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Twitter starts testing 'Fleets,' its version of Stories
- Zenst 7y agoInteresting, will be interesting how they are received and utilised. Whilst they don't allow reshares, it is common for people to screenshot a tweet and share that screenshot - this won't prevent that and wonder how Twitter will police that. Also wonder if they will allow customisable expiration (up to a point), say 36 hours etc. Or allow shorter duration posts, say an hour for spot promotions - which would be a great use for this.
- sleepychu 7y agoSnapchat has all these problems and people still enjoy the ephemeral nature of them.
- jedberg 7y agoSnapchat at least warns you that someone screenshotted it.
- ska 7y agoIt's not like that can be enforced in general, there will always be ways to duplicate it without notifying.
- creaghpatr 7y agoSnapchat sends a notification to the sender when someone screenshots their content, will be interesting to see if Twitter does the same.
- ceejayoz 7y agoTwitter can't. Lots of people use third-party clients or the website, where detecting a screenshot simply isn't possible.
- ihuman 7y agoThis feature might not be available in 3rd-party clients, like polls and cards.
- ceejayoz 7y agoIf it's not on the website it'll be DOA.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- badfrog 7y agoFacebook usage is > 80% mobile, and they often don't bother adding features to the website. Do you have reason to believe that Twitter is different?
- RandallBrown 7y agoWhat features aren't available on the website that are available in the mobile app? I've seen some news stuff that isn't I suppose, but not much actual functionality.
- cirno 7y agoWorst case, take a photo of your screen with another phone. The harder it is to scrape the content, the more vulnerable the content posted there will be, which will make it that much more desirable a target to scrape.
- felipeerias 7y agoIt is possible to detect when that screenshot is subsequently shared within the platform. Twitter could prevent blocked users from sharing screenshots of tweets by the people who have blocked them, they just choose not to because eNgAgEmEnT.
- cronix 7y agoOnly when using the native screen shot app, which you can use many on Android.
- OedipusRex 7y agoYou cannot prevent that and it cannot be policed.
- Zenst 7y agoI concur about preventing, though T&C's could enable policing. Also a nice (c) notice would enable self-policing upon such infractions to some extent. But certainly it will not be a fluid process currently. Let's see if they update T&C's to accommodate that aspect.
- OedipusRex 7y agoT&Cs stop at Twitter's border.
- baddox 7y agoWhy would they want to police it? Surely Twitter is perfectly fine with you posting screenshots of things of interest (obviously within obscenity and legal restrictions).
- Jagat 7y agoBecause if users posting screenshots of fleets becomes a common thing, users would be averse to post fleets?
- baddox 7y agoI don't know. Twitter reposts of TikTok videos seems ubiquitous, but it seems like TikTok is still thriving. I don't think the primary reason people post a story rather than a permanent post is that they want to ensure the story only lasts for a day. At least for Instagram, I think it's more about keeping your main feed highly curated while still being able to hammer out tons of stories.
- luckylion 7y agoCopyrighting tweets? I love the idea as a demonstration of the absurd extent of copyright, but I'd expect virtually no tweets to be considered copyrightable.
- abnry 7y agoThe advantage is that the tweet still doesn't show up in search.
- cirno 7y agoGoogle has begun OCRing text inside screenshots to show up in search. I've seen it happen first hand.
- mdszy 7y agoThis sounds almost like they're trying to replicate "Stories" from other social networks. - Shows up at the top of one's feed, more prominent. - Expires after a certain time.
- dddbbb 7y agoWell that is the first line of the article... But yes, I wonder how it will fit into the Twitter ecosystem. The two most successful implementations of this are Snapchat and Instagram: Snapchat was only a communication platform before stories, and Instagram profiles tend to be very deliberate and curated. Neither of these really apply to Twitter.
- stevekemp 7y agoExpiring tweets seem interesting, and it would be interesting to see how they handle that alongside their recent change to "remind" people about things they've missed. I've just deleted my account because their notifications keep spamming me with reminders "Have you seen this tweet: ...". Those fake notifications are not things I care about, and are impossible to disable, the most you can do is say "Show me less of these" which never seems to actually result in a change.
- dang 7y agoThat's in the article title. The problem was that it's longer than HN's 80 char limit. The submitted title was "Twitter starts testing 'Fleets,' which disappear after 24 hours", which is a perfectly good way to shorten it to fit the limit. But maybe mentioning Stories is more important than mentioning 24 hours, so I've adjusted it for the time being.
- ausbah 7y agowhat I would to see from twitter is something for "blog" tweets - a "single" tweet spread across 3-30 individual tweets. the structure of individual tweets makes them terribly hard to read, but I feel like I've seen enough of them to say it's something in their interest to support
- pergadad 7y agoEven series-tweets are more information dense than your average blog post. I think that's their main appeal really. Putting a blogging function on twitter which then ends up as long posts appearing between regular tweets might make it much less possible to quickly 'parse' Twitter for a dopamine hit. I'm sure there are ways to counter my concern, but honestly why do it of things work well for them?
