New interactive stickers for Stories

Instagram has introduced several new features to Stories, offering interactive ways to share music, photos, and videos.

One of the most interesting additions is a feature called Reveal, which blurs the content of a story post and requires viewers to DM the person who shared it in order to see it. Instagram's head, Adam Mosseri, has emphasized the importance of direct messages on the platform, with stories and DMs driving most of Instagram's growth. Requiring a DM to view content represents the next step in boosting engagement, and creators are likely to use it as a tactic to increase their stories' engagement.

Another new feature, Frames, adds a Polaroid overlay to images that initially appear gray. Users can shake their phone to reveal the photo, resembling the process many people associate with Polaroid pictures, despite the fact that shaking Polaroids is not recommended by the company during development.

Instagram has also introduced a music-based template feature called Add Yours Music, allowing users to share songs to their stories using prompts such as "favorite song on X album" or "if you could only listen to one song for the rest of your life." These updates are part of Instagram's efforts to promote original content from users, with a recent change focusing on making reposted or aggregated content less visible in recommendations in favor of the original post. Recommended content from accounts users don't follow is now a bigger focus, which may be frustrating for creators seeking to reach a wider audience.

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