This will be popular, and might even replace regular usage, as Stories have in Instagram. It'll enable people to be more authentic, transparent, and casual. It will help counter Twitter getting increasingly LinkedIn-like.
I honestly couldn't disagree more with this assessment of "stories".
Stories are great for the platform. They drive user engagement, and, hence, advertising.
As far as I can tell, they're terrible for the users. You have to constantly be active to not miss something, you can't just check back in after a few days. For some reason, comments are private only, which is almost never what I want -- as a poster, as a commenter, or as an observer. Contrast that with (say) a "normal" IG/FB post of a picture from the beach, where comments are public and a community of people and comment on it and reply to each other in a social way. Stories are basically broadcast-only. They're also MUCH more time-consuming to create.
I've only done a few stories, always when traveling solo, so I have time to kill and it was useful to learn something new the first time. The only positive thing I can say about them is that, because they're ephemeral, I feel less bad about posting some stupid snapshot of something unimportant/trivial.
That this is coming to Twitter is even more concerning, because it's already the most shouty, least-community driven social network, with the largest multiplier on saying trolling/annoying/controversial/stupid things in the pursuit of clicks and likes and retweets.
I find that Instagram stories, being ephemeral (they disappear after 24 hours) have done a lot do reduce the impact of "instagram perfection". You get to see a bit more of people's real, everyday lives.
You're right that you miss things if you don't check it at the right time, but that's ok, you don't have to see everything.
I've stopped using Instagram to post pictures; I only use stories. I post a lot of trash/ephemera/jokes on stories. It's much more fun that having to figure out what to post. It's not permanent.
+1 to "you don't have to see everything" Isn't it already assumed that Twitter's feed algorithms isn't showing you "everything" you want to see. There is always stuff you'll miss? What is different about missing a story?
Huh. I generally think social media is a positive thing in my life, and often wonder why people get this FOMO/anxiety thing, but the few times I've noticed folks broadcasting their "perfect" lives, it's those using stories. And, again, it's not helped by the lack of human response. You don't get someone saying "man, that looks perfect!" followed by the OP saying "well actually, all these things went wrong and it was a disaster, but i got this one shot when everything came together" .. without that human interaction it's just a broadcast-only image, which seems to be meant for broadcasting perfection.
That may, however, just be a matter of the KINDS of people in my life who use stories, though. Selection bias.
> I honestly couldn't disagree more with this assessment of "stories".
I generally agree. Anytime I see a platform move towards "stories", my engagement with that platform drops like rock.
That said, I belong to the 40+ segment and I suspect there might be a generational gap going on here. Basically just like with Snapchat is being intentionally terrible to use, to drive away us "elderly" from a platform designed primarily for the youth.
> It'll enable people to be more authentic, transparent, and casual.
Which will, I suspect, drive analytics enhancements to help get under one's skin and/or sell users more junk. The tweet disappearing from the user-facing view will not prevent its being dissected and its information stored. And the point will be likely missed by most users...
I think this is what's driving tiktoks success (or at least why I am obsessed). Tiktoks bring an entirely new level of getting to know someone that I havn't ever met before that i've never experienced before on an app.
Snap for sure! But that's more just for close friends, which I already know pretty well. Twitter isn't even close to TikTok in providing emotional connections to people you don't even know, imo.
Is this not how your friends use Instagram stories?
My friends will mostly post one or two amazing photos from their trip/event/whatever, then post various stories showing lots of casual moments along the way.
Some people put a LOT of effort into their story, but from watching most of my friends, and what I myself do, it's usually pretty casual.
If you think twitter is getting like LinkedIn, you gotta start following some more interesting people! It's the wildest thing I've ever seen almost every day.
Twitter is on a constant downhill ever since they restricted their API to force people to use their own a) shitty app or b) shitty website with c) shitty defaults.
Interesting, will be interesting how they are received and utilised. Whilst they don't allow reshares, it is common for people to screenshot a tweet and share that screenshot - this won't prevent that and wonder how Twitter will police that.
Also wonder if they will allow customisable expiration (up to a point), say 36 hours etc. Or allow shorter duration posts, say an hour for spot promotions - which would be a great use for this.
