Determining which individuals have expressed approval of a user’s Instagram story is currently not a directly supported feature within the application’s interface. The platform provides metrics related to story views, offering insights into the number of unique accounts that have watched the content. However, a dedicated mechanism for explicitly tracking ‘likes’ or positive reactions on stories, analogous to post likes, is absent.
The absence of a story ‘like’ counter impacts content creators’ strategies for gauging audience engagement with ephemeral content. While view counts offer a broad understanding of reach, they lack the nuanced feedback that a ‘like’ feature would provide. Historically, Instagram has prioritized simplicity and visual presentation within the story format, potentially influencing the decision not to include a direct ‘like’ functionality. The benefits of having such a metric would be to enable creators to see which stories resonate more with their audience.