In fact, head of Instagram Adam Mosseri revealed via Twitter that the newly introduced ability aims to reduce unnecessary clutter from a user’s DM (direct message) inbox. As mentioned earlier, existing interactions, especially from a huge following, will inevitably fill up the Stories creator’s inbox. This may cause them to miss out on more important messages, as well as receive an influx of notifications on the platform. “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,” he tweeted. “Messaging is a key priority for us, and a big piece of that is focusing on DMs between you and the people that you care about.”
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 The new “private like” feature is currently being rolled out to all Instagram users across the globe. After receiving the update, the new interactions will show up as a heart icon located between the send message and airplane icons when viewing a Story. It’s also worth noting that the like count is visible to the creator only. (Source: Instagram vis Adam Mosseri [Twitter])