Worst case, take a photo of your screen with another phone. The harder it is to scrape the content, the more vulnerable the content posted there will be, which will make it that much more desirable a target to scrape.
It is possible to detect when that screenshot is subsequently shared within the platform. Twitter could prevent blocked users from sharing screenshots of tweets by the people who have blocked them, they just choose not to because eNgAgEmEnT.
Why can't it be prevented? Doesn't seem like they should have much difficulty recognizing that it was a screenshot of a "fleet", but other commenters make it sound like it's too difficult. So I'm wondering what others are taking into account that I'm missing.
How exactly would twitter know if something is screenshotted? The way snapchat does this is check screenshots folder for new files while you are watching the story - to avoid this all you need is an different screenshot app that saves screenshots somewhere else.
Now twitter has multiple apps, multiple platforms including desktop. You'd need some absurd DRM that would be broken anyway to enforce this.
Because the other twitter terms and conditions on harassment are so well policed. That some people are concerned about screenshots instead of bullying, harassment, etc that we see every day on the platform is quite something.
Well, you often find screenshots ARE used for harassment in as stealth retweets that make it hard for the original poster to counter the re-contexting and perversion of what they wrote.
That happens all the time, so yeah - it is a tool used to bully and harass, used all the time upon twitter.
Why would they want to police it? Surely Twitter is perfectly fine with you posting screenshots of things of interest (obviously within obscenity and legal restrictions).
I don't know. Twitter reposts of TikTok videos seems ubiquitous, but it seems like TikTok is still thriving. I don't think the primary reason people post a story rather than a permanent post is that they want to ensure the story only lasts for a day. At least for Instagram, I think it's more about keeping your main feed highly curated while still being able to hammer out tons of stories.
Copyrighting tweets? I love the idea as a demonstration of the absurd extent of copyright, but I'd expect virtually no tweets to be considered copyrightable.
It seems pretty trivial (though perhaps not scalable) to do some kind of image recognition that looks for the Fleet format and flag it for review / policing.
I wonder why social media in general enforces everything to be ephemeral. Sure, Stories are specific about it, but even regular old posts in Facebook, Instagram, Twitter are very hard to track and consume. They are there, you can search if you are looking for something specific, a Facebook resurface some old memory for you when an algorithm decides it should. But they are not made to be a memory repository for users. Why is that?
I wonder this because I am building a social-network-y site (https://www.quidsentio.com) that's pretty much memory-focused, I even position it as a journal. I wonder if I am missing some obvious connection between hiding users memories and being a successful social network site.
I've thought a lot about this recently. A large portion of people hate social artifacts.
They don't want to have their picture taken. They don't want to be recorded on audio or video. They don't want their daily utterances to be a matter of record. They want comfort and low stakes.
A performance can be evaluated in the moment. An artifact (a recording of that performance) can be scrutinized forever, even by people who weren't actually there. It's why I love public speaking but I hate being on video.
Our whole society is increasingly becoming Mirandized, where "anything you say can and will be used against you in the court of [public opinion]." Ephemerality mitigates that, providing the expression and connection of social media without the stakes.
> They don't want their daily utterances to be a matter of record.
Experience being stalked and harassed online for years and you'll hate it as well. Imagine in your 30s having your job threatened because you made a dumb post when you were a teenager, and no one will ever let it go or accept that people change.
Many people are uninteresting, and never have this experience. Celebrities have large support networks and agents. For anyone caught between the two extremes, this can really break people who have no one to turn to and no support when they end up targeted.
> Ephemerality mitigates that, providing the expression and connection of social media without the stakes.
It's also a lie and setting people up for disaster. Nothing will stop stalkers from crawling stories with archive.is or even just taking screenshots. Nothing you put online is ephemeral, unless it's too uninteresting to be worth saving. Stalkers will write bots to scrape your Twitter stories, your Discord deleted messages and on and on, and then peruse the results at their leisure for juicy content to twist and distort.
Google currently OCRs text in screenshots posted to stalking websites to tie back to you in search results. And those websites rank like you wouldn't believe. Once Google gets their hands on it, forget it. You'll never outlive it.
> Nothing will stop stalkers from crawling stories with archive.is or even just taking screenshots.
That assumes many things, the first being that someone thinks you're important enough to archive, and that you were important enough to archive long ago. This is exceedingly rare for that middle ground you're discussing.
