19 ms·

Goodbye, Fleets

369 points by mattyb 5y ago

nojvek 5y ago
Dear Twitter, 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.
Saint_Genet 5y ago
If you think people are held back from tweeting by anxiety, how would you ever come to the conclusion that videos are the solution?
- cratermoon 5y ago
  Yeah this explanation smells. Reading between the lines, I'd say that twitter fell prey to a couple of bad predictions. The widely-maligned "pivot to video" that ended up being based on FB fudging the numbers for how much engagement video got, and the idea that duplicating the success of IG or TikTok is just about enabling 30 second video snippets.
  - erehweb 5y ago
    Inflated FB video numbers have been known for a long while now - references to it in Sep 2016 https://www.facebook.com/business/news/facebook-video-metrics-update?mod=article_inline https://www.facebook.com/business/news/facebook-video-metric...
    - bogwog 5y ago
      The contrast on that text makes me feel like they don't want anyone to actually read it.
      - cratermoon 5y ago
        https://www.theverge.com/2018/10/17/17989712/facebook-inaccurate-video-metrics-inflation-lawsuit https://www.theverge.com/2018/10/17/17989712/facebook-inaccu...
  - adolph 5y ago
    Vine was an American social networking short-form video hosting service where users could share six-second-long, looping video clips. It was founded in June 2012; American microblogging website Twitter acquired it in October 2012, before its official release on January 24, 2013. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vine_(service) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vine_(service)
- the_reformation 5y ago
  I think the idea was the anxiety was that tweets aren't ephemeral enough.
- LeoPanthera 5y ago
  Fleets are not videos. They can include videos, optionally.
- renewiltord 5y ago
  What makes a fleet a fleet isn't a video, it's that it's transient. You can make a text fleet. Or could. If you've never used a fleet and have read the post, you can use the text from it "Most Fleets include media" to conclude that there exist fleets that do not include media. Video is a form of media. You can then conclude through pure syllogism that fleets do not require video.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
jaqalopes 5y ago
... we hardly knew ye!
par 5y ago
> 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 this is exactly my problem with Twitter. It's an even bigger echo chamber than FB. As much as I try, I can'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's definitely not a place I feel comfortable discussing anything.
- CharlesW 5y ago
  > It's an even bigger echo chamber than FB. The trick is to block early and often. The feed is what you make it.
  - arkitaip 5y ago
    This simply doesn't work. I've tried every tool and trick available and sooner than later the feed becomes filled with drama, politics and random noise. Partly because humans are inherently social and political, partly because Twitter will throw random tweets and topics at you.
    - TheRealDunkirk 5y ago
      I'm on at least my 15th account. Speaking as something with a barely-serviceable love-hate relationship with the service... You have to add people slowly, and be quick to unfollow if you notice a disturbance in the force. Even though I'm keen on programming and related topics, I don't follow a lot of very-popular IT-type folks because of the drama they bring, ESPECIALLY "infosec" Twitter. I've noticed that's a bubble among bubbles. I love a lot of the folks in that bubble, but I won't follow them because The Algorithm gets heavily weighted with them.
      - Raineer 5y ago
        Hah - I was hoping I wasn't the only one doing this. In addition to just not being good at "viral twitter", I never have any followers because I nuke-and-pave probably one a year with a new account. As you called out, most of what I follow is infosec twitter. And the drama ratio is high. I'll follow someone because they do genuinely create a couple excellent technical posts or links, only to find out they are trash and I spend the next month hearing about it.
thallavajhula 5y ago
Twitter is great when it comes to transparency. I love how they included this >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. It's always nice to know why an experiment/project failed. They didn't have to explain it, but they did and I thought it was a nice touch.
- cratermoon 5y ago
  > Twitter is great when it comes to transparency Pull the other leg.
- blowski 5y ago
  …and I like when people aren’t constantly cynical and critical of everything, so thanks for finding something positive here.
- pjc50 5y ago
  > anxieties that hold people back from Tweeting Have they, like, asked people? Also, do they need more people to tweet? It's not like the platform is short of content. Isn't there a role for the comfortable lurker?
  - bachmeier 5y ago
    I think there's a real concern on Twitter's end with the conversation being dominated by those who are "good with Twitter". That's a big problem because it's kind of a snoozefest to read tweets by a small in-group that you don't know and that won't interact with you. Twitter serves no purpose without interaction.
    - partiallypro 5y ago
      Which IMO is why Twitter allowing users to lock their replies is actually damaging to Twitter. Now people just Quote Tweet it instead of replying.
sharkweek 5y ago
IMO this should be the default feature of Twitter. I can't think of anything I'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. Still, I make it a point to delete all my tweets after they're a week old or so. Not interested in my random musings living on for all of digital eternity.
- Zababa 5y ago
  > Still, I make it a point to delete all my tweets after they're a week old or so. I do the exact same thing, I think it's the only sane way to use twitter.
- WoodenChair 5y ago
  In my opinion, there are a few issues with this strategy: - Your Tweets may be archived on another site anyway - You may delete a Tweet that others hold onto for spite (screenshot, archiver, etc.) and then you don't have the surrounding Tweets to link to in order to show context - If your good Tweets get linked to/embedded from other sources then those links will go bad I've found the only safe strategy with social media/society is just to be very careful/clear/explicit with what you Tweet in the first place so that it can't be taken out of context. Perhaps that's unfortunate, but that's reality.
  - quanticle 5y ago
    > I've found the only safe strategy with social media/society is just to be very careful/clear/explicit with what you Tweet in the first place so that it can't be taken out of context. Twitter, as a medium, is anti-context. The UI, the character limit, the behavior of the most prominent voices on the platform, everything encourages you to post hot takes that require as little context as possible to drive engagement. Being "careful/clear/explicit about what you Tweet in the first place so that it can't be taken out of context" is equivalent to not Tweeting at all.
    - WoodenChair 5y ago
jdlyga 5y ago
Today I learned that there was a feature called Fleets.
- p4bl0 5y ago
  Same here, and I still don't really understand what it was. Even though I've been on twitter for almost 14 years. EDIT: it seems it was some kind of "stories" like they are called on other platforms, the feature was only available within the mobile apps (I've never used the apps I use the mobile website, this explains why I've never heard of fleets before).
andy_ppp 5y ago
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 read someone’s public 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.
