In the beginning of last month, February, Instagram started testing a new feature that is most likely to be very popular among its users, especially those who are always curious about who-viewed-my-profile kind of things. The new feature Instagram began testing last month is concerning its stories feature. It will allow the user to know when someone is taking a screenshot of a story he or she has posted to the Instagram Stories social media app.
This feature will not be applied without warning, though, as users who attempt to take a screenshot or a screen recording of a friend’s story will be prompted with a clear warning that the next time they he or she does that the friend who posted the story will be alerted. As for the other side of the situation, users who have had their stories screenshot taken will be able to see that under the list of the story viewers.
Any one of the story viewers who has taken a screenshot of the story will have a camera shutter logo next to his or her name in the story viewers list that the story owner can see under the tap that is labeled “seen by”.
Instagram acknowledged the tests stating that the social media app is always looking for new ways to improve the experience of its users and allowing them to share their important moments with people who matter most to them. It is believed, though, that Instagram is employing this test to make sure of its effect on the engagement rates before deciding to roll the feature out to all Instagram users or not.
And the effect of this feature might be from both sides not that good as a number of Instagram users came originally from Snapchat to get away from these alerts of screenshot takers, as well as the possibility of some users start to watch less stories on Instagram as long as they find themselves unable to take screenshot or screen record of those stories without having the owner of the story alerted about that.
This feature is not in its eternity new since all Instagram users are used to being notified when someone attempts to take a screenshot of a private message but this is the first time those notifications are applied to the public stories. Some good news remains that users are still allowed to view the story for as many times as they would like in the 24 hours the story stays up without having the app reporting how many times the story was viewed to the owner of the story.