You're right in that anything CAN be saved if its online and someone is motivated enough, but the added resistance ephemerality adds protects most people. You're talking a very narrow use case, and in that case it should be obvious your internet world is public realm. All of these points you're making rely on extreme stalking already happening. Not only stalking, but archiving of that stalking.
For the vast majority of people and the vast majority of their posts, ephemeral content actually does disappear. Especially on mobile platforms that aren't really archived like the web is. Ephemerality doesn't save you from crossing lines (plenty of teens have gotten in trouble over Snapchat messages in various forms), but the generally mundane harmless stuff goes away and can never be later used to misconstrue or define who you are.
> That assumes many things, the first being that someone thinks you're important enough to archive, and that you were important enough to archive long ago. This is exceedingly rare for that middle ground you're discussing.
What is to stop someone from writing a crawler that goes around and captures Twitter stories for every user into a permanent archive that they make available online in a few years or sell to stalkers? That would be an extremely valuable pool of content.
Just think of how much money you could make if you had 2020 dirt on a major political candidate in 2040. Maybe you know their secret fetish, their racist tirade, their thoughts on a controverisal subject, something the media would devour.
> All of these points you're making rely on extreme stalking already happening. Not only stalking, but archiving of that stalking.
It's a lot more common than you think, and nowadays they have Cloudflare to protect them so they're incredibly resilient. I was blinded to it as well.
The problem with this line of thinking is that you're only an uninteresting target until suddenly you're not. It just takes one crazy person coming across you to radically change your life. That new app or service you developed may take off overnight before you know it. Or it may happen so slowly that you don't realize that the rules have changed for you and you need to start being much more discreet.
The way these sites work is they build up dossiers before they go public with them. You'll think you are not being targeted for months, and then all of a sudden you get it all dumped on the web at once.
These kinds of ephemerality promises are dangerous, even if you are lucky enough to never be targeted.
To my mind, if you're posting something publicly (or even semi-publicly but you can't vouch personally for everyone who has access), stop and think. Would you mind if the content you're posting, with your real name attached, were posted on every wall in your city, and on the front page of every newspaper?
If you'd feel uncomfortable, don't post it publicly.
> Nothing will stop stalkers from crawling stories with archive.is or even just taking screenshots.
What stops this is not being interesting at the time you post. So if you're some random high school kid in 2020 who posts something stupid, nobody is going to obsessively catalog what you say in case you become an NFL quarterback or a congressperson in 2030.
That was true of the old internet, and might possibly be true still, but not for long.
Nowadays we have archive.org and people who wish to datamine and hoard things. I can absolutely see someone coming out with a search interface to browse through peoples' Twitter stories that they've secretly been archiving for years with a small bot scraper. The guy running archive.is has been spending thousands of dollars a month to run it for ostensibly no reason whatsoever.
The rules have changed and the stakes have escalated. I think the world will wise up and we'll start seeing greater opsec efforts around personal anonymity. People will start acting online like they do in real life in any situation that they even remotely care about (even under their pseudonyms), and anonymous communities will continue to grow and thrive as the outlet for all of the hatred that people harbor.
Not even really true of the old internet, depending how far back you want to go. Remember there are entire archives of Geocities, and everyone was frantically archiving the entire Yahoo Groups. There was the Dejanews archive of Usenet, and so on.
The idea that "I'm not important enough" needs to disappear. It doesn't matter if you're important or not to automated bots.
That's because it's not just about you. Things you post are things that are meant to be interesting to your followers (so that they spend time on the newsfeed where ads can be injected).
And believe or not, users only find recent things interesting. You may be interested in your old content, but your followers are not, and they'd have have likely already seen your old content.
The biggest thing is that I find my own posts cringeworthy 6 months back. Facebook's Timeline revamp a few years back really exacerbated this by making it easy to jump back multiple years to see what people had posted.
A small example: people often post memes & jokes on social media. Old memes don't really sound funny though, unless they were well recognized. They seem embarrassing or downright stupid. You look terrible if you find one of those old posts.
On the larger scale: most people grow more mature over time. So you have this whole historical graph of someone's life and you can easily surface when they made less great decisions or were younger. Lots of people don't like this.