- okcomputerrrr 5y ago
  twitter is way better than most social platforms in terms of being open and be able to view the content with out logging in. I think the main purpose of blocking is to prevent you from engaging with the said user / tweet. if you really don't want your tweets to be made public you can make the account private and only allow your followers
  - andy_ppp 5y ago
    That’s exactly my point, I should still be able to hear what someone I disagree with says and even agree or understand their thinking on occasion. Blocking seems like an extremely blunt tool.
- rmetzler 5y ago
  Are you really asking, why Twitter doesn’t allow to edit tweets after publishing them? I think this is a feature, it means you can’t change what you wrote. If this would be possible after you get responses, you could change the meaning of these responses.
  - andy_ppp 5y ago
    If you use your imagination you can still edit tweets and also have them be immutable. Loads of systems have an edit history or alternatively just a means to delete and recreate a tweet in the first 5 minutes after publication. There are probably other even better ways to solve this.
deleted 5y ago
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Brendinooo 5y ago
I never saw Fleets. Were they made available to everyone? I use Twitter primarily on the desktop, but I don't think I saw it on the iPad app either.
- FalconSensei 5y ago
  it's mobile app only. They are on the top, like instagram stories
PragmaticPulp 5y ago
Kudos to Twitter for pulling the plug on a high profile feature that wasn't working out. I saw some reasonably interesting Fleets at first, but it quickly devolved into a low-effort self promotion feature as they noted: > 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 Eventually I stopped clicking on them because I knew I'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't need another feature for rapid-fire, low-effort content. Contrast with Instagram where people's posts are generally well thought out, but their stories are made for rapid-fire content. Twitter didn'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's feeds.
- mdoms 5y ago
  Most fleets in my timeline were solely to make fun of fleets.
- btown 5y ago
  The one thing that Fleets had going for them, that I think Twitter needs more than anything, is the fact that they are fleeting. Many people, myself included, are afraid to tweet something inane on main, lest we forget to delete it (or lest it be archived by a crawler), and have it taken out of context years later in a way that might damage our careers. But it doesn't follow that "something is fleeting, therefore it is deserving of the rarest real estate on the screen." And the read-between-the-lines reason is that now it's Spaces that are more deserving of that real estate. "Ephemeral Tweets" are something that should be experimented with separately, perhaps as an option on a normal tweet and prioritized within the algorithmic timeline itself... but reusing the Fleets branding and presentation probably isn't the right way to do it!
  - netcraft 5y ago
    Ive always wished to be able to put an expiration on tweets. There are a lot of things that dont need to live forever. Here in the south if I go a couple hours without looking at twitter sometimes ill have to scroll through lots of weather related tweets for a current storm system that I would have loved if I was watching twitter at the time, but are useless to me now. And maybe they dont get deleted, but just dont show up in others timeline, but would if you went directly to that account - so replies and all are preserved. (I think something similar could be done to focus a tweet to a geographical area, but I digress)
mrRandomGuy 5y ago
Why would I want to _watch_ someone's fleeting thoughts when their written tweets serve literally the same purpose?
whywhywhywhy 5y ago
The lack of innovation at Twitter, Instagram and Facebook is utterly baffling and points to a serious culture problem. 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. In just a few years Instagram is going to seem completely old hat to anyone who didn'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've never even heard her mention Instagram, not sure she even knows it exists. 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. I'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'm supposed to put my focus or post my content in that app.
- dbbk 5y ago
  I actually quite like the lack of innovation on Twitter. It takes an enormous amount of restraint to keep saying no, and stick to a small, simple vision. I would hate a hypothetical Twitter that turns into another Facebook amalgamation of 75 products.
  - whywhywhywhy 5y ago
    >It takes an enormous amount of restraint to keep saying no, and stick to a small, simple vision They literally just cloned Clubhouse and are going to put it at the top of your feed because it was the cool new app for like 3 weeks last year..... How is that restraint?
    - dbbk 5y ago
      They're certainly picking it up more recently with Fleets and Spaces. My point was I was quite happy with the status quo before.
bdcravens 5y ago
How long before companies start dropping their "TikTok" mode everyone rushed to implement?
- code_duck 5y ago
  This is still Snapchat mode.
simonsarris 5y ago
That's really too bad. I don'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 @'ing: https://twitter.com/simonsarris/status/1415370626303504389 https://twitter.com/simonsarris/status/1415370626303504389 I want my timeline to be mostly thoughts and nice photography that people can go look at as they please, and I don't want to pollute it or waste follower'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.
- AdrianB1 5y ago
  What is a baseline for tweets per day per regular user? One tweet per day means 365 per year, it looks huge to some people.
  - bogwog 5y ago
    For real, my tweet rate is less than once per year, yet I still regularly use the app just to follow some interesting people.
  - simonsarris 5y ago
    I'm not sure about regular user, there's a huge spread. I see most big accounts tweet 5-10+ a day. 10x that for media people. Paul Graham tweets about once per every other waking hour (though sometimes not for days). Patrick Collison tweets every 2-3 days.
  - hobo_mark 5y ago
    Some "extremely online" people can tweet that much in a couple of days (I made software that measures it, to identify whom to mute or stop following altogether).
Tycho 5y ago
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.
- charcircuit 5y ago
  It didn't though. It took up 1/8th of the screen and it wasn't sticky. If you scroll down it's off the screen. Is it really that big of a deal that you can't see an extra tweet when you are all caught up?
  - Tycho 5y ago
    More like a 1/7th of the space previously reserved for the timeline, and considerably worse on older phones with smaller screens (eg iPhone 7). The fact that it disappeared when scrolling down but reappeared instantly when scrolling up made it even more annoying. Tyrannising your scrolling behaviour. The fucking audacity.
- plushpuffin 5y ago
  There was a way to disable it. You could revert to an earlier version of the Twitter app on Android. Version 8.68.0 was the latest version without this feature. As soon as they added it, I uninstalled and then side-loaded the older version and turned off automatic updates. In 2 weeks I'll be able to update again!
- conradfr 5y ago
  Exactly, I hope it will not be occupied by Spaces instead (which I also do not care for).
molasses 5y ago
