Instagram Stories are adding comments to the feature

Instagram is adding a new way to interact with Stories on your feed, a feature that has now become available to some (but not yet all) users of the platform.

Since Stories launched on the platform -- a response to the rising popularity of SnapChat at the time, which had the premise of posts that disappeared after a certain amount of time -- interacting with them has been confusing at best. Right now, when someone likes or responds to your story, it shows up in your Messages tab. And if it's someone you don't know, it might even end up in the abyss that is the Requests tab within that tab.

With this new update -- available for some users currently, but not everyone yet -- you are able to leave comments on Stories that actually show up alongside the post you are responding to. It used to be that you could ony publicly engage with Stories by liking them, but comments may add new value to the long-standing feature.

Instagram has been implementing and testing a lot of new features lately to increase engagement on the app. Due to the way the platform's algorithm works these days, people are finding it less and less rewarding to post to their main feeds because the algorithm shows their posts to fewer and fewer accounts (even the accounts that follow them). More people are now posting to their Stories, and comments may encourage even more people to do the same.

I personally don't find myself interacting with Stories as much as I used to -- mostly because I spend far less time on the app than I used to (because I rarely see posts from people I want to see, and that de-incentivizes me to use it). But Stories could be a way to find more of the content I'm looking for from accounts I specifically follow, and comments admittedly do make the idea of that more appealing. We'll see if others feel the same when this rolls out to more people.