What to know

  • Your Instagram Stories can now get comments from others.  
  • The Story Comments feature is enabled by default. Anyone who can see your story can see the comments on it as well.
  • Users can choose who gets to comment on their story. Comments remain on a story until the story expires.
  • Tap on the speech bubble in the bottom left corner of a story to comment.  

Instagram now lets you leave comments on other people’s Stories, which can be seen by others, as well as invite comments on your own Story. Here’s everything you need to know about the new feature – who can comment, who can view Story comments, how to comment on a Story, and most importantly, why should you bother.

Story Comments: How it works

Firstly, comments on a Story are different from the ‘messages’ that you send when you want to text or react to someone’s story.

If comments are turned on by the user, you’ll see the ‘Comment’ icon at the bottom left corner of the Story, next to the ‘Message’ field. When someone leaves a comment, it appears at the bottom of the Story, similar to how comments appear on a Live stream.

But who gets to comment on a Story, and who can view?

Who can comment on your Story?

Anyone who can view your Story can view the comments on it. But when it comes to commenting, it all depends on the one posting. Users with a Private account can allow comments from their Followers or Followers they follow back. Public accounts can allow comments from Everyone or Followers they follow back. Both account types can also turn off Story comments altogether.

  • Private account
  • Public account

How to comment and view other comments on a Story?

  1. To comment on a Story, tap on the speech bubble in the bottom left corner.
  2. Type your comment carefully (there’s no edit button) and send it through. 
  3. Your comment will now appear in the comments section. Tap on it to view all comments. 
  4. You can delete the message later. Simply tap and hold on your comment and select Delete. If you’d rather send it as a DM, tap Message.

Here’s a visual guide for your reference. Go full screen for a better view:

You can comment on your own Story too, which can function as a nice caption. And if you want to preserve the comments, simply save the story to your highlights. 

Although users might be apprehensive of Story Comments at first, the feature can help get a conversation going for as long as the story lasts. Since Stories are how people mostly share these days, it also opens up new ways of interacting on the platform, which is what Instagram’s wants to achieve with it. Whether or not you even want to have comments on your Story is entirely up to you. And if you want to moderate the comments space and block users, there’s that too.

Story Comments is rolling out to users across regions. You should see a message telling you about it when you’ve received it.