Goodbye, Fleets

Twitter is great when it comes to transparency. I love how they included this<p>&gt;Although we built Fleets to address some of the anxieties that hold people back from Tweeting, Fleets are mostly used by people who are already Tweeting to amplify their own Tweets and talk directly with others. We’ll explore more ways to address what holds people back from participating on Twitter. And for the people who already are Tweeting, we’re focused on making this better for you.<p>It&#x27;s always nice to know why an experiment&#x2F;project failed. They didn&#x27;t have to explain it, but they did and I thought it was a nice touch.

Kudos to Twitter for pulling the plug on a high profile feature that wasn&#x27;t working out.<p>I saw some reasonably interesting Fleets at first, but it quickly devolved into a low-effort self promotion feature as they noted:<p>&gt; Although we built Fleets to address some of the anxieties that hold people back from Tweeting, Fleets are mostly used by people who are already Tweeting to amplify their own Tweets<p>Eventually I stopped clicking on them because I knew I&#x27;d see the Tweets during my normal scrolling anyway. I suppose this problem is inherent to Twitter, where Tweets are already low effort enough that they didn&#x27;t need another feature for rapid-fire, low-effort content. Contrast with Instagram where people&#x27;s posts are generally well thought out, but their stories are made for rapid-fire content.<p>Twitter didn&#x27;t have the same divergence, so Fleets and Tweets became the same content in different formats. And of course, the Twitter self-promoters took full advantage of a feature that let them bubble their content to the literal top of people&#x27;s feeds.

&gt; Although we built Fleets to address some of the anxieties that hold people back from Tweeting, Fleets are mostly used by people who are already Tweeting to amplify their own Tweets<p>this is exactly my problem with Twitter. It&#x27;s an even bigger echo chamber than FB. As much as I try, I can&#x27;t seem to escape the oversaturated bubble of a handful of extremely loud mouthed tweeters and their ardent followers. Mix in the toxic conversations, and it&#x27;s definitely not a place I feel comfortable discussing anything.

The lack of innovation at Twitter, Instagram and Facebook is utterly baffling and points to a serious culture problem.<p>Feels there are rooms of people now just being paid to clone successful features from other apps and only after those apps have carved their place in the market, literally become followers rather than trailblazers.<p>In just a few years Instagram is going to seem completely old hat to anyone who didn&#x27;t grow up with it, my 10 year old niece has a TikTok account where she makes weird minecraft and among us memes, she has over 2000 followers, I&#x27;ve never even heard her mention Instagram, not sure she even knows it exists.<p>Think Twitter will be relevant for longer just because there are less companies trying to compete but honestly the app that was mostly about reading short form text thinks the future of their platform is half being a voice chatroom? Why? Because Clubhouse the new hotness a few months ago? Again just panicking to clone other services as a feature within their app who cares if it makes sense or complements the platform, lets just pray our existing users opt for doing their voice chat in our app rather than going to that new app.<p>I&#x27;ll admit IG managed to clone snapchat stories successfully and pretty much kill off Snapchat, but reels? IGTV? I no longer have any idea where I&#x27;m supposed to put my focus or post my content in that app.

&quot;We’ll explore more ways to address what holds people back from participating on Twitter.&quot;<p>Perhaps I can help.<p>Twitter is always angry. You&#x27;ll find the most idiotic, extreme, harmful statements from both sides of the political spectrum. Worse, Twitter actively rewards it. The more unhinged and controversial, the more engagement you get.<p>The replies will be equally angry. Any attempt to add nuance or reason is futile. Because the damage is already done in the form of retweets, likes, quotes.<p>Hence, the unreasonables run Twitter. And they have normalized a lot of absolutely pathetic behavior. Taking things out of context and applying the worst faith interpretation of it, willingly. Sub-tweeting, screenshotting, exposing private conversations, speaking badly of others within their bubble, and sometimes this triggering further attacks or even cancellations.<p>This culture of perpetual outrage, hate-addiction even, and the many childish behaviors that come with it, are born at Twitter.<p>After a Twitter session, one feels miserable and depressed. There is nothing delightful, nothing new you learned, no new friend you met. It&#x27;s horror. Like the news, but then 10 times worse.<p>Wait, sometimes there&#x27;s non-hateful tweets too. 99% of them are self-congratulatory or stupid. Something like: &quot;My 3 year old just commented that an intersectional approach in politics is most effective&quot;.<p>Attention starved, completely made up. Yet for sure it will get thousands of likes. Both hate and idiocracy are richly rewarded.<p>To stay in line with the ever narrowing Twitter culture, one has to use it at least 6 hours per day. Otherwise, you might miss that word you used your entire life suddenly being problematic. Could even be a particular emoij. Anything triggers outrage. Anything at all. It seems the entire point of Twitter: maximizing outrage perpetually.<p>It&#x27;s a Twitter thing and a Twitter thing only. I&#x27;ve never experienced it with such intensity anywhere else, and I&#x27;m merely lurking. The reason I hate it so much is that it goes beyond just a website sucking, its effects are cultural.