Never seen the option in compose for a fleet? How do you do one?
- dnissley 5y ago
  It was a mobile app only feature
  - molasses 5y ago
    Aha, that's why I never spotted it. What have I missed!?
- charcircuit 5y ago
  Hit the add button in the area where other people's fleets show up.
aidaman 5y ago
That was a trashcan. Glad they are getting rid of it.
bigdang 5y ago
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.
- renewiltord 5y ago
  If it helps if you can't see them, then you can use Ublock Origin and block on ##div[aria-label$=" like"] ##div[aria-label$=" likes"] And you will probably kill off that bar below your tweets.
yakshaving_jgt 5y ago
> Although we built Fleets to address some of the anxieties that hold people back from Tweeting Did Fleets address the problem of political extremists using Twitter to go after people's livelihoods?
- mcintyre1994 5y ago
  They probably do actually - they disappear after a short time and you can't link to them.
  - yakshaving_jgt 5y ago
    I suppose that would help in the scenario where people go digging up old tweets, but it’s also pretty common for people to screenshot content, knowing that it might later be deleted or amended. I’m not sure there’s any getting around that the culture on Twitter for whatever reason is toxic.
deleted 5y ago
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yoursunny 5y ago
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.
spoonjim 5y ago
> Although we built Fleets to address some of the anxieties that hold people back from Tweeting 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. 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's business model because people love mobbing on someone and punching them in the face. So the answer to, "why are people hesistant to Tweet?" is that Twitter has decided that it's in its best interests to encourage a highly toxic form of entertainment on its platform.
- fleddr 5y ago
  In typical Twitter fashion, all of the horror you describe its users would call "accountability". But yes, when people are afraid to use their own name, auto-delete tweets, and do all of this for not getting in trouble for middle-of-the-road views, you know you're in an extreme place.
miguelrochefort 5y ago
Looks like we've still got: - Snapchat Stories - YouTube Stories (Google) - LinkedIn Stories (Microsoft) - Instagram Stories (Facebook) - WeChat Time Capsule (Tencent) - Weibo Stories (Alibaba) - Naver Snow https://miguelrochefort.com/blog/tech-giant/#65-stories-35 https://miguelrochefort.com/blog/tech-giant/#65-stories-35
- cpeterso 5y ago
  And Chrome's Web Stories: https://stories.google/ https://stories.google/
  - throw_m239339 5y ago
    Never heard of all these services? How comes? It's like Poly that closed in June. Never heard of that until I heard it was closing: https://blog.google/products/google-ar-vr/poly-browse-discover-and-download-3d-objects-and-scenes/ https://blog.google/products/google-ar-vr/poly-browse-discov... Is there a full list of active services provided by Google (or other big tech) somewhere?
    - miguelrochefort 5y ago
      > Is there a full list of active services provided by Google (or other big tech) somewhere? I'm only aware of the opposite: https://killedbygoogle.com/ https://killedbygoogle.com/
jwithington 5y ago
Finally I can view profile pictures again.
tsimionescu 5y ago
Is Twitter actually used outside the US? Here in Romania, where we rputinely import most aspects of US culture, it's almost entirely outside popular consciousness. Politicians and stars are certainly not using it - they're on Facebook and Instagram, and YT or Spotify for music. How is it in the rest of the world?
- astrange 5y ago
  It's very popular in Japan. Otherwise, journalists and celebs worldwide use it, which means crazy people yelling at journalists about politics somehow now run the news media.
- rconti 5y ago
  As an American working in tech, I know there are other tech folks on Twitter, but it feels like it's primarily used by celebrities, politicians, academics, and journalists.
- thrdbndndn 5y ago
  The country that used the Twitter most isn't even the US. Turkey, Japan, UK, etc. all use it more (per capita). From my personal experience, Twitter is undoubtedly HUGE in Japan. Everyone and its dog use it, not to mention all the companies, personalities, etc.
FalconSensei 5y ago
As I said on Twitter: I just want them to make me able to block my likes (and replies) from appearing on other people's timelines.
pmulard 5y ago
I use twitter daily and fleets was nothing more than an annoyance to me. I would click on someone'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. I like the idea of fleets, but I think it was implemented poorly. They just copied the same 'story' format that's been recycled 100x over. I think an alternative exists out there, twitter will just have to be a little more creative.
udfalkso 5y ago
They should just have been normal tweets that disappear after X hours. No special location, no visual treatment, etc. Just ephemeral tweets that don't stick around forever on your profile. 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.
cpeterso 5y ago
The feature name "Fleets" was terrible. I know it was a pun on "fleeting tweet", but the word "fleet" just makes me think of a fleet of ships.
- cableshaft 5y ago
  I just heard of it today and I assumed the same, like it was a fleet of people getting together or something, not 'fleeting'.
- charcircuit 5y ago
  and tweets makes me think of birds it really doesn't matter
npunt 5y ago
I didn't love Fleets personally, the medium was mismatched to Twitter's niche of a public social network. Ephemeral media is ideally paired with a small/private network to maximize personal expression. The next question is will LinkedIn kill Stories? I'd guess they're probably noticing similar low usage levels, but operationally they might not be as open to killing experiments quickly.
jacobmischka 5y ago
> 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. Glad I stopped using twitter a few months ago.
hiidrew 5y ago
My biggest issue with their design was the horrible flow of clicking on someone's profile pic from a tweet that has a Fleet up, would pull up the Fleet instead of their profile In general, I'd like to turn off stories on every social platform I'm on. By far the most addictive design for me.
deleted 5y ago
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Andrew_nenakhov 5y ago
Oh, finally. Who knows, maybe we'll soon get rid of stories in WhatsApp, too!
yodelshady 5y ago
My resistance to tweeting is a) even 280 characters isn't even for almost any useful content, b) hate mobs. Put simply: if you wanted the most intelligent view that opposed yours on a subject, would you ever use Twitter? I humbly suggest social media could work better, based on a variant of reddit's "place" pixel art stunt: 1) you post freely and anonymously, but others can hide your post freely and anonymously as well. 2) if you want to restore your post, just click a button to do so. No one individual could hide a post twice. 3) if it's hidden again, you'll have to retype it. My bet is - most low-effort trolling won't go this far, but those who strongly believe in a controversial opinion will. 4) maybe escalate further with time delays, CAPTCHAs, etc - but ultimately, if you're definitely human and you really care, the post's visibility should become immutable.
- latexr 5y ago
