
Twitter starts testing 'Fleets,' its version of Stories - jbegley
https://techcrunch.com/2020/03/04/twitter-starts-testing-its-own-version-of-stories-called-fleets-which-disappear-after-24-hours/
======
shanev
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 made an app called Blink that did exactly this a few years ago:
[https://www.producthunt.com/upcoming/blink](https://www.producthunt.com/upcoming/blink).
Build it and they will come, not :)

~~~
rconti
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.

~~~
nicoburns
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.

~~~
pradn
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.

------
Zenst
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.

~~~
OedipusRex
You cannot prevent that and it cannot be policed.

~~~
Zenst
I concur about preventing, though T&C's could enable policing. Also a nice (c)
notice would enable self-policing upon such infractions to some extent.

But certainly it will not be a fluid process currently. Let's see if they
update T&C's to accommodate that aspect.

~~~
luckylion
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.

~~~
ohmaigad
This idea has been looked at -
[https://copyrightalliance.org/ca_faq_post/tweet-protected-
co...](https://copyrightalliance.org/ca_faq_post/tweet-protected-copyright/)
Seems that if you posted an original joke it should be copyrightable.

------
soneca
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](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.

~~~
rriepe
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.

~~~
cirno
> 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.

~~~
adjkant
> 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.

~~~
cirno
> 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.

------
holler
It seems like all the major social media sites are slowly turning into the
same homogenous app.

~~~
josteink
> It seems like all the major social media sites are slowly turning into the
> same homogenous app.

While it's absolutely terrible, it kinda makes sense in the metric-driven
world we live in right now.

What had me completely surprised was when this was added to _fucking YouTube_.
I do _not_ want stories in my Youtube feed. God damnit!

It's a video-streaming site, not a social media platform. And please don't try
to make it into a social media platform either!

~~~
chaosite
It _was_ more of a social media platform. Remember video replies?

Then it turned into a video-streaming website.

------
gentleman11
Unannounced, somebody somewhere is building a caching service to preserve
these “fleets” to sell them to whom ever is interested

------
ausbah
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

~~~
pergadad
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?

------
KenanSulayman
Those 'guce.advertising.com/collectIdentifiers' redirects on TechCrunch
articles when you have an ad-blocker really make me go ballistic.

Is this only for EU users? I can't believe that this would be happening for
long if it wasn't...
[https://i.imgur.com/uQp1yVD.png](https://i.imgur.com/uQp1yVD.png)

~~~
tyfon
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.

------
RcouF1uZ4gsC
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.

~~~
KarlKemp
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)

~~~
karatestomp
Native (US) English speaker here. Semi-old, too. Never heard of a "fleets
enema".

------
darkstar999
I always see Stories as an engagement ploy. Come back every day... or else
FOMO.

~~~
kabacha
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.

------
throwaway724
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.

~~~
ilamont
They've done quite a bit on the product front, although it's fair to question
the utility to average users:

\- Increased tweet length to 280 chars

\- Tweet threads

\- GIF integration

\- Multiple UI revisions of desktop and mobile apps

There's also been a fair amount of work on ads and security, although these
changes will be less apparent to most users.

~~~
danShumway
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.

~~~
mypalmike
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.

[https://blog.twitter.com/engineering/en_us/topics/infrastruc...](https://blog.twitter.com/engineering/en_us/topics/infrastructure/2017/the-
infrastructure-behind-twitter-scale.html)

------
azinman2
Did snapchat not patent stories? It seems like they should be suing the pants
off everyone!

~~~
rriepe
I know you meant the technical feature, but I couldn't help but laugh at the
idea of patenting _stories_.

------
mxstbr
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!

~~~
CGamesPlay
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.

------
duhballs
That's a great name for them.

~~~
rasz
'Farts' seems more appropriate.

------
ethanwillis
Why wouldnt they just name it flocks

~~~
kyle-rb
Fleet == fleeting

~~~
scoot
fleet === fleeting tweet

------
animalnewbie
I just hope this voyeuristic culture dies so I don't get stupid suggestions
from Twitter

------
mschuster91
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?

------
piokoch
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...

------
transfire
Fleets? Not Flocks?

------
Wistar
Twit large.

------
mdszy
This sounds almost like they're trying to replicate "Stories" from other
social networks.

\- Shows up at the top of one's feed, more prominent.

\- Expires after a certain time.

~~~
dddbbb
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.

------
allovernow
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.

------
lostgame
Well, since Snapchat is a glorified nude-sharing app, it makes sense for the
use case.

~~~
delecti
Just because it is used for that does not by any stretch mean that it is used
_primarily_ for that.

~~~
lostgame
Speak for yourself. :P

~~~
ska
Physician, heal thyself?

------
smabie
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..

------
Traster
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.

[1][https://www.marketwatch.com/story/twitters-jack-dorsey-
faces...](https://www.marketwatch.com/story/twitters-jack-dorsey-faces-
another-crisis-this-time-from-an-activist-investor-2020-03-02)