- Shank 7y agoI just want an official way to link to a thread to emphasize "no, I want you to read the whole thread" as opposed to "no, I want you to read the first tweet." Sometimes I just want to share one specific thing, or the whole thread, but it's ambiguous when people click the link which one I was trying to share with them.
- lostgame 7y agoWell, since Snapchat is a glorified nude-sharing app, it makes sense for the use case.
- throwaway724 7y agoI really don't get it. Twitter has five thousand full-time employees. I have to assume at least 20% of them are in product development in some capacity. What exactly are these people doing all day? I can't point to a single notable product innovation they've had in years. And they continue to ignore the drumbeat of user asking for an edit button, and are completely unable to come up with any kind of reasonable solution to the abuse or bot problems. I don't know Kayvon personally, but what exactly is wrong with Twitter that it's so bad and slow at product development? This should be #5000 on their list of things to do.
- ilamont 7y agoThey've done quite a bit on the product front, although it's fair to question the utility to average users: - Increased tweet length to 280 chars - Tweet threads - GIF integration - Multiple UI revisions of desktop and mobile apps There's also been a fair amount of work on ads and security, although these changes will be less apparent to most users.
- throwaway724 7y agoNone of those things strike as 1) important or 2) indicative of a high-performing product development team given their size. But we can agree to disagree!
- baddox 7y agoAds and security are both extremely important to Twitter. It's hard to imagine any product concern being more important than those two, other than perhaps uptime.
- danShumway 7y agoBut is any of this really stuff that should take 1000 engineers to build? Tweet length? GIFs? I don't question that those engineers are working hard. I'm sure they're not sitting around twiddling their thumbs. And I don't question that there aren't some genuinely hard, complicated problems to solve at Twitter, particularly around scaling and security. But from a structural perspective, I do still kind of wonder if companies the size of Twitter and Facebook aren't just an extended, very public example of Brooks's Law. Anecdotally, I've been in large teams and small teams and I work equally hard in both environments. But even with the same amount of work, somehow, more stuff gets done and more products get shipped from the smaller teams.
- shanev 7y agoThis will be popular, and might even replace regular usage, as Stories have in Instagram. It'll enable people to be more authentic, transparent, and casual. It will help counter Twitter getting increasingly LinkedIn-like. I made an app called Blink that did exactly this a few years ago: https://www.producthunt.com/upcoming/blink https://www.producthunt.com/upcoming/blink. Build it and they will come, not :)
- ptero 7y ago> It'll enable people to be more authentic, transparent, and casual. Which will, I suspect, drive analytics enhancements to help get under one's skin and/or sell users more junk. The tweet disappearing from the user-facing view will not prevent its being dissected and its information stored. And the point will be likely missed by most users...
- gsich 7y agoTwitter is on a constant downhill ever since they restricted their API to force people to use their own a) shitty app or b) shitty website with c) shitty defaults.
- rconti 7y agoI honestly couldn't disagree more with this assessment of "stories". Stories are great for the platform. They drive user engagement, and, hence, advertising. As far as I can tell, they're terrible for the users. You have to constantly be active to not miss something, you can't just check back in after a few days. For some reason, comments are private only, which is almost never what I want -- as a poster, as a commenter, or as an observer. Contrast that with (say) a "normal" IG/FB post of a picture from the beach, where comments are public and a community of people and comment on it and reply to each other in a social way. Stories are basically broadcast-only. They're also MUCH more time-consuming to create. I've only done a few stories, always when traveling solo, so I have time to kill and it was useful to learn something new the first time. The only positive thing I can say about them is that, because they're ephemeral, I feel less bad about posting some stupid snapshot of something unimportant/trivial. That this is coming to Twitter is even more concerning, because it's already the most shouty, least-community driven social network, with the largest multiplier on saying trolling/annoying/controversial/stupid things in the pursuit of clicks and likes and retweets.
- KenanSulayman 7y agoThose 'guce.advertising.com/collectIdentifiers' redirects on TechCrunch articles when you have an ad-blocker really make me go ballistic. Is this only for EU users? I can't believe that this would be happening for long if it wasn't... https://i.imgur.com/uQp1yVD.png https://i.imgur.com/uQp1yVD.png
- tyfon 7y agoThere are several pages that does this, another one is huffington post. I just don't visit them as I assume what they're doing is hostile to the users. I'm in the EEA (almost EU) for reference. GDPR is valid here as well.
- duhballs 7y agoThat's a great name for them.
- rasz 7y ago'Farts' seems more appropriate.
