Instagram recently unveiled a new feature called Stories which allows you to shoot, annotate, and share photos and short videos outside of your normal feed. By default, all of your followers can see the Stories your post. Likewise, you can see all the Stories the people you follow are posting. This is where it sometimes gets overwhelming.
I follow a lot of random people on Instagram because I appreciate the quality of the photos they share on their feeds. However, I care very little for their Stories, which are typically more about their personal lives than sharing beautiful shots. In this case, I’d rather not see their Stories at all.
There are also some people who follow me with whom I don’t want to share my Stories, so I am opting to hide my Stories from these people.
In this post we will learn how you can hide your story from select people, but also how you can prevent other people’s stories from filling up your screen.
How to hide your Instagram story from specific people
If you want to make sure specific Instagram users don’t see your story, you can follow these simple steps:
1) Navigate to the person’s main profile.
2) Tap on the ellipsis icon in the upper right corner of the screen.
3) Select Hide Your Story from the options that are presented to you. A message will appear on the screen to confirm that this user will not be able to see your story anymore.
If you wish to undo this, simply follow the first two steps above, and select Unhide Your Story.
How to easily find out who your stories are hidden from
If you can hide and unhide your stories from specific users from their own profile page, it can quickly become difficult to keep track of that. To alleviate this issue, Instagram added a new section in your profile settings where you can have a glance at all the users you’ve hidden your stories from. If you change your mind, this is also where you can unhide your stories from them.
1) To get there, go to your profile, and tap the Menu icon in the upper right corner, and select Settings.
2) Choose Privacy and then Story.
3) Select Hide Story From. The users you’re hiding your stories from will show at the top. You can also add or remove people on the list. Tap Done.
How to hide stories on Instagram by other users
Technically, you won’t be hiding stories; you will just be muting them. This means that you will still be able to see them if you choose to, but they won’t be displayed chronologically in the carousel of stories. Instead muted stories will appear after all other stories that are available to you.
For instance, if I mute a user who happened to just publish something to his story, this story will show last in the carousel, despite being the most recent one. This is a great way to give priority to the stories of people you actually care about the most.
To mute someone else’s stories, simply do the following:
1) Find the person you want to mute in your stories carousel at the top of your Instagram feed.
2) Tap and hold your finger on their profile icon for a few seconds. You will see two options: Mute and View Profile.
3) Tap on Mute and then select either Mute Story or Mute Story and Posts per your preference.
As explained above, the user’s stories won’t be completely hidden from you. They will just be muted. If you scroll all the way to the end of the Stories carousel, you will see that this user’s stories are there. They stand out from the rest as the users’ profile icons are washed out a bit, as you can see on this screenshot.
You can unmute this user’s stories by following the same directions, and choosing Unmute.
Again, this is a nice feature because it prioritizes the stories of people you are most interested in. However, I must admit I wish there was a way to completely hide stories from specific users altogether.
This is all there is to hiding/muting stories on Instagram. Note that at this time, it is not possible to disable Stories altogether, so if you don’t like that new feature, it seems you’re going to have to live with it anyway.