Instagram is becoming more like Facebook

If you’ve spent any time watching Instagram Stories over the last year, you’ve probably noticed a trend: Posts that don’t have any photos or videos at all. With polls, quizzes, text updates, and AMA-style question and answer sessions, Instagram Stories are moving beyond their photographic roots.

Now Instagram is redesigning its in-app camera to make it easier to create non-image Stories posts using Instagram’s “creative” tools, like polls, questions, and GIFs.

It may seem like a relatively minor change for Instagram, which has been steadily adding features to Stories for some time. But it highlights just how crucial Stories has become to Instagram’s engagement, and how the format has evolved.

Features like polls and quizzes and static text posts used to be the kind of content you’d expect to see in your Facebook News Feed, not in Instagram. But as Instagram has grown to more than a billion users, it’s started to become the more dominant social network for many. And these users have begun to use Stories in a way that previous generations may have used Facebook. 

With the change, rolling out in the next few weeks, Instagram’s camera will be separated into three modes, instead of the cluttered mess it currently does: live, camera, and create. The “camera” section is where you can find Instagram’s camera effects, like Boomerang and Superzoom, as well as the augmented reality effects. 

While the new “create” section is where you can make non-image posts. You can begin a post with GIFs, a poll, or other sticker, similar to how you’d create a text post from the Instagram camera today. These tools will still be available to add to photo and video posts after the fact, but you can also use them as standalone posts.