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.
Yeah I actually really respect that they axed something within a timely span, posted about their thoughts, and well, lately the Twitter team has been killing it as far as deploying features and long talked about stuff, so it's all good. The idea of Fleets, whether it was inspired by Stories etc, was another way to engage users and it did have some usefulness. I love the 24hr disappearing thing on IG and I liked it similarly here.
Being able to set retention would make me feel better about tweeting.
You can do some of this with third party tools, but it'd be nice to have it built in. I stopped liking Tweets though because it's actually impossible to remove more than 3k old likes. I was eventually able to do so, but it required contacting their DPO office and having them reset the cache each time so I could remove them in batches (entire process of reaching out, getting a response, and iterating took 6weeks-ish).
Limiting quote-tweets would also help people since most of the abuse comes from quote-tweeting rather than replies (which you can already limit).
I'm not twitter famous so I mostly only experience the good aspects of twitter.
If you have a highly curated feed and make an effort to interact pleasantly with in-good-faith people it can be a really great place. It requires aggressive blocking and intentionally not following hostile people though.
Some better blocking tools would probably also be helpful (block everyone who liked this tweet, etc.)
I'd also love a YouTube Premium style twitter where I could pay $10/month for no ads.
It's cool they have the culture to ship something big like this and decide to pivot - I think that's a pretty good sign.
Are you kidding? This is an incredibly opaque and user-hostile company.
edit: I am one of the moderators of /r/Twitter on Reddit. Come look at my subreddit if you want a feel for where my opinion is being drawn from. This company is in absolutely no way transparent.
> 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...
That makes sense in retrospect. I have a twitter account but have only used it a handful of times when it was the only way to complain to a company (!). I read tweets only when someone links to them.
Perhaps something even more lightweight would have attracted me but I'd never even heard of this product.
It's a difficult problem to publicize an addition to a service to those non-users who aren't actively looking for features.
> It's always nice to know why an experiment/project failed.
Every failure we can learn from is one which we can avoid for our self. Hence in the startup ecosystem, 'What not to do' is more valuable than 'What to do' but those who are new to the game flock to those selling the latter because 'they tell what one wants to hear'.
The recent #buildinpublic trend is showing some promise. I started my first buildinpublic project recently, A platform to validate minimum viable product but it failed the meta validation and I've detailed the reasons in the twitter thread[1].
But I've noticed that much of the building in public ecosystem is focused upon nocode, Especially flooded with notion related projects. I haven't used it, But I presume the reason is because majority of the people who are watching the #buildinpublic threads are non-coders and are looking to learn how a project is built.
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.
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!
> 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.
Be selective in who you follow, and if you're following someone who shares interesting thoughts but retweets too much, you can turn off their retweets. That in combination with being judicious on the block button makes Twitter one of my favorite social networks.
If you're using Twitter on a desktop browser, I made an extension which by default removes everything but what the people you're following are actually saying or commenting on, and automatically switches you back to the chronological timeline when Twitter tries to move you back to the algorithmic timeline:
You really just need to follow one good Twitter account and they will usually retweet other people who are interesting and usually share a characteristic that led you to followed the original account.
I had the same issue and for me it was about "Topics" I followed (e.g., computer programming). They were surfacing nonsensical self-absorbed tweets so I unfollowed these topics, and since then, my feed is a lot better.
I also use Tweetbot on my Mac, which allows me to filter retweets. That means I only see what people say. I do use another filter on my National Basketball Association list to block a certain keyword.
The downsides of Tweetbot is that it doesn't support everything that Twitter offers (polls, probably fleets, etc.) and is about $10.
I currently look at Twitter as a destination for socially approved statements.
Twitter is a place where you are either celebrated for having approved perspectives or risk professional destruction.
New users can only be craven popularity chasers. Old users either conform or quit. Why would anyone play in that sandbox if you have any respect for diverse opinions?
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.
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.
Someone had a "history of MUD sites" in which they describe a two year lifecycle of popularity. I think the same applies to social media on about ten years; there's a cohort of people who join in the first few years, because the site creates a different community that isn't served elsewhere. Then it reaches saturation, slow decay, drama, and gradually exodus to the hotter new things.
Hence all the desperate cloning of new platform features.
> The lack of innovation at Twitter, Instagram and Facebook is utterly baffling and points to a serious culture problem.
Yes, and the befuddling long time it takes them to implement obvious features that smaller teams delivery within days, like support for dark mode, or an auto-repeat button on YouTube (seriously wtf is up with that, they have auto-play but not repeat? w. t. f. Google)
Established social media companies innovating is how you get new reddit. I think the facebook strategy of not changing successful platforms and continually building/buying new ones makes the most sense.
