The Meta-owned photo sharing platform has announced the launch of the new private Story likes feature.

“We’re excited to announce private Stories likes, where you can react to Stories without sending a DM. The likes are private, do not have counts and only appear as hearts next to people’s handles in your Stories view sheet,” Instagram tweeted from its official account.

Users will now be able to see a heart icon on Stories and can like another user’s Story from that icon.

The author of that story will be able to see the likes received in their viewer sheet instead of their direct messages. There will be a heart icon against the names of the users who have liked a Story in the author’s viewer sheet.

“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. I said at the beginning of the year, that messaging was a key priority for us and a big piece of that is focusing DMs on the conversations between you and the people that you care about,” Instagram Chief Adam Mosseri explained in a video announcing the feature.