On Social Media Stories

I've been thinking about this a lot. I've never liked social media stories, whether on Snapchat or Instagram or anywhere else.

(Although VS Code stories was nice to play with when it was first out.)

I've been trying to understand why I don't like stories in the first place. At first I thought it's the same reason why I prefer Snapchat over Instagram:

In my head, Snapchat is an app to connect with people. Similar to messaging apps. You'd only send snaps to people you care to stay in touch with.

Instagram on the other hand is different - you share content with your followers. (Now these followers could be friends & family only, but that's besides the point.) The content is simply posted out there. Similar to this blogpost, I'm typing this out because I want to, and I will post it in a few minutes because I want to.

Neither Instagram posts nor my blogposts are meant for a specific person.

Now here's the thing with stories: they feel like advertisements.
The only difference here is that the OP is the brand, and the story is the ad.

But everyone appears to be checking stories proactively. Like what?

Stories are clearly a good thing for social media companies since it encourages people to post more and therefore use the social media product more. Win.

But what does it do for me? I don't know.

What's even crazier, is the number of people using it. Apart from content creators and others like me, everyone prefers to post stories over normal posts.

Why? I don't know. Or maybe I do, but meh...