  > most low-effort trolling won't go this far Quite the contrary, my bet is trolls would have a field day with your proposed system. Why make inflammatory post when you can instead annoy people by hiding their posts and making them retype everything? It doesn’t matter how “strongly [you] believe in a controversial opinion”, having to keep fighting to keep your post up would tire anyone. My prediction is the outcome of such a system would be the opposite of what you envision: only the most boring inconsequential opinions would stay up.
bloudermilk 5y ago
I use Twitter basically every day and never even knew this existed. What are Fleets?
- charcircuit 5y ago
  It's at the top of your timeline. People can make tweets that last 24 hours.
thrower123 5y ago
Maybe just blindly copying what your competitors are doing isn't the greatest strategic plan.
irq-1 5y ago
> 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. 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. It's much harder to foster conversation but this feels like an 'Innovators Dilemma' moment for Twitter: either go low and be a poor TikTok or go high and be something different.
throwawayswede 5y ago
Sure, like this wasn't just a grab at the quick growing market of social voice chat apps like clubhouse last year. What a bullshit org. Twitter management is synonymous with incompetence.
figassis 5y ago
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.
colesantiago 5y ago
Why did Twitter kill Vine? This is why pretty much why TikTok exists and filled that space very quickly.
andrewmcwatters 5y ago
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. 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.
- firloop 5y ago
  Instagram copying Snapchat's Stories is the canonical example of this working, which makes sense that Twitter tried Stories as well.
- uDontKnowMe 5y ago
  Reddit started out as a text-based discussion forum for use on desktop and has slowly morphed into endless-scroll-of-images/gifs/streams on mobile.
- kuu 5y ago
  Threads is a successful feature they added and it's not the same as at the beginning.
fleddr 5y ago
"We’ll explore more ways to address what holds people back from participating on Twitter." Perhaps I can help. Twitter is always angry. You'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. 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. 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. This culture of perpetual outrage, hate-addiction even, and the many childish behaviors that come with it, are born at Twitter. After a Twitter session, one feels miserable and depressed. There is nothing delightful, nothing new you learned, no new friend you met. It's horror. Like the news, but then 10 times worse. Wait, sometimes there's non-hateful tweets too. 99% of them are self-congratulatory or stupid. Something like: "My 3 year old just commented that an intersectional approach in politics is most effective". Attention starved, completely made up. Yet for sure it will get thousands of likes. Both hate and idiocracy are richly rewarded. 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. It's a Twitter thing and a Twitter thing only. I've never experienced it with such intensity anywhere else, and I'm merely lurking. The reason I hate it so much is that it goes beyond just a website sucking, its effects are cultural.
- bqe 5y ago
  I think the simplest solution to this would be to simply hide comment/retweet/like counts. It will be possible to sort of figure this out from the engagement, but it won't be easy to figure out if a tweet is popular or wildly popular.
- geewee 5y ago
  Honestly I think this is very dependent on what bubble you end up in. There's isn't really any outrage anywhere in my feed.
kzrdude 5y ago
Maybe I'd be in the target group (rarely say anything), but I didn't know that it existed.
mtnGoat 5y ago
i dont tweet, despite having an account registered in '08 because quite frankly its a very toxic and argumentative environment, with a lot of noise, nonsense and bots galore. 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. same reason FB is having issues growing, i would imagine.
rhacker 5y ago
Feel free to respond with get over it, but BLOG.twitter.com HAHA.
idownvoted 5y ago
Gee, who would have thought the culture on Twitter is experienced as hostile by some (ie all normal people). Never once in the last years have I opened the app without closing it 10 mins max later in exasperation of disgust. It really brings out the worst people, it brings out the worst in people as some of the worst people „bring out“ Twitter.
skinkestek 5y ago
> 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. If anyone from twitter reads this, here's one thing that could get me to post more: Give us pseudonyms. Guarantee that you won't leak them to media or mobs. I understand you'll have to givw them to the police sometimes but the police is far less scary for me than the mob. 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?
- kyle-rb 5y ago
  What's the difference between this and simply making multiple accounts?
  - skinkestek 5y ago
    Convenience. And the promise. Edit: since this is transparent Twitter we could even get an high level explanation on how to make sure such pseudonymous accounts technically cannot be linked back unless three persons in three jurisdictions - of which at least one is a customer ombudsperson - agree that there is a valid request from a law enforcement agency and then electronically sign it. Seems a tall order when you can just create more accounts? Well creating new accounts forces you to give up your phone number meaning you are a sitting duck the moment anything gets leaked.
    - kyle-rb 5y ago
      Twitter doesn't require you to add a phone number, you can sign up with just an email address. In some cases, if your account gets flagged, they'll ask you to add a phone number to unsuspend it (which makes it a little harder to dodge bans), but I think that's a rare case.
      - skinkestek 5y ago
        I cannot create one from Norway without a telephone number. I could try with a VPN but I guess that would just make it harder.
jms703 5y ago
Waiting for the Goodbye, Spaces post.
stereoradonc 5y ago
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 "public square".
kyle-rb 5y ago
This isn't very surprising; they introduced fleets 8 months ago but never bothered to add them to the web version in any form.
lazycouchpotato 5y ago
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.
- markmark 5y ago
  Yeah I use tweetdeck on desktop and a third party app on mobile. Neither had fleets so I didn't know they existed.
kalleboo 5y ago
It'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. On the Japanese one, the fleets are packed. The feature was SUPER popular in Japan! As Instagram moves away from people sharing stories (they recently announced a new focus - "shopping", and competing with TikTok), I could only see Twitter fleets getting even more popular here.
Delowar776 5y ago
How to grow up Twitter followers and connect? What should I do to increase twitter followers.
dustinmoris 5y ago
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
shruubi 5y ago
I don'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. 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. 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'd rather go without and be blissfully ignorant to anything happening on that platform.
ertucetin 5y ago
Good call.
rswail 5y ago
Is it just me or does the word "learnings" make others cringe? There's a perfectly cromulent word, "lessons" that are the nouns of the things that you "learned" as a verb. Along with "socializing" instead of "distributing", it's the latest in using stupid words to sound "business like". It reminds me of the kitty in the Lego Movie bouncing through shouting "numbers, numbers, numbers, business, business, business" to avoid detection.

