Here's How to Trick Your Friends Into Opening Your Messages ASAP

I am not a fan of read receipts. The anxiety I have when I open a Facebook or Instagram message and know that, at that exact moment, my secret is out. I have read the message and the sender can see that. And now I'm just expected to craft a response to the sender momentarily so that person doesn't think I'm ignoring them? The horror.

Though Meta doesn't give us a choice to disable read receipts, luckily Apple does. And you bet I have read receipts disabled for iMessages.

But not everyone is like me. Every day, people are reading messages and allowing their phones to timestamp the exact moment they laid eyes on it and then sharing that data with the sender. So brave.

However, it has come to my attention that even those folks who are Team Read Receipts sometimes want a little privacy.

TikToker Daniel Hentschel (@danhentschel) discusses this phenomenon of having read receipts enabled and then purposely not opening messages until they're ready to respond. For the person on the other end of the conversation, it can be aggravating. Like excuse me, but read my message now!

If you know someone with their read receipts on (or are messaging someone on Facebook or Instagram), here's how you can get them to open your message immediately. Commence operation trick someone with their read receipts on to open your message ASAP!

Creator Daniel Hentschel is living in the future. He shared a genius trick on TikTok.

"When someone has read receipts on, they will intentionally not open your message until they feel like responding," Daniel says in the beginning of his video. I'm sure we've all experienced this to some degree.

Usually, this person will be able to get an idea of what the message says by looking at the notification on their lock screen or the unopened conversation in their inbox. Here they'll be able to read the first 80 to 85 characters of a message.

If you want someone to read your message sooner rather than later, Daniel suggests you must craft a message that will fool them into thinking they can assume what the message says. As in, go wild with the first 80 to 85 characters of a message. Write something so compelling or urgent that they can't bear to leave the message unread.

He shows an example of a text that reads the following in the preview window display. "I'm in the hospital. In so much pain. I have no idea how but the doctor told me I bro—...".

Sounds pretty alarming, right?

But the actual message isn't very high stakes. It reads, "I'm in the hospital. In so much pain. I have no idea how but the doctor told me I broke my back from carrying this relationship. What is holding you back from communicating with me?"

Daniel explains that you include your actual message in the second part of the text. In this case, the real text was "What is holding you back from communicating with me?"

"This is a trojan horse texting model," he explains. (For context, in The Iliad, the Greek army tricked the Trojans during the Trojan War by building a giant wooden horse and leaving it at the gates to Troy. The Trojans brought the horse inside, thinking it was a peace offering. But what they didn't know was that Greek soldiers had hid inside the horse and were ready to attack them.)

Users shared some thoughts about Daniel's texting trick in the comments.

Some felt it was kind of a sleazy move. Others appeared to have no qualms about opening a message and then leaving that person on read.

But then one user pointed out that Daniel's elaborate trick was unnecessary, necause folks with their read receipts on are still able to hold the message notification down on their lock screen and preview the whole thing without the sender knowing.

That said, is it even worth the trouble to craft such a strategic message if there are still ways folks can work around it? Not sure, but Daniel's method definitely allows you to flex your creative writing muscles at least for the first sentence or so.