This is a huge problem with Facebook groups which are replacing many forums and are unindexable. I'm part of few groups and the same questions and discussions are being held asked daily.
likewise, I'm building a social-network-y site for retail investors (https://www.holfolio.com) to track and share what they and others are investing in.
One of the main points is you can see the history of what someone has invested in and get a picture of their whole portfolio. Some people currently post their trades on traditional social media but its really hard to keep track of, these fleets are only going to make it worse (helping me in the process?)
Because FOMO increases engagement, which means bigger ad sales: the user has to keep coming back or they miss the ephemeral content, same reason F2P-style games have daily activities.
what I would to see from twitter is something for "blog" tweets - a "single" tweet spread across 3-30 individual tweets. the structure of individual tweets makes them terribly hard to read, but I feel like I've seen enough of them to say it's something in their interest to support
Even series-tweets are more information dense than your average blog post. I think that's their main appeal really. Putting a blogging function on twitter which then ends up as long posts appearing between regular tweets might make it much less possible to quickly 'parse' Twitter for a dopamine hit.
I'm sure there are ways to counter my concern, but honestly why do it of things work well for them?
I just want an official way to link to a thread to emphasize "no, I want you to read the whole thread" as opposed to "no, I want you to read the first tweet." Sometimes I just want to share one specific thing, or the whole thread, but it's ambiguous when people click the link which one I was trying to share with them.
There are several pages that does this, another one is huffington post. I just don't visit them as I assume what they're doing is hostile to the users.
I'm in the EEA (almost EU) for reference. GDPR is valid here as well.
I wonder how much research went into the name "Fleets". To a lot of people, the first thing that comes to mind after "Fleets" is "enema" as in "Fleets enema".
I am not sure Twitter wants to evoke that image.
Then again, maybe this is Twitter acknowledging the toxic nature of Tweets and why they should be flushed out of the system quickly.
I've studied in the US, binged every Sorkin series, scored a 700 on the verbal SAT, and work almost exclusively in an English-language environment. And yet I've never heard of Fleets enema". It's strange what cultural blind spots remain.
That being said, "Fleets" strikes my non-native ears as an above-average naming choice with its double entendre of "Group of something" as well as "fleeting".
(It's also an ongoing pet peeve of mine how risk-averse people are in regards to naming. "CockroachDB" or "Plan B" (the morning-after pill) strike me as hilarious and instant classics of the genre, both evoking a rich set of emotions that fit pretty well with their respective products. I guess it's Keynesian-Beauty-Contest sort of fallacy, where everyone believes all the others are into Playboy models, even though they themselves prefer the Girl-next-door type)
Actually I think you've pointed out a potential confusion. My understanding was they're "Fleets" because they're ephemeral - they get deleted after 24 hours. So they're "Fleeting" definition -lasting for a very short time. Not "Fleet" as in group of boats sailing together. So the name potentially implies they're something they're absolutely not.
Also born and raised in US and have no clue what a fleets enema is.
edit: apparently it’s a brand of enema laxative. I wonder what proportion of people have had to use an enema. I may be in the minority due to young age and being male?
When I hear “fleet” the first thing I think of is a bunch of warships. Up until today, the President sending a “fleet” to another country’s leader would be considered an escalation of conflict or act of war.
A temporary tweet? Why not just call it a chirp? Stick with the bird sounds theme. Are they calling it a fleet because it’s fleeting?
I've never heard of this phrase. At first I thought ships but then within the context of Twitter and their nomenclature, Fleets as temporal and Tweets as short messages made more sense, though I still thought it a terrible name.
For companies - sure but for people it's great. People don't usually put important stuff there and it's just fun to catch up with what they are up to.
That was initial idea behind microblogging and twitter but people started to write actual blogs there and started having long discussion on a platform that is fundamentally incompatible with it.
I really don't get it. Twitter has five thousand full-time employees. I have to assume at least 20% of them are in product development in some capacity. What exactly are these people doing all day?
I can't point to a single notable product innovation they've had in years. And they continue to ignore the drumbeat of user asking for an edit button, and are completely unable to come up with any kind of reasonable solution to the abuse or bot problems.
I don't know Kayvon personally, but what exactly is wrong with Twitter that it's so bad and slow at product development? This should be #5000 on their list of things to do.
