Instagram is adding Likes to Stories so it doesn’t clog up people’s inboxes

Instagram lately has been introducing a lot of features to make the user experience on the app better. From allowing people to mass delete posts and comments to giving them easier access to their visited links, and reorganising the feed, the main aim is to ensure that the time spent on the app is a smooth one. The Meta-owned social media platform has added one more feature to the lot and they call it Private Story Likes.

Private Story Likes will let users like someone’s Instagram Story without sending a DM to them. Currently, if you respond to or react to someone’s Story with an emoji, it shows up as a response in their DM inbox. The new feature will allow you to respond and react without that happening.

As Instagram head Adam Mosseri explained, “So now, as you go through Stories, between send message and that little paper airplane, there will be a heart icon. And if you tap on it, it’ll send the author of that story a like, and that like will show up in the viewer sheet, not in your DM thread with them.”

Like counts on Stories are not available, but once the feature rolls in you can see who left a like on the Story on the view sheet. “The idea here is to make sure that people can express more support for each other, but also to clean up DMs a little bit,” Mosseri said.

Instagram stories do not have like counts, unlike the posts you see on the main feed. This is one of the things that differentiates Stories from the regular Instagram posts. Instagram has also been testing hiding Like counts on the main feed for a couple of years now and has left the option on default for users. You can change this from the settings and hide the Likes on the posts.

The new feature is rolling out now to all Instagram users globally.

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