Instagram adds comments for Stories with anti-trolling feature

Instagram Stories, one of the most popular parts of the Instagram app today, is getting a big new feature: comments. Here are all the details you should know, including how they’re designed to help eliminate trolls.

Key protections aim to make Stories comments more wholesome

The latest Instagram release introduces a notable shift to how you can interact with your friends’ stories.

Previously, you could send an emoji reaction or message in response to a story, but there was no way to publicly comment.

Now, comments are rolling out to all users. But they arrive with a twist.

Instagram is implementing two key restrictions on how comments work, in an effort to make stories’ comments section more wholesome.

1. Story comments are only visible to people who follow you
2. Only mutual follows (people whom you follow back) can leave comments on your stories

These two privacy-focused details should serve to eliminate trolling from Instagram’s new story comments. Instagram, in my experience at least, tends to be one of the more positive social spaces on the web, so these protections should help that continue.

Just like stories themselves, story comments will disappear after 24 hours. If you prefer to disable them, you can do that on a per-story basis.

9to5Mac’s Take

I love that stories are finally getting comments, and the way Instagram has built them seems great. Limiting comment visibility to followers only helps reduce any potential unwanted attention from less friendly parts of the internet. But putting even stricter limits on who can comment at all is a bold choice that I also find useful. I could see how some users would want to open comments to a larger base though. We’ll see if Instagram provides that option at some point in the future.

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Are you glad to see comments added to stories? What do you think of the restrictions? Let us know in the comments.

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