Instagram has always been a place for sharing visual snippets of your life with friends and followers. But in recent months, the platform has been evolving to emphasize more personal connections through direct messaging and prioritize original content over reposted material.

This evolution continued today with the introduction of several new interactive sticker features for Instagram Stories. The most notable addition is called “Reveal,” which blurs out a story post until a viewer direct messages the creator to unlock and view it.

Adam Mosseri, the head of Instagram, has been vocal about the app’s shifting focus toward direct messaging and more intimate sharing. “Direct messages are an increasingly important part of Instagram,” Mosseri stated, “And stories and DMs account for most of our growth.”

By effectively locking story content behind a DM, the Reveal sticker encourages more interpersonal interactions between creators and viewers. It’s an engagement tactic creators will likely leverage to boost visibility and prompt more conversations through direct messaging.

But Reveal isn’t the only new interactive sticker arriving on Instagram Stories. The platform is also introducing “Frames,” which applies a retro Polaroid border to photos that are initially grayed out. To reveal the image, viewers have to physically shake their phone, mimicking the developing process of a classic Polaroid picture (albeit without following Polaroid’s advice against shaking the photos as they develop).

This nostalgic Frames feature first debuted during Coachella in April, tapping into the current trend of vintage aesthetics on social media.

Additionally, Instagram is rolling out “Add Yours Music,” a template that lets users share songs to their stories with prompts like “favorite song on X album” or “if you could only listen to one song for the rest of your life.” It builds upon the existing story prompt templates for sharing photos, now applying the same crowdsourced format to music.

These new features align with Instagram’s broader push to spotlight more original content created by its users. Just this week, the platform announced it would deprioritize reposted or aggregated content in recommendations, instead of surfacing the original source post.

However, this renewed emphasis on original content is a double-edged sword for creators. While it aims to elevate authentic, user-generated material, Instagram is also intensifying its focus on recommended content from accounts users don’t already follow — a concerning shift for creators who have seen their reach plummet among existing followers.

This article was originally published on May 3, 2024, at 11:30 am ET.