Meta-owned photo sharing platform Instagram is rolling out a new feature that will allow you to “Like” people’s stories. The new feature, named Private Story Likes, will let users like people’s Story on Instagram without sending them a direct message.Currently, the only option to react to Stories is via an emoji or a full-on message that shows up as a response in people’s Instagram Inbox. With the new feature, users can react to the story without sending a message to the person who has shared the story.
The new feature was announced by Instagram head Adam Mosseri, who posted a video on his Twitter. In the video, Mosseri can be heard saying, “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.”
️ 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
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Now, Stories will not have like counts as with Instagram posts. With normal posts on an Instagram feed, the company has spent over two years testing the option to hide the like counts on Instagram, before finally deciding to leave them on. Users can opt ot hide them in their posts.
For likes on Stories, users won’t see a public count, though they can see who all have left a like on their Stories when they look at the view sheet or the list of people who have seen the story. Mosseri, in his video, said that the idea is to let people know that others are reacting to their Stories, while cleaning up the DMs a little bit.
The feature has not rolled out to all users and it is not known as to when users in India will be able to “like” people’s stories. But given that Instagram has started rolling out the Story Like feature, it is expected to show up on your app in the coming few weeks.
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