369 points by mattyb 5y ago

Dear Twitter, 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.

Saint_Genet 5y ago

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

cratermoon 5y ago
Yeah this explanation smells. Reading between the lines, I'd say that twitter fell prey to a couple of bad predictions. The widely-maligned "pivot to video" that ended up being based on FB fudging the numbers for how much engagement video got, and the idea that duplicating the success of IG or TikTok is just about enabling 30 second video snippets.
- erehweb 5y ago
  Inflated FB video numbers have been known for a long while now - references to it in Sep 2016 https://www.facebook.com/business/news/facebook-video-metrics-update?mod=article_inline https://www.facebook.com/business/news/facebook-video-metric...
  - bogwog 5y ago
    The contrast on that text makes me feel like they don't want anyone to actually read it.
    - cratermoon 5y ago
      https://www.theverge.com/2018/10/17/17989712/facebook-inaccurate-video-metrics-inflation-lawsuit https://www.theverge.com/2018/10/17/17989712/facebook-inaccu...
- adolph 5y ago
  Vine was an American social networking short-form video hosting service where users could share six-second-long, looping video clips. It was founded in June 2012; American microblogging website Twitter acquired it in October 2012, before its official release on January 24, 2013. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vine_(service) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vine_(service)
the_reformation 5y ago
I think the idea was the anxiety was that tweets aren't ephemeral enough.
LeoPanthera 5y ago
Fleets are not videos. They can include videos, optionally.
renewiltord 5y ago
What makes a fleet a fleet isn't a video, it's that it's transient. You can make a text fleet. Or could. If you've never used a fleet and have read the post, you can use the text from it "Most Fleets include media" to conclude that there exist fleets that do not include media. Video is a form of media. You can then conclude through pure syllogism that fleets do not require video.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

jaqalopes 5y ago

... we hardly knew ye!

par 5y ago

> 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 this is exactly my problem with Twitter. It's an even bigger echo chamber than FB. As much as I try, I can'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's definitely not a place I feel comfortable discussing anything.

CharlesW 5y ago
> It's an even bigger echo chamber than FB. The trick is to block early and often. The feed is what you make it.
- arkitaip 5y ago
  This simply doesn't work. I've tried every tool and trick available and sooner than later the feed becomes filled with drama, politics and random noise. Partly because humans are inherently social and political, partly because Twitter will throw random tweets and topics at you.
  - TheRealDunkirk 5y ago
    I'm on at least my 15th account. Speaking as something with a barely-serviceable love-hate relationship with the service... You have to add people slowly, and be quick to unfollow if you notice a disturbance in the force. Even though I'm keen on programming and related topics, I don't follow a lot of very-popular IT-type folks because of the drama they bring, ESPECIALLY "infosec" Twitter. I've noticed that's a bubble among bubbles. I love a lot of the folks in that bubble, but I won't follow them because The Algorithm gets heavily weighted with them.
    - Raineer 5y ago
      Hah - I was hoping I wasn't the only one doing this. In addition to just not being good at "viral twitter", I never have any followers because I nuke-and-pave probably one a year with a new account. As you called out, most of what I follow is infosec twitter. And the drama ratio is high. I'll follow someone because they do genuinely create a couple excellent technical posts or links, only to find out they are trash and I spend the next month hearing about it.

thallavajhula 5y ago

Twitter is great when it comes to transparency. I love how they included this >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. It's always nice to know why an experiment/project failed. They didn't have to explain it, but they did and I thought it was a nice touch.

cratermoon 5y ago
> Twitter is great when it comes to transparency Pull the other leg.
blowski 5y ago
…and I like when people aren’t constantly cynical and critical of everything, so thanks for finding something positive here.
pjc50 5y ago
> anxieties that hold people back from Tweeting Have they, like, asked people? Also, do they need more people to tweet? It's not like the platform is short of content. Isn't there a role for the comfortable lurker?
- bachmeier 5y ago
  I think there's a real concern on Twitter's end with the conversation being dominated by those who are "good with Twitter". That's a big problem because it's kind of a snoozefest to read tweets by a small in-group that you don't know and that won't interact with you. Twitter serves no purpose without interaction.
  - partiallypro 5y ago
    Which IMO is why Twitter allowing users to lock their replies is actually damaging to Twitter. Now people just Quote Tweet it instead of replying.

sharkweek 5y ago

IMO this should be the default feature of Twitter. I can't think of anything I'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. Still, I make it a point to delete all my tweets after they're a week old or so. Not interested in my random musings living on for all of digital eternity.