Today I learned that there was a feature called Fleets.

If you think people are held back from tweeting by anxiety, how would you ever come to the conclusion that videos are the solution?

That&#x27;s really too bad. I don&#x27;t tweet much, maybe once a day, but I really liked using fleets, and lots of people told me they loved seeing them, in DM or @&#x27;ing: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;simonsarris&#x2F;status&#x2F;1415370626303504389" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;simonsarris&#x2F;status&#x2F;1415370626303504389</a><p>I want my timeline to be mostly thoughts and nice photography that people can go look at as they please, and I don&#x27;t want to pollute it or waste follower&#x27;s time with one-off stuff (like making pasta every night, or some weird looking bug, or funny sign, etc). Fleets allowed for that really well. I think its a mistake to look at how Big Accounts are using them and make decisions from there.

It was incredibly annoying how it took up significant real estate at the top of the screen and there was no way to disable the feature. Good riddance.

Is it just me or does the word &quot;learnings&quot; make others cringe? There&#x27;s a perfectly cromulent word, &quot;lessons&quot; that are the nouns of the things that you &quot;learned&quot; as a verb.<p>Along with &quot;socializing&quot; instead of &quot;distributing&quot;, it&#x27;s the latest in using stupid words to sound &quot;business like&quot;. It reminds me of the kitty in the Lego Movie bouncing through shouting &quot;numbers, numbers, numbers, business, business, business&quot; to avoid detection.

Maybe someone can correct me, but I don’t recall ever seeing a website fundamentally change itself or evolve and grow whereas I have seen time and time again something entirely new coming out and being the thing people use instead.<p>If you compared Twitter today to Twitter’s first tweet, it’s the same thing. Nothing’s changed with the site itself; I can see people talk about how they ate a sandwich then and still today.

&gt; We built Fleets as a lower-pressure, ephemeral way for people to share their fleeting thoughts. We hoped Fleets would help more people feel comfortable joining the conversation on Twitter.<p>If anyone from twitter reads this, here&#x27;s one thing that could get me to post more:<p>Give us pseudonyms.<p>Guarantee that you won&#x27;t leak them to media or mobs.<p>I understand you&#x27;ll have to givw them to the police sometimes but the police is far less scary for me than the mob.<p>While you are at it: Let me post to different channels or topics or something. Why should people who follow me because of programming have to suffer my gardening tweets and vice versa?

The feature name &quot;Fleets&quot; was terrible. I know it was a pun on &quot;fleeting tweet&quot;, but the word &quot;fleet&quot; just makes me think of a fleet of ships.

IMO this should be the default feature of Twitter.<p>I can&#x27;t think of anything I&#x27;d be SUPER embarrassed of in my Twitter history, but context is important and something I might have Tweeted 10 years ago would look bad today, maybe.<p>Still, I make it a point to delete all my tweets after they&#x27;re a week old or so. Not interested in my random musings living on for all of digital eternity.

One thing I never understood about Twitter, and what keeps me from tweeting, is why on earth everyone needs to see how many likes, replies, and retweets my tweet has? I will never be a Twitter influencer, and have no desire to be. I just want to tweet one-off learnings or thoughts I have without the awkward struggle of trying to compete with others.

&gt; Although we built Fleets to address some of the anxieties that hold people back from Tweeting<p>Those anxieties are driven by the fact that every week someone destroys their career or even life with a single Tweet. In the worst cases, people have been driven to suicide by the backlash to a Tweet of theirs. Unless you are an aspiring celebrity trying to build a career or get a book deal from your Twitter persona, the rational move on Twitter is to not play.<p>Twitter has the levers to fix this -- they can reduce the exposure of highly viral Tweets, especially by non-celebrities (i.e. people without a lot of existing followers). However that would greatly harm Twitter&#x27;s business model because people love mobbing on someone and punching them in the face. So the answer to, &quot;why are people hesistant to Tweet?&quot; is that Twitter has decided that it&#x27;s in its best interests to encourage a highly toxic form of entertainment on its platform.