They're making tons of innovative new features for their customers, who are advertisers. People who write and read tweets aren't the customer, they're the product.
What exactly are these people doing all day? I can't point to a single notable product innovation they've had in years.
Maybe Twitter is less caught up on the SV "gotta change/break something user-facing today to justify my job" treadmill than other tech companies. Or maybe the changes they make are on the back end. It's been a long time since I've seen a fail whale.
Considering the global societal impact that Twitter has, I'm surprised it has only 5,000 employees.
Maintaining the infrastructure needed to deliver ads that are targeted based on real-time event streams collected from users' interaction with the website and app. Stuff like that.
That's my guess, anyway. It's the kind of thing that can keep a lot of developers very busy, but not something they'll be talking about much in public.
But is any of this really stuff that should take 1000 engineers to build? Tweet length? GIFs?
I don't question that those engineers are working hard. I'm sure they're not sitting around twiddling their thumbs. And I don't question that there aren't some genuinely hard, complicated problems to solve at Twitter, particularly around scaling and security. But from a structural perspective, I do still kind of wonder if companies the size of Twitter and Facebook aren't just an extended, very public example of Brooks's Law.
Anecdotally, I've been in large teams and small teams and I work equally hard in both environments. But even with the same amount of work, somehow, more stuff gets done and more products get shipped from the smaller teams.
There's a ton of infrastructure to build and maintain at Twitter. Yesterday's solutions don't scale and need replacing. Yesterday's "just get it done, we'll worry about cost (or quality, or operational burden) later" have happened and it's time to fix. Lather, rinse, repeat.
This post should give you an idea of scale at Twitter. When I worked there, I spent about 2 months focused just on creating software to help automate the Clos migration mentioned. And there are just tons of things like this that are constantly being worked on.
Having made the same observation as you, I always preferred the formulation in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ringelmann_effect. Although the Wikipedia article lists "loss of motivation" as a cause, it originally focussed more on coordination problems growing with group size–sort of a reverse Metcalf'.
In that sense it avoids the lazy cynicism of writing off whole groups of people as stupid or unmotivated (i. e. all of Dilbert). Instead, it's a starting point to consider how much we can still improve what's arguably humanity's claim to fame, the ability to cooperate.
None of those things strike as 1) important or 2) indicative of a high-performing product development team given their size. But we can agree to disagree!
Ads and security are both extremely important to Twitter. It's hard to imagine any product concern being more important than those two, other than perhaps uptime.
The only comment on HN more tiresome than "lol I can build twitter over a weekend" is a comment by a throwaway implicitly claiming that fixing the twitter product problems is easy.
A lot of features never make it past experimentation and never see the light of day. The lifecycle of these experiments can last months and multiple code paths on mobile clients have to be carefully maintained. Failure to catch regressions on experiments cause unclean data and prevent experiments from re-starting until the new client reaches app stores.
Could it be that they're just bogged down in fire fighting and paying off the tech debt accumulated over years?
(Genuine question, as someone who has never worked in >50 eng company, I always wonder how those companies tackle stuff like this.)
Jack has discussed this. It won't happen. Even in 5 minutes a tweet can reach MANY people, and then it would be able to be changed entirely?
Twitter won't get an edit feature, it just doesn't work for the platform. The only way I see it happening is as an 'undo' send feature like Gmail has. You can see the tweet for 15 seconds before it actually goes out. This has also been discussed as an issue since Twitter is supposed to be real-time, but maybe certain people wouldn't care and enable the feature
I think all 5000 of them are busy "moderating" complaints. My account was suspended for 7 days for telling a youtuber (one I'd spoken with back and forth many times) that she had some clothes fluff in her armpit on pic she posted. Apparently that falls under harassment of a sexual nature and my appeal was denied within 15 minutes.
I started using Instagram stories quite heavily a couple weeks ago. For reference, I have ~32k followers on Twitter and ~700 on Instagram.
Way more people have come up to me in real life and talked about a story of mine in the last month than people have ever come up to me to talk about a tweet.
YMMV of course but I am bullish on the format and cannot wait for Fleets!
