Have you ever wondered how to read messages or watch someone’s story without letting them know? In this article, we’ll explore how to half swipe on Instagram and read messages and stories without letting your friends know!
Half-swiping is a trick Instagram users use to see DMs and stories anonymously. It’s mostly done to protect one’s privacy, especially when one needs time to reply but wants to know what the other person is saying.
Why to Half Swipe on Instagram?
The half swiping feature on Instagram can be used for so many reasons, stating the few below:
✓ Maintain the privacy and security of your account on Instagram.
✓ Not letting the sender know you’ve read the message will help you take time and reflect on your situation.
✓ You don’t want to engage in a conversation immediately but need to understand the context behind it.
✓ Take control of your online presence over your Seen status on someone else’s account.
✓ Fun trick to do with friends and family.
How to Half Swipe on Instagram
Before knowing how to half swipe on Instagram, it’s important to know what part of the content you like to half swipe! To understand more about it, you can half swipe on Instagram Direct Messages (DMs) to see the Messages and Stories to check the sender’s stories without letting them know.
Let’s explore both methods in a step-by-step process:
1. How to Half Swipe on Instagram Messages
Step 1: Open the Instagram app on your device and tap the Direct Messages (DMs) icon on the top-right corner of the screen. You can also swipe right to left after landing on your feed to reveal your messages window.
Step 2: Scroll down in your DMs until you find the chat you want to read without letting the user know.
Important: Don’t open the chat just yet, as we need to follow the next step to perform a half-swipe.
Step 3: After locating the chat, tap the chat and swipe down immediately after opening it. This must happen in split seconds so you can swipe down and reveal older messages before loading the new ones.
Note: Your action will be marked as read if the new messages load before swiping down.
Step 4: Now scroll up to read the past messages. You can also scroll down slowly to reveal the new unread messages, but you have to ensure you do not scroll all the way down, as it’ll be marked as read. You can read most of them when there are multiple messages and swipe left to right to get out of the chat.
This will keep the chats unread, and you’ll get to know what messages are sent.
Tip: We suggest you practice half-swipes on demo messages or ask your friends to send one before jumping directly into the ones you prefer.
2. How to Half Swipe on Instagram Stories
Half swiping on Instagram stories is a bit different than half swiping on Direct Messagas (DMs). Let’s see how it different and how to tackle a half swipe on Instagram stories.
Note: It’s also worth remembering the half swipe is only useful to watch photos on Instagram stories since videos will only play after a full swipe, leaving you on read.
Step 1: Open Instagram on your device, and tap on the story besides the person you want to half swipe.
Step 2: After opening the previous story to the one want to sneak, perform the next step. Although it’s important to know you’ll be left on read for the person you’ve opened beside the person you prefer to hide from.
Step 3: Now hold your finger on the screen & slowly half swipe right without taking off your finger. This will slowly reveal what’s on the person’s story in the form of a thumbnail. Keep swiping until you see what’s in it. You don’t have to swipe all the way since it’ll leave you on read.
Step 4: Swipe back to the left while keeping the finger on the screen to get back to the previous one. This will not let Instagram know you’ve watched the other person’s story and you’ll successfully perform a half swipe.
Conclusion
Now that you know how to half swipe on Instagram you should also know that with each new update, new features are presented. Therefore, it’s our job to keep you with the latest updates on how to half swipe on Instagram. Just like the new updates on How to Hide Instagram Photos without Deleting Them is just one of many! You never know when you need them right?
Let us know if you have any doubts regarding the same and we’ll be happy to help. Keep swiping, just not too much! 😉