Instagram has rolled out a nifty update for Stories, which allows users to like a Story without sending a dedicated direct message to another user. The “Private Story Likes” feature allows users to show their love for the Instagram Story content of their friends without cluttering up their DM section.
The new Private Story Likes feature was recently announced by Instagram head Adam Mosseri. In a short video posted on Twitter, Mosseri explained how the feature would work on the platform.
❤️ Private Story Likes ❤️Starting to roll out today, you can now send some love by liking people’s stories without sending a DM. Likes on stories are private and do not have counts. Rather, they appear as hearts next to people’s handles in your Stories view sheet. 🙏🏼 pic.twitter.com/l56Rmzgnnw— Adam Mosseri (@mosseri) February 14, 2022
It is worth mentioning that the Story viewer sheet will not show the cumulative like count of a Story and is different from an Instagram post’s like counts. It will only show tiny hearts sent by different Instagram users. Mosseri says that “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.” The feature is a part of Instagram’s focus on the DM section, which is a priority in 2022.