"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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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?
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!
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.
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.
> 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?
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.
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.
I use Tweet Delete[0] to auto-delete my tweets older than a month. I see no value in keeping old tweets around, especially compared to the risk that I inadvertently become briefly well-known and some wokes decide to trawl my timeline, take some tweet from 12 years ago out of context and convince my employer that I'm racist or something. Seen it happen too many times.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
If I block you, I want it to prevent you from reading my tweets. Obviously you can use a logged-out browser window, but that extra step is supposed to be annoying enough to prevent most non-psycho people from reading your stuff.
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
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.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
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.
Twitter hides a lot of features for third party apps using their API. I probably would have given it a try if they would have made it available to third party apps.
I 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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".
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.
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.
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.
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.
thallavajhula|4 years 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 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.
ChrisArchitect|4 years ago
blowski|4 years ago
gonehome|4 years ago
You can do some of this with third party tools, but it'd be nice to have it built in. I stopped liking Tweets though because it's actually impossible to remove more than 3k old likes. I was eventually able to do so, but it required contacting their DPO office and having them reset the cache each time so I could remove them in batches (entire process of reaching out, getting a response, and iterating took 6weeks-ish).
Limiting quote-tweets would also help people since most of the abuse comes from quote-tweeting rather than replies (which you can already limit).
I'm not twitter famous so I mostly only experience the good aspects of twitter.
If you have a highly curated feed and make an effort to interact pleasantly with in-good-faith people it can be a really great place. It requires aggressive blocking and intentionally not following hostile people though. Some better blocking tools would probably also be helpful (block everyone who liked this tweet, etc.)
I'd also love a YouTube Premium style twitter where I could pay $10/month for no ads.
It's cool they have the culture to ship something big like this and decide to pivot - I think that's a pretty good sign.
pjc50|4 years ago
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?
mdoms|4 years ago
riffic|4 years ago
Are you kidding? This is an incredibly opaque and user-hostile company.
edit: I am one of the moderators of /r/Twitter on Reddit. Come look at my subreddit if you want a feel for where my opinion is being drawn from. This company is in absolutely no way transparent.
gumby|4 years ago
That makes sense in retrospect. I have a twitter account but have only used it a handful of times when it was the only way to complain to a company (!). I read tweets only when someone links to them.
Perhaps something even more lightweight would have attracted me but I'd never even heard of this product.
It's a difficult problem to publicize an addition to a service to those non-users who aren't actively looking for features.
Abishek_Muthian|4 years ago
Every failure we can learn from is one which we can avoid for our self. Hence in the startup ecosystem, 'What not to do' is more valuable than 'What to do' but those who are new to the game flock to those selling the latter because 'they tell what one wants to hear'.
The recent #buildinpublic trend is showing some promise. I started my first buildinpublic project recently, A platform to validate minimum viable product but it failed the meta validation and I've detailed the reasons in the twitter thread[1].
But I've noticed that much of the building in public ecosystem is focused upon nocode, Especially flooded with notion related projects. I haven't used it, But I presume the reason is because majority of the people who are watching the #buildinpublic threads are non-coders and are looking to learn how a project is built.
[1] https://twitter.com/Abishek_Muthian/status/13994004552858542...
dheera|4 years ago
unknown|4 years ago
[deleted]
cratermoon|4 years ago
[deleted]
PragmaticPulp|4 years ago
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.
btown|4 years ago
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!
mdoms|4 years ago
par|4 years ago
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.
leviathant|4 years ago
insin|4 years ago
https://github.com/insin/tweak-new-twitter#tweak-new-twitter
CharlesW|4 years ago
The trick is to block early and often. The feed is what you make it.
JohnFen|4 years ago
I know there are ways of actively managing it to reduce the toxicity, but that's a lot more work than it's worth to me.
At least as far as what keeps me off Twitter, Fleets missed the point entirely.
zarriak|4 years ago
jimkleiber|4 years ago
Almost like an infinitely connected comments sections, bringing many of the challenges of the once-isolated comments sections.
topicseed|4 years ago
jdeibele|4 years ago
I also use Tweetbot on my Mac, which allows me to filter retweets. That means I only see what people say. I do use another filter on my National Basketball Association list to block a certain keyword.
The downsides of Tweetbot is that it doesn't support everything that Twitter offers (polls, probably fleets, etc.) and is about $10.
taytus|4 years ago
Pro tip: Mute words and people.
