Twitter has shut down Fleets, its Stories-format posts, on Tuesday (3/8). The decision is related to the low public adoption of the tool, in addition to the implementation of a new positioning for the social network that seeks to reinvent itself by distancing itself from Facebook.
Understand why Fleets ended
Twitter launched Fleets in November 2019 as a belated response to the phenomenon of stories, temporary vertical posts that emerged on Snapchat and were popularized by the general public on Instagram. The initiative, however, did not present anything new in relation to competing networks, and it also came at a time when it was no longer new, since Instagram itself was already envisioning the development of new formats by targeting the competition from TikTok and the creation of Reels.
According to Twitter, the idea was for the tool to boost the platform's reach by attracting new users. From a business perspective, Twitter has been seen for years as a stagnant social network that, despite its consolidated user base, has not seen the same growth as its competitors.
“Since we introduced Fleets to everyone, we haven’t seen the increase in new people joining the conversation that we expected,” said Ilya Brown, Twitter’s vice president of product.
In good internet Portuguese: it flopped. Nobody liked it.
Despite the unsuccessful experiment, not everything was a disaster for Twitter with Fleets. According to the company, some features of the platform will be incorporated as tools for tweets, including the format of display GIFs, a new framework of uncropped images and presence of audio messages.
Furthermore, the social network considers that the top of the timeline is a strategic place to highlight what is trending at the moment. With this, Fleets will leave the scene to make way for Twitter Spaces, the social network's chat rooms.
Which is “inspired”, again, by another rising network: the Clubhouse. This time, unlike fleets, it seems to have become popular with the community and has been praised by users.
Nudes in farewell
Even with low adoption during the months it was active, Twitter Brazil users decided to give Fleets a proper farewell and began posting nudes and semi-nudes, that is, somewhat sensual photos on the platform between the early hours of Sunday and Monday (2/8). The movement was seen with good humor among users:
A bunch of naked people in the fleets because they're going off the air tomorrow. I can't imagine what you guys would do on a crashing plane.
— Leonor Macedo (@subversiva) August 2, 2021
Fleets' farewell pic.twitter.com/heQPIFvxmA
— Chico Barney (@chicobarney) August 2, 2021
"Ah, but stay fleets…" I don't think so. It's about time. Actually, we're joking, but we should be able to get naked when we want to. Do what you want. Move on. That's what being an adult is. "Take courage if what you want is what you think and do."
— Pietra Príncipe (@pietraprincipe) August 2, 2021
About the termination of the service, the Twitter stated:
“We’ll continue to build new ways to participate in conversations, listening to feedback and changing direction when there’s a better way to serve people using Twitter.”
On Friday (July 30), the social network launched a survey for researchers and hackers to detect problems in its image cropping algorithm. Last year, an investigation by the platform's users showed that the algorithm had a tendency to prioritize white people over black people when cropping photos on the social network.
Through which channels you reach those people, classic and out of the box. The Verge