Stalking Instagram Stories

[WinterNightsByCandleLight]

Right, ladies, is this weird?

One of my OH's work colleagues doesn't follow me on Instagram (and doesn't have me on Facebook either) - the two other women who work in his department that OH is close with, do follow me, and I follow them also! We all get along well and regularly chat/have banter etc - not sure that's relevant but thought I'd add it in anyway!

So, the one that doesn't follow me (who I also don't follow)..
I noticed this evening that she'd watched my Instagram story that I posted this afternoon. Upon spotting this, I went back through my Archive of Instagram stories and have seen that she's been watching my daily stories almost religiously for nearly three months now?! 🤔 To watch someone's story that you dont follow, you need to search for them to get to their profile and then watch it that way - as opposed to when you do follow someone, their story will appear at the top of your feed making it nice and easy to quickly tap and see what people are posting.

Is it weird that she's quite blatantly searching for my profile on an almost daily basis to watch my stories!? I think it is.. I told OH about it but he can't see why it bothers me. For the record, it's not that it 'bothers' me as such, I just find it quite creepy and strange!

Oh and before people jump to it, I can categorically rule out anything going on between weird stalker colleague and my OH!

I find it weird that people have public profiles. But I accept it’s what some people do. No big deal.

You get a notification showing who’s viewed.

I think people are missing the point, it’s not that she’s watching them - it’s that she has to actually go to the search bar, type in OPs name, go to her profile and then select to watch the story. Every single day. It’s strange.

I watched my exes wife's story once then realised she could see i had it. Awful! Okay I was being nosey and only looked once. Three months is a bit extreme! But my point being... probably being nosey! Take it as a compliment.

Once you’ve searched once, you don’t need to search again as it comes up in your ‘recent searches’.
The woman is probably looking at loads of stories not just the ops.

Hasn't all this Instagram business, especially setting it to be available to view by evey tom, dick and harry, been invented to look for attention? Well you got it. What's the problem?

You still have to press the magnifying class, then click search to get to recent searches. What I’m saying is it’s not just there on the front page. This woman is having to search for the stories and is doing it every day. I have my profile locked down but I still think it’s weird.

I do think you can solve it by just making your profile private to be honest, why would you want all and sundry seeing all your personal life, it only leads to stuff like this. Unless you're a blogger and it makes you money, why drop clues about where you live/who you hang out with/what the inside of your house is like etc to the world.
It is really weird she's doing it though OP, she's literally thinking about you daily and typing you in, it's hardly normal if she doesn't know you, even if she does just find you entertaining, or was just super friendly- she'd just follow you surely . Who knows, maybe she fancies your DH and is sizing you up/comparing, she wouldn't be the first to do that would she maybe she is just bored.

You can hide your stories from certain people in 'settings' so do that if you don't want to go private, nip it in the bud and you don't need to worry. I'd just otherwise block her if it really bothered me, then she'd know I knew at least.

OP you seem determined to make yourself feel important by over analysing this. You seem far more obsessed by her than by her randomly looking at stories. Perhaps she commutes and spends her time amusing herself by looking at Ista? Perhaps she is nosey? Perhaps she looks at tens of stories everyday. Perhaps like me, she doesn’t ‘folliw’ because she does t want to accept you as a follower in return?

She's prob having it odd with your fella and checking the story to see if he's in it.

Having it off even. Doh!!

Isn't it as strange to reply to random people's posts and issues on mumsnet as looking at someone stories.
We all go back and check what's been said and talk to strangers.
It's the way the world is now.

Maybe she only follows people she's actually met? Them and maybe celebrities? Friends of friends who aren't a big name on a social network can be an odd grey area. People have all kinds of odd personal rules and ideas of ettiquette, it never ceases to surprise me. I'd guess she's watching lots of people's too. Also if she's watching on a desktop browser, she may not be searching, it might be what comes up when she starts typing in Instagram and then if she keeps reusing that one out of laziness, she keeps ending up on yours first. Like there are Wikipedia articles that have ended up as my landing page for Wikipedia for weeks or months out of this sort of inertia and because I haven't cleared the history, not because i'm obsessed with the topic and reading the article several times a week. I've never watched an Instagram story in my life though, so I don't know if they autoplay or what - they seem to be very fraught, every mention I've heard of them attaches an awful lot of significance to people watching them in a way that makes me very glad Instagram didn't exist when I was in my teens and twenties.

Perhaps it's just as case of how nosy we can all be particularly if we don't think we will get caught. I looked at my boyfriends ex girlfriend on Facebook, she's one of his friends. I would be mortified if she knew.

Yeah as PP said, I am often nosey. I have a routine of people I find interesting to look up when bored (usually when patting DS to sleep or on hold on the phone at work). There's actually a couple I don't follow, I don't follow them because I guess I don't really see us as friends but I like being nosey.