Zababa 5y ago
> Still, I make it a point to delete all my tweets after they're a week old or so. I do the exact same thing, I think it's the only sane way to use twitter.
WoodenChair 5y ago
In my opinion, there are a few issues with this strategy: - Your Tweets may be archived on another site anyway - You may delete a Tweet that others hold onto for spite (screenshot, archiver, etc.) and then you don't have the surrounding Tweets to link to in order to show context - If your good Tweets get linked to/embedded from other sources then those links will go bad I've found the only safe strategy with social media/society is just to be very careful/clear/explicit with what you Tweet in the first place so that it can't be taken out of context. Perhaps that's unfortunate, but that's reality.
- quanticle 5y ago
  > I've found the only safe strategy with social media/society is just to be very careful/clear/explicit with what you Tweet in the first place so that it can't be taken out of context. Twitter, as a medium, is anti-context. The UI, the character limit, the behavior of the most prominent voices on the platform, everything encourages you to post hot takes that require as little context as possible to drive engagement. Being "careful/clear/explicit about what you Tweet in the first place so that it can't be taken out of context" is equivalent to not Tweeting at all.
  - WoodenChair 5y ago

jdlyga 5y ago

Today I learned that there was a feature called Fleets.

p4bl0 5y ago
Same here, and I still don't really understand what it was. Even though I've been on twitter for almost 14 years. EDIT: it seems it was some kind of "stories" like they are called on other platforms, the feature was only available within the mobile apps (I've never used the apps I use the mobile website, this explains why I've never heard of fleets before).

andy_ppp 5y ago

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 read someone’s public 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.

okcomputerrrr 5y ago
twitter is way better than most social platforms in terms of being open and be able to view the content with out logging in. I think the main purpose of blocking is to prevent you from engaging with the said user / tweet. if you really don't want your tweets to be made public you can make the account private and only allow your followers
- andy_ppp 5y ago
  That’s exactly my point, I should still be able to hear what someone I disagree with says and even agree or understand their thinking on occasion. Blocking seems like an extremely blunt tool.
rmetzler 5y ago
Are you really asking, why Twitter doesn’t allow to edit tweets after publishing them? I think this is a feature, it means you can’t change what you wrote. If this would be possible after you get responses, you could change the meaning of these responses.
- andy_ppp 5y ago
  If you use your imagination you can still edit tweets and also have them be immutable. Loads of systems have an edit history or alternatively just a means to delete and recreate a tweet in the first 5 minutes after publication. There are probably other even better ways to solve this.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

Brendinooo 5y ago

I never saw Fleets. Were they made available to everyone? I use Twitter primarily on the desktop, but I don't think I saw it on the iPad app either.

FalconSensei 5y ago
it's mobile app only. They are on the top, like instagram stories

PragmaticPulp 5y ago

Kudos to Twitter for pulling the plug on a high profile feature that wasn't working out. I saw some reasonably interesting Fleets at first, but it quickly devolved into a low-effort self promotion feature as they noted: > 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 Eventually I stopped clicking on them because I knew I'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't need another feature for rapid-fire, low-effort content. Contrast with Instagram where people's posts are generally well thought out, but their stories are made for rapid-fire content. Twitter didn'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's feeds.

mdoms 5y ago
Most fleets in my timeline were solely to make fun of fleets.
btown 5y ago
The one thing that Fleets had going for them, that I think Twitter needs more than anything, is the fact that they are fleeting. Many people, myself included, are afraid to tweet something inane on main, lest we forget to delete it (or lest it be archived by a crawler), and have it taken out of context years later in a way that might damage our careers. But it doesn't follow that "something is fleeting, therefore it is deserving of the rarest real estate on the screen." And the read-between-the-lines reason is that now it's Spaces that are more deserving of that real estate. "Ephemeral Tweets" are something that should be experimented with separately, perhaps as an option on a normal tweet and prioritized within the algorithmic timeline itself... but reusing the Fleets branding and presentation probably isn't the right way to do it!
- netcraft 5y ago
  Ive always wished to be able to put an expiration on tweets. There are a lot of things that dont need to live forever. Here in the south if I go a couple hours without looking at twitter sometimes ill have to scroll through lots of weather related tweets for a current storm system that I would have loved if I was watching twitter at the time, but are useless to me now. And maybe they dont get deleted, but just dont show up in others timeline, but would if you went directly to that account - so replies and all are preserved. (I think something similar could be done to focus a tweet to a geographical area, but I digress)

mrRandomGuy 5y ago

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

whywhywhywhy 5y ago

The lack of innovation at Twitter, Instagram and Facebook is utterly baffling and points to a serious culture problem. 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. In just a few years Instagram is going to seem completely old hat to anyone who didn'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've never even heard her mention Instagram, not sure she even knows it exists. 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. I'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'm supposed to put my focus or post my content in that app.

dbbk 5y ago
I actually quite like the lack of innovation on Twitter. It takes an enormous amount of restraint to keep saying no, and stick to a small, simple vision. I would hate a hypothetical Twitter that turns into another Facebook amalgamation of 75 products.
- whywhywhywhy 5y ago
  >It takes an enormous amount of restraint to keep saying no, and stick to a small, simple vision They literally just cloned Clubhouse and are going to put it at the top of your feed because it was the cool new app for like 3 weeks last year..... How is that restraint?
  - dbbk 5y ago
    They're certainly picking it up more recently with Fleets and Spaces. My point was I was quite happy with the status quo before.

bdcravens 5y ago

How long before companies start dropping their "TikTok" mode everyone rushed to implement?

code_duck 5y ago
This is still Snapchat mode.

simonsarris 5y ago

That's really too bad. I don'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 @'ing: https://twitter.com/simonsarris/status/1415370626303504389 https://twitter.com/simonsarris/status/1415370626303504389 I want my timeline to be mostly thoughts and nice photography that people can go look at as they please, and I don't want to pollute it or waste follower'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.

AdrianB1 5y ago
What is a baseline for tweets per day per regular user? One tweet per day means 365 per year, it looks huge to some people.
- bogwog 5y ago
  For real, my tweet rate is less than once per year, yet I still regularly use the app just to follow some interesting people.
- simonsarris 5y ago
  I'm not sure about regular user, there's a huge spread. I see most big accounts tweet 5-10+ a day. 10x that for media people. Paul Graham tweets about once per every other waking hour (though sometimes not for days). Patrick Collison tweets every 2-3 days.
- hobo_mark 5y ago
  Some "extremely online" people can tweet that much in a couple of days (I made software that measures it, to identify whom to mute or stop following altogether).