I can't tell you how much better my experience has been since I started growing my muted words list.
rst|4 years ago
robryan|4 years ago
___luigi|4 years ago
I would question this line, FB has a serious challenge to address in this space.
papito|4 years ago
DaniloDias|4 years ago
Twitter is a place where you are either celebrated for having approved perspectives or risk professional destruction.
New users can only be craven popularity chasers. Old users either conform or quit. Why would anyone play in that sandbox if you have any respect for diverse opinions?
whywhywhywhy|4 years ago
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|4 years ago
I would hate a hypothetical Twitter that turns into another Facebook amalgamation of 75 products.
pjc50|4 years ago
Hence all the desperate cloning of new platform features.
Razengan|4 years ago
Yes, and the befuddling long time it takes them to implement obvious features that smaller teams delivery within days, like support for dark mode, or an auto-repeat button on YouTube (seriously wtf is up with that, they have auto-play but not repeat? w. t. f. Google)
nerfhammer|4 years ago
colinmhayes|4 years ago
fleddr|4 years ago
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.
geewee|4 years ago
bqe|4 years ago
jdlyga|4 years ago
p4bl0|4 years ago
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).
Saint_Genet|4 years ago
cratermoon|4 years ago
the_reformation|4 years ago
renewiltord|4 years ago
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.
unknown|4 years ago
[deleted]
LeoPanthera|4 years ago
simonsarris|4 years ago
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|4 years ago
Tycho|4 years ago
charcircuit|4 years ago
conradfr|4 years ago
plushpuffin|4 years ago
rswail|4 years ago
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.
andrewmcwatters|4 years ago
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|4 years ago
uDontKnowMe|4 years ago
kuu|4 years ago
skinkestek|4 years ago
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|4 years ago
cpeterso|4 years ago
cableshaft|4 years ago
charcircuit|4 years ago
sharkweek|4 years ago
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.
WoodenChair|4 years ago
- 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.
mdoms|4 years ago
[0] https://tweetdelete.net/
Zababa|4 years ago
I do the exact same thing, I think it's the only sane way to use twitter.
bigdang|4 years ago
renewiltord|4 years ago
spoonjim|4 years ago
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|4 years ago
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.
andy_ppp|4 years ago
rmetzler|4 years ago
rogerclark|4 years ago
okcomputerrrr|4 years ago
colesantiago|4 years ago
This is why pretty much why TikTok exists and filled that space very quickly.
shruubi|4 years ago
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.
pmulard|4 years ago
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.
thrower123|4 years ago
miguelrochefort|4 years ago
- 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
cpeterso|4 years ago
https://stories.google/
unknown|4 years ago
[deleted]
jacobmischka|4 years ago
Glad I stopped using twitter a few months ago.
irq-1|4 years ago
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.
Andrew_nenakhov|4 years ago
kalleboo|4 years ago
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.
lazycouchpotato|4 years ago
markmark|4 years ago
Brendinooo|4 years ago
FalconSensei|4 years ago
npunt|4 years ago
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.
udfalkso|4 years ago
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.
FalconSensei|4 years ago
mtnGoat|4 years ago
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.
mrRandomGuy|4 years ago
jwithington|4 years ago
hiidrew|4 years ago
In general, I'd like to turn off stories on every social platform I'm on. By far the most addictive design for me.
tsimionescu|4 years ago
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?
thrdbndndn|4 years ago
From my personal experience, Twitter is undoubtedly HUGE in Japan. Everyone and its dog use it, not to mention all the companies, personalities, etc.
astrange|4 years ago
rconti|4 years ago
bdcravens|4 years ago
code_duck|4 years ago
stereoradonc|4 years ago
figassis|4 years ago
nojvek|4 years ago
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.
yakshaving_jgt|4 years ago
Did Fleets address the problem of political extremists using Twitter to go after people's livelihoods?
mcintyre1994|4 years ago
molasses|4 years ago
charcircuit|4 years ago
dnissley|4 years ago
throwawayswede|4 years ago
Twitter management is synonymous with incompetence.
yoursunny|4 years ago
kyle-rb|4 years ago
kzrdude|4 years ago
bloudermilk|4 years ago
charcircuit|4 years ago
aidaman|4 years ago
jms703|4 years ago
dustinmoris|4 years ago
Delowar776|4 years ago
jaqalopes|4 years ago
ertucetin|4 years ago
unknown|4 years ago
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unknown|4 years ago
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idownvoted|4 years ago
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rhacker|4 years ago
unknown|4 years ago
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yodelshady|4 years ago
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|4 years ago
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.