about today is stalking someone online.
Be it a person you have a crush on or a person with an interesting social profile. We’ve all stalked someone one way or another. It’s not entirely a bad thing as there are many levels to it. If you stalk someone just out of curiosity of what they’ve posted or were over the years then there’s nothing wrong with it. But if you start saving someone’s picture in your phone and watch them every day then that may get a bit creepy on your part.
However, no matter how we stalk people, we never would admit that we’ve done it but would want to know if someone stalked us. As hypocritical as it may sound, it is true for most of us at least. Social media platforms have taken advantage of such situations and let people know if someone has viewed their content.
Snapchat, for example, introduced its famous My Story feature back in 2013 which allowed users to post a picture or video of up to 10 seconds for the next 24 hours. In addition to this anyone who views a person’s story would have their name on a list of people who’ve viewed it. over the years, many other platforms like Facebook and Instagram have adopted this feature along with the viewer list.
Instagram, however, has implemented an additional feature to have your story stay up on your profile as long as you like. It is called Highlights and was introduced back in 2016 and it featured the same view list as the Story. Now that gave birth to a problem.
If someone who follows you views your Story, it doesn’t necessarily mean they are stalking you. It’s because they can view it directly from their feed. However, in order to access your Highlight, they would have to open your profile. That would mean you could tell who stalked you just by looking at your viewer list in your Highlights.
This was a huge issue for people who just wanted to look at someone’s Highlights but were too embarrassed to admit it. However, it wasn’t going to last forever. Just now some people started noticing a change on their Instagram app where they weren’t able to view the list anymore. We confirmed it and this was what we got:
As you can see, you can still see how many people have viewed your Highlight but the list is gone. Instead, there’s a message which says “Viewer lists aren’t available after 24 hours”. This has been currently been observed in Instagram version 79.0 on iOS and Android.
However, we believe that this was independent of the app update as some people who reported hadn’t updated their Instagram app for over a week. This probably means that people on Android won’t be able to roll back their app to an older version and cheat the system.