Tycho 5y ago

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.

charcircuit 5y ago
It didn't though. It took up 1/8th of the screen and it wasn't sticky. If you scroll down it's off the screen. Is it really that big of a deal that you can't see an extra tweet when you are all caught up?
- Tycho 5y ago
  More like a 1/7th of the space previously reserved for the timeline, and considerably worse on older phones with smaller screens (eg iPhone 7). The fact that it disappeared when scrolling down but reappeared instantly when scrolling up made it even more annoying. Tyrannising your scrolling behaviour. The fucking audacity.
plushpuffin 5y ago
There was a way to disable it. You could revert to an earlier version of the Twitter app on Android. Version 8.68.0 was the latest version without this feature. As soon as they added it, I uninstalled and then side-loaded the older version and turned off automatic updates. In 2 weeks I'll be able to update again!
conradfr 5y ago
Exactly, I hope it will not be occupied by Spaces instead (which I also do not care for).

molasses 5y ago

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

dnissley 5y ago
It was a mobile app only feature
- molasses 5y ago
  Aha, that's why I never spotted it. What have I missed!?
charcircuit 5y ago
Hit the add button in the area where other people's fleets show up.

aidaman 5y ago

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

bigdang 5y ago

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.

renewiltord 5y ago
If it helps if you can't see them, then you can use Ublock Origin and block on ##div[aria-label$=" like"] ##div[aria-label$=" likes"] And you will probably kill off that bar below your tweets.

yakshaving_jgt 5y ago

> Although we built Fleets to address some of the anxieties that hold people back from Tweeting Did Fleets address the problem of political extremists using Twitter to go after people's livelihoods?

mcintyre1994 5y ago
They probably do actually - they disappear after a short time and you can't link to them.
- yakshaving_jgt 5y ago
  I suppose that would help in the scenario where people go digging up old tweets, but it’s also pretty common for people to screenshot content, knowing that it might later be deleted or amended. I’m not sure there’s any getting around that the culture on Twitter for whatever reason is toxic.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

yoursunny 5y ago

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.

spoonjim 5y ago

> Although we built Fleets to address some of the anxieties that hold people back from Tweeting 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. 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's business model because people love mobbing on someone and punching them in the face. So the answer to, "why are people hesistant to Tweet?" is that Twitter has decided that it's in its best interests to encourage a highly toxic form of entertainment on its platform.

fleddr 5y ago
In typical Twitter fashion, all of the horror you describe its users would call "accountability". But yes, when people are afraid to use their own name, auto-delete tweets, and do all of this for not getting in trouble for middle-of-the-road views, you know you're in an extreme place.

miguelrochefort 5y ago

Looks like we've still got: - Snapchat Stories - YouTube Stories (Google) - LinkedIn Stories (Microsoft) - Instagram Stories (Facebook) - WeChat Time Capsule (Tencent) - Weibo Stories (Alibaba) - Naver Snow https://miguelrochefort.com/blog/tech-giant/#65-stories-35 https://miguelrochefort.com/blog/tech-giant/#65-stories-35

cpeterso 5y ago
And Chrome's Web Stories: https://stories.google/ https://stories.google/
- throw_m239339 5y ago
  Never heard of all these services? How comes? It's like Poly that closed in June. Never heard of that until I heard it was closing: https://blog.google/products/google-ar-vr/poly-browse-discover-and-download-3d-objects-and-scenes/ https://blog.google/products/google-ar-vr/poly-browse-discov... Is there a full list of active services provided by Google (or other big tech) somewhere?
  - miguelrochefort 5y ago
    > Is there a full list of active services provided by Google (or other big tech) somewhere? I'm only aware of the opposite: https://killedbygoogle.com/ https://killedbygoogle.com/

jwithington 5y ago

Finally I can view profile pictures again.

tsimionescu 5y ago

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

astrange 5y ago
It's very popular in Japan. Otherwise, journalists and celebs worldwide use it, which means crazy people yelling at journalists about politics somehow now run the news media.
rconti 5y ago
As an American working in tech, I know there are other tech folks on Twitter, but it feels like it's primarily used by celebrities, politicians, academics, and journalists.
thrdbndndn 5y ago
The country that used the Twitter most isn't even the US. Turkey, Japan, UK, etc. all use it more (per capita). From my personal experience, Twitter is undoubtedly HUGE in Japan. Everyone and its dog use it, not to mention all the companies, personalities, etc.

FalconSensei 5y ago

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

pmulard 5y ago

I use twitter daily and fleets was nothing more than an annoyance to me. I would click on someone'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. I like the idea of fleets, but I think it was implemented poorly. They just copied the same 'story' format that's been recycled 100x over. I think an alternative exists out there, twitter will just have to be a little more creative.

udfalkso 5y ago

They should just have been normal tweets that disappear after X hours. No special location, no visual treatment, etc. Just ephemeral tweets that don't stick around forever on your profile. 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.

cpeterso 5y ago

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

cableshaft 5y ago
I just heard of it today and I assumed the same, like it was a fleet of people getting together or something, not 'fleeting'.
charcircuit 5y ago
and tweets makes me think of birds it really doesn't matter

npunt 5y ago

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

jacobmischka 5y ago

> 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. Glad I stopped using twitter a few months ago.

hiidrew 5y ago

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

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

deleted 5y ago

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Andrew_nenakhov 5y ago

Oh, finally. Who knows, maybe we'll soon get rid of stories in WhatsApp, too!

