What the order of who views your Instagram stories actually means

The meaning behind the order of Instagram story viewers has been revealed, and it might reflect how you use the app.

What order Instagram story viewers are in is an algorithm that has puzzled us since the feature was launched back in 2017.

Some have argued it’s totally random, whilst others have come up with elaborate theories based on data and analytics.

However, there are a couple of possible theories which make more sense, considering story viewers tend to land in a similar spot everytime.

The Instagram algorithm has puzzled people for years. (Illustration by Budrul Chukrut/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images)

Instagram has never confirmed an official order, but based on logic and experiments, this could be as close as we’re going to get.

The platform has switched its algorithms up a lot in recent years.

The feed used to be in chronological order, but Instagram shook things up to place a heavy emphasis on what the user wanted to see first instead.

How does Instagram determine the order of story views?

Based on experiments, there are two possible algorithms that make a lot more sense than the others:

1. The list of Story viewers is shown in reverse chronological order until there have been more than 50 viewers.
2. After 50 views, Instagram then pushes those accounts who you have interacted with the most at the top. But here’s the catch: profile views are allegedly given the heaviest weight in this equation, according to the research.

But that still leaves us very much in the dark.

What we are slightly more clued up on, however, is the order in which you are presented with stories to watch.

According to Social Media Week, Paige Thelen Cohen, who works in tech communications at Instagram, said: “Similar to the feed, Stories are ordered based on which moments you’ll care about most.

"The order is determined based on a number of signals." (Getty stock image)

“The order is determined based on a number of signals, including: 1) the likelihood you’ll be interested in the content, 2) timeliness of the posts, and 3) your relationships to the person posting.

“The technology is powered by machine learning, which is adaptive to your behaviour and improves over time.”

Does the order really matter?

A much wider question that ties in nicely with all of this, is asking ourselves why we really care.

It seems to be our inner stalkers who love to know who might be a little bit obsessed with us.

The only thing we can say for certain is that people are dying to hear from Instagram themselves how they order it.

Come on Insta, divulge the info will you!

Tyla has contacted Instagram for comment.