- RcouF1uZ4gsC 7y agoI wonder how much research went into the name "Fleets". To a lot of people, the first thing that comes to mind after "Fleets" is "enema" as in "Fleets enema". I am not sure Twitter wants to evoke that image. Then again, maybe this is Twitter acknowledging the toxic nature of Tweets and why they should be flushed out of the system quickly.
- mygo 7y agoWhen I hear “fleet” the first thing I think of is a bunch of warships. Up until today, the President sending a “fleet” to another country’s leader would be considered an escalation of conflict or act of war. A temporary tweet? Why not just call it a chirp? Stick with the bird sounds theme. Are they calling it a fleet because it’s fleeting? Well, what’s in a name, anyway
- KarlKemp 7y agoI've studied in the US, binged every Sorkin series, scored a 700 on the verbal SAT, and work almost exclusively in an English-language environment. And yet I've never heard of Fleets enema". It's strange what cultural blind spots remain. That being said, "Fleets" strikes my non-native ears as an above-average naming choice with its double entendre of "Group of something" as well as "fleeting". (It's also an ongoing pet peeve of mine how risk-averse people are in regards to naming. "CockroachDB" or "Plan B" (the morning-after pill) strike me as hilarious and instant classics of the genre, both evoking a rich set of emotions that fit pretty well with their respective products. I guess it's Keynesian-Beauty-Contest sort of fallacy, where everyone believes all the others are into Playboy models, even though they themselves prefer the Girl-next-door type)
- karatestomp 7y agoNative (US) English speaker here. Semi-old, too. Never heard of a "fleets enema".
- Traster 7y agoActually I think you've pointed out a potential confusion. My understanding was they're "Fleets" because they're ephemeral - they get deleted after 24 hours. So they're "Fleeting" definition -lasting for a very short time. Not "Fleet" as in group of boats sailing together. So the name potentially implies they're something they're absolutely not.
- cmauniada 7y agook boomer
- ASalazarMX 7y agoDon't do this here, please. It's not even relevant to the comment you're replying to.
- Analemma_ 7y agoIt is relevant, it's a totally appropriate response to the GP comment. Snapchat hasn't been primarily a nude-sharing app for a long time, and the fact that some people seem to go out of their way to remain ignorant about that and keep treating it as such is the exact kind of intentional smug ignorance that the "ok boomer" meme is mocking.
- ASalazarMX 7y agoFine, I concede that although Snapchat does monetize porn content with premium accounts, it's not its main purpose; the meme is relevant. Still, please don't reply with memes. Before you know it, people will start replying with threads of lyrics here too.
- cmauniada 7y agoI understand, but my reply was meant to allude to both how out of touch the older generation is and also how they look down at snapchat. I have snapchat and I use it everyday pretty much, its so much more than just sending nudes, so it irks me a bit when someone calls it just a nude sharing app. Thus my reply.
- lostgame 7y agoBut I am a millennial who literally uses Snap for this very purpose and pretty much only this purpose - like most of the people I know who use it. Otherwise, it’s WhatsApp.
- allovernow 7y agoI think the modern stock market has a structural problem with unrealistic pursuit of growth, which essentially forces public organizations into scope creep, intimately leading to the decline of product quality across the board as successful products make unnecessary changes.
- mxstbr 7y agoI started using Instagram stories quite heavily a couple weeks ago. For reference, I have ~32k followers on Twitter and ~700 on Instagram. Way more people have come up to me in real life and talked about a story of mine in the last month than people have ever come up to me to talk about a tweet. YMMV of course but I am bullish on the format and cannot wait for Fleets!
- CGamesPlay 7y agoI've noticed something similar between Instagram and Facebook. However, I get much more engagement on Instagram stories (300 followers) than Facebook stories (1.8k followers). Like, consistency 10x more views and engagement. So there's more to it than just the format, I think.
- Traster 7y agoThis seems very likely to be an emergency reaction to the activist investors that have just started making noises[1]. Over the last 5 years facebook is up 150% in value and twitter is down 22% and that's a pretty consistent trend. Dorsey isn't even full time at Twitter, their development track record has been trash and Dorsey's planning on going to Africa for 3 months. This looks very much like a defensive move, but given how lame this feature is I think this is going to be way too little too late. The time to release this feature was July 9th 2011 - the day after Snapchat launched. Not a decade later. [1]https://www.marketwatch.com/story/twitters-jack-dorsey-faces-another-crisis-this-time-from-an-activist-investor-2020-03-02 https://www.marketwatch.com/story/twitters-jack-dorsey-faces...
- darkstar999 7y agoI always see Stories as an engagement ploy. Come back every day... or else FOMO.
- kabacha 7y agoFor companies - sure but for people it's great. People don't usually put important stuff there and it's just fun to catch up with what they are up to. That was initial idea behind microblogging and twitter but people started to write actual blogs there and started having long discussion on a platform that is fundamentally incompatible with it.