I've noticed something similar between Instagram and Facebook. However, I get much more engagement on Instagram stories (300 followers) than Facebook stories (1.8k followers). Like, consistency 10x more views and engagement. So there's more to it than just the format, I think.
tl;dr: Twitter doesn't give a flying f..k about their users.
Users: Twitter, ban the Nazis please, and let us edit tweets.
Twitter: Here, we take the stars and replace them with hearts.
Users: Twitter, please ban the Nazis, and let us edit tweets.
Twitter: Here's a totally messed up "redesign" filled with bugs that is mandatory except if you pretend to be an older browser (hint: extension GoodTwitter does that).
Users: Seriously, just please ban the Nazis and give us an edit option
Twitter: Hey, we're introducing AI to penalize sex workers, and giving the Nazis a tool to report tweets that has no real recourse for you, and if you appeal a ban you can't do anything, not even DM, for weeks until we may or may not look at the "offending" tweet because we are understaffed and our moderation slaves only speak your language roughly and don't get cultural context!
Usrrs: ... WTF man
Twitter: Hey, we're rolling out a feature we saw on Snapchat first and then was copied by Facebook, Whatsapp, and Instagram and it mostly utterly sucks there!
Seriously, how utterly detached is their product development team from the user base? And when are they finally going to offer a real API again?
Why Techcrunch can get away with such obvious GDPR violation. First, by default I am opt-in to being tracked, secondly I don't even have a way to opt-out. I can only say ok or "manage" my permissions, and managing throws me inside endless loop of screens that does not have opt-out button anyway...
It is relevant, it's a totally appropriate response to the GP comment. Snapchat hasn't been primarily a nude-sharing app for a long time, and the fact that some people seem to go out of their way to remain ignorant about that and keep treating it as such is the exact kind of intentional smug ignorance that the "ok boomer" meme is mocking.
I understand, but my reply was meant to allude to both how out of touch the older generation is and also how they look down at snapchat. I have snapchat and I use it everyday pretty much, its so much more than just sending nudes, so it irks me a bit when someone calls it just a nude sharing app. Thus my reply.
But I am a millennial who literally uses Snap for this very purpose and pretty much only this purpose - like most of the people I know who use it. Otherwise, it’s WhatsApp.
Well that is the first line of the article... But yes, I wonder how it will fit into the Twitter ecosystem. The two most successful implementations of this are Snapchat and Instagram: Snapchat was only a communication platform before stories, and Instagram profiles tend to be very deliberate and curated. Neither of these really apply to Twitter.
That's in the article title. The problem was that it's longer than HN's 80 char limit. The submitted title was "Twitter starts testing 'Fleets,' which disappear after 24 hours", which is a perfectly good way to shorten it to fit the limit. But maybe mentioning Stories is more important than mentioning 24 hours, so I've adjusted it for the time being.
Expiring tweets seem interesting, and it would be interesting to see how they handle that alongside their recent change to "remind" people about things they've missed.
I've just deleted my account because their notifications keep spamming me with reminders "Have you seen this tweet: ...". Those fake notifications are not things I care about, and are impossible to disable, the most you can do is say "Show me less of these" which never seems to actually result in a change.
I think the modern stock market has a structural problem with unrealistic pursuit of growth, which essentially forces public organizations into scope creep, intimately leading to the decline of product quality across the board as successful products make unnecessary changes.
I wonder how this is going to change the tweet prediction markets. I’ve spent a significant amount of time on my tweet count models and have finally reached the point of 5% weekly returns and it would be a real shame if this fleets thing becomes popular among certain people (rdt, aoc, etc)! You spend months making a model and then when it finally starts generating real stable cash flows, you get sent back to square one. Such is the nature of zero-sum games though..
This seems very likely to be an emergency reaction to the activist investors that have just started making noises[1]. Over the last 5 years facebook is up 150% in value and twitter is down 22% and that's a pretty consistent trend. Dorsey isn't even full time at Twitter, their development track record has been trash and Dorsey's planning on going to Africa for 3 months. This looks very much like a defensive move, but given how lame this feature is I think this is going to be way too little too late. The time to release this feature was July 9th 2011 - the day after Snapchat launched. Not a decade later.
I made an app called Blink that did exactly this a few years ago: https://www.producthunt.com/upcoming/blink. Build it and they will come, not :)