Twitter Is Discontinuing Fleets After Nine Months Of Inactivity
Twitter is discontinuing Fleets after nine months of inactivity
On social media platforms such as Snapchat, Instagram, WhatsApp, and Facebook, the action is in disappearing stories. However, when it comes to Twitter, it appears as though the product will be discontinued in a matter of days. Twitter has confirmed that Fleets — its own take on ephemeral Stories that launched nine months ago — will shut down on August 3.
The company cited a lack of activity as the reason for the move — specifically, among the more cautious Twitter users it claimed it was targeting with Fleets in the first place. Kayvon Beykpour, Twitter's head of consumer product, stated that the company would be developing additional products, but did not specify whether any of them would include more ephemeral features.
Spaces, the company's answer to Clubhouse, is currently located in the same strip at the top of the app as Fleets and will take over as the sole occupant of that horizontal carousel once Fleets is decommissioned.
Meanwhile, the company stated in a blog post written by Ilya Brown, VP of Product, that some of the features it developed for Fleets — such as the real-time, full-screen advertising test it conducted in June — may reappear in other areas of the app.
It's not a Surprise
The announcement should come as no surprise, given that the only time we've heard about Fleets is when Twitter launched them, iterated on them, or encountered a technical issue. Yet there has been little viral traction or high-profile Fleets.
Most importantly, though, the shut-down demonstrates how Twitter continues to struggle to make its product more accessible to a broader pool of users; and how it continues to struggle to increase engagement by tapping users who are already there to sit back with their popcorn and watch the action.
When Twitter first began testing Fleets in limited markets in March 2020, the company reasoned that some users were not tweeting as frequently as others due to the permanent format of Twitter. They reasoned that by removing the tweets, more people would engage in conversation... not least because the format was proving so popular on other social platforms. (Until last year, Twitter was one of the few social media platforms that had not yet introduced a stories format.)
The feature's initial rollout appeared promising — at least if you consider the fact that Fleets crashed as a result of the initial surge of users when it became available globally.
However, in the long run, it turns out that those inactive Twitter users were also uninterested in Fleets, and that the only people posting stories as Fleets were already fairly active on the platform.
To be clear, we have no idea how many power users used Fleets. When contacted, Twitter declined to provide usage statistics or other information about Fleets.
There were additional issues with Twitter's Fleets user experience that were never resolved. For instance, was it problematic or perplexing that when Twitter launched Spaces, they appeared alongside Fleets? Or was that lack of clarity a foregone conclusion for Fleets?
In Conclusion
Furthermore, with Fleets, it was never entirely clear how Twitter chose what to include in the space. Due to the fact that some people follow thousands of accounts and there was never a way to follow people specifically for their Fleets, what you saw became a matter of Twitter's algorithms.
Twitter appears to be open to conducting additional experiments, despite its track record of bringing some of them to widespread use. “Because bg bets are risky and speculative, a certain percentage of them will fail,” Beykpour noted. “If we do not have to wind down features on occasion, it's a sign that we're not swinging hard enough.”
