When it came to interacting with a Story, the only option used to be sending a DM to the creator. This is something that disincentivized people from interacting with them altogether. No one really wants a message in their DMs containing a sentiment that a quick “like” can sum up. Luckily, Instagram is working on more subtle ways to interact with Stories.
Instagram might make it possible to reply to Stories with audio clips
The company might be working on a new way to reply to stories, but this one may not be all that subtle. In the tweet, we see a leaked image of an Instagram Story with the option to reply to it. In the text bar, we see a little microphone icon. This hints at the ability to reply to Instagram Stories using audio clips. Being able to do that could be an interesting concept, especially for people who are friends on the platform. If you want to give more of a spirited response to a Story than text or an emoji, you could be able to.
There’s no word on how this will function
Right now, all we have to go on is this picture, so you’ll need to take this with a grain of salt. Since this is going to be intended for quick responses, the audio clips might be kept really short (maybe no longer than 20-30 seconds). As with anything on the platform, the creator could retain the right to delete and report any audio clips if they feel the need to.
— Alessandro Paluzzi (@alex193a) March 26, 2022
There’s one important thing to consider
At this point, we can’t expect everyone on the internet to behave (people post all sorts of disturbing content to TikTok). That being said, giving people the ability to send you audio clips could lead to trouble, as people sometimes use social media to send, let’s just say, “unsavory” content to people. Because of this, Instagram will need to have some checks in place so that people won’t get bad audio messages. Maybe the company could make it so that users can pick and choose who can send them audio messages. This is important for really popular people on the platform who don’t want thousands of audio messages on the daily. We also can’t rule out children, people of color, women, LGBTQ+ folks, and other people who are at high risk. Hopefully, the company will have some safety precautions in place to reduce abusive audio messages.
