Announced in March 2020 and officially launched in November to mixed reactions, Twitter Fleets are getting shut down. The social network is pulling the plug on its Stories-clone feature popular on Instagram.
Just like Insta Stories, Fleets disappeared after 24 hours and this format didn’t allow for retweets, likes or public replies. Reactions and Replies went straight to DMs.
The company had begun testing bringing ads to Fleets to increase its profits and revenues and the platform was thinking of showing full-screen ads just as you’d see on Instagram Stories.
Twitter was working with select brands for the ads to be shown to a few US users on iOS and Android.
To increase engagement and annoy more users who already hated the feature, Twitter started showing Fleets from people they don’t follow on top of their timeline.
Looks like this feature wasn’t getting as much engagement as previously though as they are planning to remove Fleets come 3rd August.
“We’re sorry or you’re welcome” read a tweet posted on the platform. I’m pretty sure most users on the platform will go with the latter.
There were a lot of reactions:
Twitter will probably focus on Spaces that’s quickly catching up with Clubhouse in terms of live audio and will feature prominently on the top of your feed.
However, Twitter is currently testing a dedicated tab for Spaces so that will be interesting to see.
“We hoped Fleets would help more people feel comfortable joining the conversation on Twitter. But, in the time since we introduced Fleets to everyone, we haven’t seen an increase in the number of new people joining the conversation with Fleets like we hoped,” said Twitter’s vice president of product, Ilya Brown.
“If we’re not evolving our approach and winding down features every once in a while – we’re not taking big enough chances. We’ll continue to build new ways to participate in conversations, listening to feedback and changing direction when there may be a better way to serve people using Twitter,” he adds in a statement.
