>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.
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.
1. Bookmark instead of liking tweet if info is worth coming back to.
2. Retweet if I totally agree and want to share my view with my followers
3. Add people to different curated lists instead of following them.
Twitter has some excellent feed curation tools but not many people are aware about them.
tweetdeck.twitter.com is their first-party client that doesn't have ads (and also gives you an actual chronological feed and some other niceties).
Interestingly, it also never implemented Fleets.
It'd be more efficient to have a twitter mode where you can only ever tweet, and not read anything other people tweet.
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?
It's like the inverse of reddit: reddit has a very high Alexa score yet is invisible in the public media; Twitter is discussed endlessly by the nattering nabobs, called before congress etc, yet has trouble monetizing their infamy.
EDIT to add: I feel like we are have seen a shift in how social media is perceived by society. It used to be an extension of the internet forum days, where there was a reasonable expectation of anonymity and an employer scouring your online persona was considered a breach of trust. But now as more and more public discourse happens online, and places like Facebook enforce using real names, that veil of perceived anonymity (even if it was an illusion at the time) has completely fallen.
There are too many examples of a forgotten offhand remark, a harmless off-color joke, or that one time you had a bad day and thought you were just venting to the handful of close friends who are the only people you think even know about your Twitter account coming back many years later to bite you in the ass when a future potential employer (or goodness forbid the media) decide to go spelunking in your personal social media and essentially treat that version of you from 11 years ago as the same person you are today.
Twitter makes it way too hard to mass delete old tweets or otherwise exercise fine control over whats on there.
With social media, the only way to win is not to play.
But I think about deleting my account every day, because it's an enormous risk for normal people.
the long searchable record is certainly convenient for digging dirt, but public speech is public speech.
Yes, it exposes unapologetic racists and misogynists. That's a good thing. People who genuinely learn from their fuckups are generally called out, but their lives are hardly "ruined".
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.
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.
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...
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.
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!
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.
Basically I want my Twitter to be a politics-free zone, but I can't help it if some of the people I follow occasionally like political tweets.
Also, today it has been sending me a push notification to the same race politics tweet repeatedly even after I keep dismissing it. The author isn't anyone I follow and the tweet wasn't liked by anyone I follow - Twitter is desperately trying to get me to see it though.
The accounts are all run by human (well I hope they are) and all prone to the same problems that make me not like Twitter ...
At least most folks maintain some focus on the topic / decorum on their blog or in a random article. Most seem incapable of ignoring the attention you get from being a jerk or typical twitter drama and etc.
https://github.com/insin/tweak-new-twitter#tweak-new-twitter
No more bullshit injected into by feed or forced upon my eyeballs from the right column and everything stays in the correct order. Twitter is vastly improved by your extension.
The trick is to block early and often. The feed is what you make it.
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.
If someone starts being annoying, unfollow them. It's really simple.
Almost like an infinitely connected comments sections, bringing many of the challenges of the once-isolated comments sections.
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.
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.
I would question this line, FB has a serious challenge to address in this space.
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?
I imagine that quite a few Twitter-socially approved statements would raise a lot of eyebrows in the real world. for being plain weird, nonsensical, or the listener simply not able to understand it at all.
I imagine a subset of things said on Twitter and/or tactics used will make you wake up in the hospital when applied to the real world.
This is why hardcore Twitter users tend to be so shocked when the election results come in and learn that a vast majority of people do not support their view.
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 would hate a hypothetical Twitter that turns into another Facebook amalgamation of 75 products.
They literally just cloned Clubhouse and are going to put it at the top of your feed because it was the cool new app for like 3 weeks last year..... How is that restraint?
Hence all the desperate cloning of new platform features.
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)
Herding as many people as possible into one service and corralling them in there seems to benefit the megacorps more than the users.
I'd argue new reddit isn't innovating, there is no vision or passion behind that product. The team is clearly being given metrics they need to move and all the work is focused around moving those metrics.
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.
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).
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.
Paul Graham tweets about once per every other waking hour (though sometimes not for days). Patrick Collison tweets every 2-3 days.
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.
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.
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?
And the promise. Edit: since this is transparent Twitter we could even get an high level explanation on how to make sure such pseudonymous accounts technically cannot be linked back unless three persons in three jurisdictions - of which at least one is a customer ombudsperson - agree that there is a valid request from a law enforcement agency and then electronically sign it.
Seems a tall order when you can just create more accounts? Well creating new accounts forces you to give up your phone number meaning you are a sitting duck the moment anything gets leaked.
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.
- 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.
Or in the databases of one of their data stream customers, or in the database of someone that customer made the data available or on-sold it to. If you're a Twitter customer you're supposed to read and apply their stream of updates and deletes to your database, so that when someone deletes a tweet in Twitter you delete it too, but in practice Twitter doesn't seem to care or enforce that this happens. It's also just a lot from a technical perspective, the volume of these changes is large.
The only reasonable behaviour is to assume that your government (local police, military, whoever - probably multiple separate agencies) has all your tweets, forever. Not because they hacked Twitter or had the NSA tap the lines - they just bought the data from someone Twitter sold it to. Twitter probably doesn't even know who these down-stream buyers are.
(I know for a fact this is happening)
Twitter, as a medium, is anti-context. The UI, the character limit, the behavior of the most prominent voices on the platform, everything encourages you to post hot takes that require as little context as possible to drive engagement.
Being "careful/clear/explicit about what you Tweet in the first place so that it can't be taken out of context" is equivalent to not Tweeting at all.
I do the exact same thing, I think it's the only sane way to use twitter.
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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.
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.
This is why pretty much why TikTok exists and filled that space very quickly.
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 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.
- Snapchat Stories
- YouTube Stories (Google)
- LinkedIn Stories (Microsoft)
- Instagram Stories (Facebook)
- WeChat Time Capsule (Tencent)
- Weibo Stories (Alibaba)
- Naver Snow
https://blog.google/products/google-ar-vr/poly-browse-discov...
Is there a full list of active services provided by Google (or other big tech) somewhere?
Glad I stopped using twitter a few months 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
How is it in the rest of the world?
From my personal experience, Twitter is undoubtedly HUGE in Japan. Everyone and its dog use it, not to mention all the companies, personalities, etc.
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.
Did Fleets address the problem of political extremists using Twitter to go after people's livelihoods?
I’m not sure there’s any getting around that the culture on Twitter for whatever reason is toxic.
Twitter management is synonymous with incompetence.
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.