Social media platforms, by large, usually follow the same blue print. A feature gets famous somewhere, which is then copied by every other social media platform, which are basically all becoming different versions of the same product over time. The OG feature, which started this phenomena, was ‘Stories’, which first appeared on Snapchat and have since made an appearance on every other platform there is. Twitter, much like everyone else, introduced its own version of Stories called ‘Fleets’ just a little while ago, saying that it will help reluctant users who don’t like the permanent nature of tweets make use of the forum.
However, it looks like things did not work out as the company was hoping, which has announced that it will be shutting down Fleets from August 3rd, owing to a lack of usage among users.
Instead, starting from next month, the entire portion of the Fleets section will be occupied by Spaces, Twitter’s answer to Clubhouse, which currently shares it with the former.
This is a bold move for Twitter, which launched the feature just 8 months ago. It was being expected that due to the ephemeral nature of Fleets, users who don’t like tweets will be able to better express themselves on the platform. However, it was noticed that the feature failed to do so, and those who were making use of Fleets were already posting tweets, meaning that they were already pretty active on Twitter. Thus, the sole mission of the content type-attract new users, failed, due to which the company has decided to shut it down.
Twitter’s head of product, Ilya Brown, said in a blog post,” 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.”
However, this is not to say that Fleets will have no effect on Twitter’s future. The feature allowed company to test full page ads, which might become a part of the Twitter experience going forward.
