Instagram Introduces Likes for Stories

More and more new feedback options are added to Instagram. Recently it added up to four responses to a poll, and the next move is adding traditional likes to stories. Users could react to other users’ stories before, but their reactions were delivered to the story’s author as a message. Alike is not.

Now stories have a heart icon at the bottom. It works absolutely like the similar icon under post: just tap it to show you like the story. After you do it, the icon turns red. The author of the story will see your like on the list, but will not be notified about it with a message. No one else can see the number of the likes and who left them – like with regular reactions to stories. This correlates with how Instagram hides the numbers of likes for select users from all the other users.

What’s the meaning of these likes that function like those under posts? The principal difference is that they don’t start a conversation like reactions did. This means you can swipe through stories and drop likes even at night when you don’t want to wake the author. And if you are a power user with thousands of subscribers, you won’t be attacked with thousands of DMs, so the conversations will be much clearer.

It will take a while for users to acknowledge the new feature (which is not very noticeable unless you already know). But soon your DM tab will not be that flooded as soon as you post a new story. Similar likes have already been added to Reels. It’s not clear whether the introduction of similar features will bring Reels and Stories closer together for a more seamless experience.

Have you already liked someone’s story this way? Did they notice it at all (in case both of you care)? Do you prefer receiving silent likes to noisy but more diverse reactions? We’d like to read your comments: unlike reactions, these won’t wake us in the middle of the night.