- mschuster91 7y agotl;dr: Twitter doesn't give a flying f..k about their users. Users: Twitter, ban the Nazis please, and let us edit tweets. Twitter: Here, we take the stars and replace them with hearts. Users: Twitter, please ban the Nazis, and let us edit tweets. Twitter: Here's a totally messed up "redesign" filled with bugs that is mandatory except if you pretend to be an older browser (hint: extension GoodTwitter does that). Users: Seriously, just please ban the Nazis and give us an edit option Twitter: Hey, we're introducing AI to penalize sex workers, and giving the Nazis a tool to report tweets that has no real recourse for you, and if you appeal a ban you can't do anything, not even DM, for weeks until we may or may not look at the "offending" tweet because we are understaffed and our moderation slaves only speak your language roughly and don't get cultural context! Usrrs: ... WTF man Twitter: Hey, we're rolling out a feature we saw on Snapchat first and then was copied by Facebook, Whatsapp, and Instagram and it mostly utterly sucks there! Seriously, how utterly detached is their product development team from the user base? And when are they finally going to offer a real API again?
- gentleman11 7y agoUnannounced, somebody somewhere is building a caching service to preserve these “fleets” to sell them to whom ever is interested
- ethanwillis 7y agoWhy wouldnt they just name it flocks
- animalnewbie 7y agoI just hope this voyeuristic culture dies so I don't get stupid suggestions from Twitter
- holler 7y agoIt seems like all the major social media sites are slowly turning into the same homogenous app.
- diegoperini 7y agoSimilarly, all major multiplayer games turn into Hunger Games with a glorified slot machine embedded in them.
- josteink 7y ago> It seems like all the major social media sites are slowly turning into the same homogenous app. While it's absolutely terrible, it kinda makes sense in the metric-driven world we live in right now. What had me completely surprised was when this was added to fucking YouTube. I do not want stories in my Youtube feed. God damnit! It's a video-streaming site, not a social media platform. And please don't try to make it into a social media platform either!
- soneca 7y agoI wonder why social media in general enforces everything to be ephemeral. Sure, Stories are specific about it, but even regular old posts in Facebook, Instagram, Twitter are very hard to track and consume. They are there, you can search if you are looking for something specific, a Facebook resurface some old memory for you when an algorithm decides it should. But they are not made to be a memory repository for users. Why is that? I wonder this because I am building a social-network-y site (https://www.quidsentio.com https://www.quidsentio.com) that's pretty much memory-focused, I even position it as a journal. I wonder if I am missing some obvious connection between hiding users memories and being a successful social network site.
- bkinnard 7y agolikewise, I'm building a social-network-y site for retail investors (https://www.holfolio.com https://www.holfolio.com) to track and share what they and others are investing in. One of the main points is you can see the history of what someone has invested in and get a picture of their whole portfolio. Some people currently post their trades on traditional social media but its really hard to keep track of, these fleets are only going to make it worse (helping me in the process?)
- Shank 7y agoThe biggest thing is that I find my own posts cringeworthy 6 months back. Facebook's Timeline revamp a few years back really exacerbated this by making it easy to jump back multiple years to see what people had posted. A small example: people often post memes & jokes on social media. Old memes don't really sound funny though, unless they were well recognized. They seem embarrassing or downright stupid. You look terrible if you find one of those old posts. On the larger scale: most people grow more mature over time. So you have this whole historical graph of someone's life and you can easily surface when they made less great decisions or were younger. Lots of people don't like this.
- Jagat 7y agoThat's because it's not just about you. Things you post are things that are meant to be interesting to your followers (so that they spend time on the newsfeed where ads can be injected). And believe or not, users only find recent things interesting. You may be interested in your old content, but your followers are not, and they'd have have likely already seen your old content.
- azinman2 7y agoDid snapchat not patent stories? It seems like they should be suing the pants off everyone!
- rriepe 7y agoI know you meant the technical feature, but I couldn't help but laugh at the idea of patenting stories.
- transfire 7y agoFleets? Not Flocks?
- Wistar 7y agoTwit large.
- smabie 7y agoI wonder how this is going to change the tweet prediction markets. I’ve spent a significant amount of time on my tweet count models and have finally reached the point of 5% weekly returns and it would be a real shame if this fleets thing becomes popular among certain people (rdt, aoc, etc)! You spend months making a model and then when it finally starts generating real stable cash flows, you get sent back to square one. Such is the nature of zero-sum games though..
- piokoch 7y agoWhy Techcrunch can get away with such obvious GDPR violation. First, by default I am opt-in to being tracked, secondly I don't even have a way to opt-out. I can only say ok or "manage" my permissions, and managing throws me inside endless loop of screens that does not have opt-out button anyway...