Instagram wants your DM conversation to be better organised, in response to this the company is rolling our Private Story Likes. Instead of you sending an emoji or replying with a text which normally appears as a DM conversation, you will now be able to send private story likes to users which won’t count as a DM.

“So now, as you go through Stories, between send message and that little paper airplane, there will be a heart icon,” Instagram boss, Adam Mosseri shared in a video. “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. So, you can do so without worrying about cluttering up your messages.”

Interestingly, private story likes will not have like counts, this makes sense since people can now hide like counts on feed posts due to the psychological effect it has on many. “And if they want to see all their likes, or if you post a story and you want to see your likes, you can go to the viewer sheet for that story and there will be a little heart icon from any viewer who actually liked that,” Mosseri added. “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.”

Instagram has been rolling out a lot of updates lately and the company also began testing the return of the chronological feed in January.