Big tech companies especially Twitter and Google have zero longevity when it comes to new products. How about they add subscriptions to Fleets before giving up, I’ve enjoyed a few really great conversations there and it’s a decent product like much of Twitter it just needs some love in terms of features and how they work. For example why on Earth am I not allowed to <i>read</i> someone’s <i>public</i> tweets when blocked. Twitter is kind of the definition of getting lucky over being brilliant IMO, how it doesn’t have an edit function yet is beyond me.

Why did Twitter kill Vine?<p>This is why pretty much why TikTok exists and filled that space very quickly.

I don&#x27;t use twitter, in fact, I deleted my account and created a new, blank account in case I got sent anything on Twitter. Twitter is, to me an ugly place dominated by cliques with everyone else trying to shout the loudest in the hopes of being noticed by said cliques.<p>I in no way feel safe or comfortable contributing to a platform that is that toxic and has a long track record of people trawling through every little thing you have ever said in the hopes of destroying your career and life.<p>And people who say the solution is to follow specific people or use certain ways of viewing your timeline underline the other problem which is if the platform requires me to make a significant time investment to get a non-toxic, non-awful experience, then I&#x27;d rather go without and be blissfully ignorant to anything happening on that platform.

I use twitter daily and fleets was nothing more than an annoyance to me. I would click on someone&#x27;s profile picture to view their profile, and it would automatically make me view their fleets instead. Even after watching them (or skipping through to the end), I would click it again and it would still take me to their fleets. Getting to their profile took several taps on tiny sections of the screen instead. The UX was pretty terrible imo and made me frustrated more than anything.<p>I like the idea of fleets, but I think it was implemented poorly. They just copied the same &#x27;story&#x27; format that&#x27;s been recycled 100x over. I think an alternative exists out there, twitter will just have to be a little more creative.

Maybe just blindly copying what your competitors are doing isn&#x27;t the greatest strategic plan.

Looks like we&#x27;ve still got:<p>- Snapchat Stories<p>- YouTube Stories (Google)<p>- LinkedIn Stories (Microsoft)<p>- Instagram Stories (Facebook)<p>- WeChat Time Capsule (Tencent)<p>- Weibo Stories (Alibaba)<p>- Naver Snow<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;miguelrochefort.com&#x2F;blog&#x2F;tech-giant&#x2F;#65-stories-35" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;miguelrochefort.com&#x2F;blog&#x2F;tech-giant&#x2F;#65-stories-35</a>

&gt; Our Fleet ads test, which concluded as planned last month, was one of our first explorations of full-screen, vertical format ads. We’re taking a close look at learnings to assess how these ads perform on Twitter.<p>Glad I stopped using twitter a few months ago.

&gt; Most Fleets include media – people enjoy quickly sharing photos and videos to add to the discussion on Twitter. Soon, we’ll test updates to the Tweet composer and camera to incorporate features from the Fleets composer – like the full-screen camera, text formatting options, and GIF stickers.<p>So more like TikTok and less thoughtful. Twitter became big because people (sometimes) expressed coherent thoughts and used it for serious issues like the Arab Spring and #timesup.<p>It&#x27;s much harder to foster conversation but this feels like an &#x27;Innovators Dilemma&#x27; moment for Twitter: either go low and be a poor TikTok or go high and be something different.

Oh, finally. Who knows, maybe we&#x27;ll soon get rid of stories in WhatsApp, too!

It&#x27;s been interesting to see the uneven adoption of Fleets. I have two Twitter accounts, one I use for English-language stuff and tech, and one I use for Japanese-language stuff, friends, culture. On the English one, nearly no fleets at all. Maybe once a day.<p>On the Japanese one, the fleets are packed. The feature was SUPER popular in Japan!<p>As Instagram moves away from people sharing stories (they recently announced a new focus - &quot;shopping&quot;, and competing with TikTok), I could only see Twitter fleets getting even more popular here.

Twitter hides a lot of features for third party apps using their API. I probably would have given it a try if they would have made it available to third party apps.

I never saw Fleets. Were they made available to everyone? I use Twitter primarily on the desktop, but I don&#x27;t think I saw it on the iPad app either.

