Who even texts these days? These days, it's all about sliding into Instagram DMs and sharing memes and reels with each other until one of you eventually stops reacting to them.

Talking about DMs, have you ever wished there was a way to read your Instagram messages without the other person knowing you've seen them? While you can always see the messages from the notifications, if you need to see something in the chat, there's no way to do it without opening it. But, as luck would have it, there's a hack that lets you open a chat on Instagram without the other person knowing that you have seen the message.

It's more commonly known as a "half swipe" – a technically inaccurate moniker since you won't be doing any "half swiping". Nonetheless, here we go.

Open the Instagram app and swipe left to open your DMs or tap the 'Messages' icon in the top-right corner of the screen.

Find the chat with unread messages you want to open without actually "opening" it. Now, before opening it, read the next step carefully.

Once you tap the chat to open it, you need to swipe down in the chat so that the messages scroll up. And you need to be lightning fast because, once the new messages load into view, it's game over. They will be "seen".

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To recap: Open the chat with unread messages and quickly swipe down so that the chat scrolls up.

If you have successfully scrolled up, the new messages will remain unseen.

Now, you can actually see the new message without reading it. Slowly start scrolling back down. But don't scroll all the way down.

Don't scroll completely down. Until the message isn't completely viewed, as in the screenshot above, it won't be marked as seen.

If you reach the end of the message where the space between the message and the compose box becomes visible, the message will be marked as read.

In this case, where the message is completely on the screen so that the space between the message bubble and the compose box is visible, it'll be marked as seen. 

Suppose there are multiple unread messages in the chat and one of those messages comes completely in your field of view, i.e., the end of the message bubble is above the bottom of the screen, it'll be counted as read. The messages below it won't until they come entirely on the screen. But the other person will be able to see a 'Seen' label underneath the message that had come on the screen.

For example, in the screenshot below, out of the two new messages, the message "Hey" is entirely viewable and will be marked as seen. However, the message bubble for "Are you there?" isn't completely on the screen and this message won't be marked as read.

So, if there are multiple unread messages in the chat, you can't use this hack to read them all without tipping off the sender.

Whether intentional or a bug, this is how Instagram DMs currently work. The message isn't counted as read until the bottom of the message bubble crosses the screen's threshold. And until it does work like this, you can continue using this "half swipe" hack to read messages without seeing them!