How To Skip Snapchat Stories On The Snapchat Update, Because No One Has Time For That

Snapchat users may notice some major changes in the app this week. Snapchat got a big update, which included integrating stickers, sending photos, and audio and video calling. That's all well and good, but there's one aspect of the rollout that is stumping users, and it's what Snapchat calls "Auto-advance stories." In case you are one of the many who is perplexed or annoyed, here's how to skip Snapchat stories on the Snapchat update.

Before this update, users may recall that you could select the stories you wanted to view, stop them when you wanted, then go back and choose another one. When they were finished playing, they would stop automatically and take you back to your home screen. Well, all that tapping is a thing of the past. Now, all you do is tap once and the videos keep playing, uninterrupted — an unbroken stream of chats.

So what exactly was the company thinking? According to Snapchat, their "goal was to emulate the best parts of face-to-face conversation." That is, without actually having to interact with another human directly. Auto-advance stories keep that conversation going. For people who want to watch every story their friends post every day and don't want to wait for them to load one by one, this is great. This makes life that much easier. They can just keep watching without going back to a different screen. Yay. For everyone else — beware.

Many users have taken to Twitter to voice their annoyance with the new Snapchat update.

Others just want help on how to skip stories, which brings us to the point. How do you stop this auto-play stories? How do you undo what's been done?

Sadly, you can't undo the update. For now, auto-advance is here to stay. But, according to Snapchat, skipping stories is easy. When you update there should be a tutorial that walks you through the process of navigating your feed, but if you missed that, here's how: "When you finish a Story, the next one begins automatically — simply swipe to skip ahead, or pull down to exit!" Perhaps once users start to get the hang of it it won't be so bad...

From Snapchat's point of view, this is probably a great way to up its numbers and get more views to more stories, but the costs (to people's time?) might be great.