Twitter starts testing 'Fleets,' its version of Stories
techcrunch.com
techcrunch.com
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 :)
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...
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.
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.
That may, however, just be a matter of the KINDS of people in my life who use stories, though. Selection bias.
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.
Right. /s
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.
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.
I've seen some news stuff that isn't I suppose, but not much actual functionality.
But certainly it will not be a fluid process currently. Let's see if they update T&C's to accommodate that aspect.
That happens all the time, so yeah - it is a tool used to bully and harass, used all the time upon twitter.
Now twitter has multiple apps, multiple platforms including desktop. You'd need some absurd DRM that would be broken anyway to enforce this.
Does this mean that the Snapchat screenshot detection doesn't work if you don't give it the storage permission?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?)
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!
Then it turned into a video-streaming website.
I'm sure there are ways to counter my concern, but honestly why do it of things work well for them?
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
I'm in the EEA (almost EU) for reference. GDPR is valid here as well.
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.
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)
https://www.inputmag.com/culture/im-sorry-but-twitter-babe-y...
Twitter acknowledging it: https://twitter.com/TwitterComms/status/1235271981462720512
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?
...why so militaristic? I mean, I'm not a "hippie", but come one, fleets is just a preloaded word.
A temporary tweet? Why not just call it a chirp? Stick with the bird sounds theme. Are they calling it a fleet because it’s fleeting?
Well, what’s in a name, anyway
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 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.
- 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.
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.
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.
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...
I'd really prefer I not retweet a funny joke and an hour later discover it's been edited into a neo-Nazi recruitment link or something.
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
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.
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.
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!
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?
- Shows up at the top of one's feed, more prominent.
- Expires after a certain time.
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.
[1]https://www.marketwatch.com/story/twitters-jack-dorsey-faces...