yodelshady 5y ago

My resistance to tweeting is a) even 280 characters isn't even for almost any useful content, b) hate mobs. Put simply: if you wanted the most intelligent view that opposed yours on a subject, would you ever use Twitter? I humbly suggest social media could work better, based on a variant of reddit's "place" pixel art stunt: 1) you post freely and anonymously, but others can hide your post freely and anonymously as well. 2) if you want to restore your post, just click a button to do so. No one individual could hide a post twice. 3) if it's hidden again, you'll have to retype it. My bet is - most low-effort trolling won't go this far, but those who strongly believe in a controversial opinion will. 4) maybe escalate further with time delays, CAPTCHAs, etc - but ultimately, if you're definitely human and you really care, the post's visibility should become immutable.

latexr 5y ago
> most low-effort trolling won't go this far Quite the contrary, my bet is trolls would have a field day with your proposed system. Why make inflammatory post when you can instead annoy people by hiding their posts and making them retype everything? It doesn’t matter how “strongly [you] believe in a controversial opinion”, having to keep fighting to keep your post up would tire anyone. My prediction is the outcome of such a system would be the opposite of what you envision: only the most boring inconsequential opinions would stay up.

bloudermilk 5y ago

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

charcircuit 5y ago
It's at the top of your timeline. People can make tweets that last 24 hours.

thrower123 5y ago

Maybe just blindly copying what your competitors are doing isn't the greatest strategic plan.

irq-1 5y ago

> 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. 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. It's much harder to foster conversation but this feels like an 'Innovators Dilemma' moment for Twitter: either go low and be a poor TikTok or go high and be something different.

throwawayswede 5y ago

Sure, like this wasn't just a grab at the quick growing market of social voice chat apps like clubhouse last year. What a bullshit org. Twitter management is synonymous with incompetence.

figassis 5y ago

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.

colesantiago 5y ago

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

andrewmcwatters 5y ago

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. 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.

firloop 5y ago
Instagram copying Snapchat's Stories is the canonical example of this working, which makes sense that Twitter tried Stories as well.
uDontKnowMe 5y ago
Reddit started out as a text-based discussion forum for use on desktop and has slowly morphed into endless-scroll-of-images/gifs/streams on mobile.
kuu 5y ago
Threads is a successful feature they added and it's not the same as at the beginning.

fleddr 5y ago

"We’ll explore more ways to address what holds people back from participating on Twitter." Perhaps I can help. Twitter is always angry. You'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. 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. 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. This culture of perpetual outrage, hate-addiction even, and the many childish behaviors that come with it, are born at Twitter. After a Twitter session, one feels miserable and depressed. There is nothing delightful, nothing new you learned, no new friend you met. It's horror. Like the news, but then 10 times worse. Wait, sometimes there's non-hateful tweets too. 99% of them are self-congratulatory or stupid. Something like: "My 3 year old just commented that an intersectional approach in politics is most effective". Attention starved, completely made up. Yet for sure it will get thousands of likes. Both hate and idiocracy are richly rewarded. 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. It's a Twitter thing and a Twitter thing only. I've never experienced it with such intensity anywhere else, and I'm merely lurking. The reason I hate it so much is that it goes beyond just a website sucking, its effects are cultural.

bqe 5y ago
I think the simplest solution to this would be to simply hide comment/retweet/like counts. It will be possible to sort of figure this out from the engagement, but it won't be easy to figure out if a tweet is popular or wildly popular.
geewee 5y ago
Honestly I think this is very dependent on what bubble you end up in. There's isn't really any outrage anywhere in my feed.

kzrdude 5y ago

Maybe I'd be in the target group (rarely say anything), but I didn't know that it existed.

mtnGoat 5y ago

i dont tweet, despite having an account registered in '08 because quite frankly its a very toxic and argumentative environment, with a lot of noise, nonsense and bots galore. 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. same reason FB is having issues growing, i would imagine.

rhacker 5y ago

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

idownvoted 5y ago

Gee, who would have thought the culture on Twitter is experienced as hostile by some (ie all normal people). Never once in the last years have I opened the app without closing it 10 mins max later in exasperation of disgust. It really brings out the worst people, it brings out the worst in people as some of the worst people „bring out“ Twitter.

skinkestek 5y ago

> 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. If anyone from twitter reads this, here's one thing that could get me to post more: Give us pseudonyms. Guarantee that you won't leak them to media or mobs. I understand you'll have to givw them to the police sometimes but the police is far less scary for me than the mob. 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?

kyle-rb 5y ago
What's the difference between this and simply making multiple accounts?
- skinkestek 5y ago
  Convenience. And the promise. Edit: since this is transparent Twitter we could even get an high level explanation on how to make sure such pseudonymous accounts technically cannot be linked back unless three persons in three jurisdictions - of which at least one is a customer ombudsperson - agree that there is a valid request from a law enforcement agency and then electronically sign it. Seems a tall order when you can just create more accounts? Well creating new accounts forces you to give up your phone number meaning you are a sitting duck the moment anything gets leaked.
  - kyle-rb 5y ago
    Twitter doesn't require you to add a phone number, you can sign up with just an email address. In some cases, if your account gets flagged, they'll ask you to add a phone number to unsuspend it (which makes it a little harder to dodge bans), but I think that's a rare case.
    - skinkestek 5y ago
      I cannot create one from Norway without a telephone number. I could try with a VPN but I guess that would just make it harder.

jms703 5y ago

Waiting for the Goodbye, Spaces post.

stereoradonc 5y ago

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 "public square".

kyle-rb 5y ago

This isn't very surprising; they introduced fleets 8 months ago but never bothered to add them to the web version in any form.

lazycouchpotato 5y ago

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.

markmark 5y ago
Yeah I use tweetdeck on desktop and a third party app on mobile. Neither had fleets so I didn't know they existed.

kalleboo 5y ago

It'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. On the Japanese one, the fleets are packed. The feature was SUPER popular in Japan! As Instagram moves away from people sharing stories (they recently announced a new focus - "shopping", and competing with TikTok), I could only see Twitter fleets getting even more popular here.

Delowar776 5y ago

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

dustinmoris 5y ago

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

shruubi 5y ago

I don'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. 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. 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'd rather go without and be blissfully ignorant to anything happening on that platform.

ertucetin 5y ago

Good call.

rswail 5y ago

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