I didn&#x27;t love Fleets personally, the medium was mismatched to Twitter&#x27;s niche of a public social network. Ephemeral media is ideally paired with a small&#x2F;private network to maximize personal expression.<p>The next question is will LinkedIn kill Stories? I&#x27;d guess they&#x27;re probably noticing similar low usage levels, but operationally they might not be as open to killing experiments quickly.

They should just have been normal tweets that disappear after X hours. No special location, no visual treatment, etc. Just ephemeral tweets that don&#x27;t stick around forever on your profile.<p>That would have gotten people tweeting when they might have been afraid to otherwise. That would have been the appropriate equivalent of the features they were inspired by on other platforms.

As I said on Twitter: I just want them to make me able to block my likes (and replies) from appearing on other people&#x27;s timelines.

i dont tweet, despite having an account registered in &#x27;08 because quite frankly its a very toxic and argumentative environment, with a lot of noise, nonsense and bots galore.<p>adding features without cleaning house isnt going to bring new tweeters into the fold, we left and dont participate because of the culture on that platform.<p>same reason FB is having issues growing, i would imagine.

Why would I want to _watch_ someone&#x27;s fleeting thoughts when their written tweets serve literally the same purpose?

Finally I can view profile pictures again.

My biggest issue with their design was the horrible flow of clicking on someone&#x27;s profile pic from a tweet that has a Fleet up, would pull up the Fleet instead of their profile<p>In general, I&#x27;d like to turn off stories on every social platform I&#x27;m on. By far the most addictive design for me.

Is Twitter actually used outside the US?<p>Here in Romania, where we rputinely import most aspects of US culture, it&#x27;s almost entirely outside popular consciousness. Politicians and stars are certainly not using it - they&#x27;re on Facebook and Instagram, and YT or Spotify for music.<p>How is it in the rest of the world?

How long before companies start dropping their &quot;TikTok&quot; mode everyone rushed to implement?

Twitter appears like a one-trick pony. We need to start asking whether it serves any purpose, apart from flaming wars and doom scrolling. It is a glorified advertising network being repurposed (and marketed) as &quot;public square&quot;.

I think there is a limit to how much this type of microblogging can grow. Some people are just not into broadcasting every thought. Also, the immediate fallout of many tweet missteps as well as cancel culture is sure to hold many back.

Dear Twitter,<p>Please follow Spotify, Netflix, YouTube model. Make an ad-free premium version, no selling data to others. The product is the product. The users use it to add value to the lives. Not the other way around.

&gt; Although we built Fleets to address some of the anxieties that hold people back from Tweeting<p>Did Fleets address the problem of political extremists using Twitter to go after people&#x27;s livelihoods?

Never seen the option in compose for a fleet? How do you do one?

Sure, like this wasn&#x27;t just a grab at the quick growing market of social voice chat apps like clubhouse last year. What a bullshit org.<p>Twitter management is synonymous with incompetence.

I see Fleets as a thing that takes up a row in the Twitter mobile app, but I never clicked it. Now I hope Facebook says goodbye to Stories.

This isn&#x27;t very surprising; they introduced fleets 8 months ago but never bothered to add them to the web version in any form.

Maybe I&#x27;d be in the target group (rarely say anything), but I didn&#x27;t know that it existed.

I use Twitter basically every day and never even knew this existed. What are Fleets?

That was a trashcan. Glad they are getting rid of it.

Waiting for the Goodbye, Spaces post.

Am I the only one here wondering what the fuck Fleets even is? I have never seen or heard of such a feature before LOL

How to grow up Twitter followers and connect? What should I do to increase twitter followers.

... we hardly knew ye!

Good call.

Feel free to respond with get over it, but BLOG.twitter.com HAHA.

My resistance to tweeting is a) even 280 characters isn&#x27;t even for almost any useful content, b) hate mobs.<p>Put simply: if you wanted the most intelligent view that opposed yours on a subject, would you <i>ever</i> use Twitter?<p>I humbly suggest social media could work better, based on a variant of reddit&#x27;s &quot;place&quot; pixel art stunt:<p>1) you post freely and anonymously, but others can hide your post freely and anonymously as well.<p>2) if you want to restore your post, just click a button to do so. No one individual could hide a post twice.<p>3) if it&#x27;s hidden again, you&#x27;ll have to retype it. My bet is - most low-effort trolling won&#x27;t go this far, but those who strongly believe in a controversial opinion will.<p>4) maybe escalate further with time delays, CAPTCHAs, etc - but ultimately, if you&#x27;re definitely human and you really care, the post&#x27;s visibility should become immutable.