Facebook Stories are always changing and updating but every time they do that, it feels a little bit manipulative in a sense.
Despite all the complaints, Facebook claims that Stories is the next-generation of social sharing. Facebook doesn't make these claims in thin air and has actual statistics to show and prove their claim about how and in what numbers the people are using Facebook Stories.
With all the proof backing up the claims, Facebook is carrying out its discovery and development for the Stories. Not only that, but Facebook is also pushing these features to the people but it is unclear whether they are using these features or not. Last week, Facebook rolled out a new feature for Facebook Stories that will make the Stories to be viewed separately on a "discover (or discovery)" page. This feature is easily accessible and can be used to see all viewable Stories under the existing Stories bar.
This new Facebook Stories feature has also been compared with a number of existing features of different apps like Instagram's IGTV by the critics.
Reports claim that Facebook has been working on this Facebook Stories Discovery feature for quite a while now and the same option was rumored to be rolled out on Twitter last summer. However, the feature did not see the light of day and it seemed a little dull as well.
An opinion: Choosing Stories for Facebook and pushing this feature to the people seems like a desperate move from Facebook to put more people on the Facebook Stories bandwagon and maybe it will work but we don't know that for sure. Stories may make sense on Instagram but it doesn't seem to fit in Facebook and its demeanor.
Facebook is a big company, one of the biggest in the world, and they must have planned a strategy before rolling out this option. There are still more than 500 million active users on Facebook who interact with Facebook Stories on a daily basis. The number is not insignificant but it is actually 30% of all the Facebook users that are currently active on the platform. Despite the argument, the newer generation may feel more familiar with the vertical Stories format which could give them benefit in the long-term retrospect and could really become the future of social sharing.
Facebook may think of this option that could portray the 'Explore' feature on Instagram which is evidently a more engaging way to connect with other people.
