The Real Reason Your Instagram Story Viewers Show Up In That Order

Whether you’re posting a deep, dark secret on your Close Friends story or a soft launch on your public story, there’s a good chance you’ve scrolled through your Instagram story viewers before. Maybe you want to see if your crush has seen your latest cute candid or want to see which random acquaintances from high school are still tapping through your memes or perhaps you’re just browsing out of sheer boredom. Whatever the reason for scrolling through your Instagram story viewers, you might be perplexed as to what determines the order of your story viewers.

The order of your Instagram story viewers can seem totally random. If you’re trying to use your story viewers to see how recently a specific someone viewed your story, you may want confirmation as to how the order of your story viewers is determined.

Here’s what the order of Instagram story viewers means.

What Does The Order Of Instagram Story Viewers Mean?

According to Status Brew, Instagram story viewers are not listed chronologically. You may have already put this together if you checked on your story viewers early on, then checked back later to see your original viewers scattered throughout the list.

So, how are story viewers ordered? Well, as is the rhyme and reason for many social media mysteries, it seems to all come down to the Instagram algorithm. Instagram purposefully keeps its algorithms fairly shrouded in mystery. However, based on testing the story viewers' order for myself, there seem to be a few probable causes behind the order that viewers show up in.

Of course, Instagram seems to place those who have liked your story at the top of the list. So, you will likely see rows of usernames with red hearts next to them at the top to show who has liked your story.

As for the rest of the list, the algorithm seems to function similarly to the way in which stories show up at the top of your feed. Typically, the accounts that you engage with the most seem to be listed first in your story feed. It looks like this is somewhat the same for story viewers – meaning that the accounts you engage with the most show up towards the top. This engagement can be measured by accounts you like photos from often or DM the most. However, this doesn’t seem to always be the case, as a few random viewers likely make appearances toward the top of your list every once in a while.

The story viewer list also seems to place accounts that you don’t follow back toward the bottom. As for any kind of chronological view order, there is little evidence to show whether the order in which people view the story affects the order of your viewer list.

Overall, the order of Instagram story viewers seems to be left to mystery, but maybe that’s a blessing in disguise. Otherwise, you might spend a lot more time analyzing your story viewers than you need to.