Twitter has killed off Fleets just months after it launched

Twitter has killed off Fleets just months after it launched

In the past few years, most major social media platforms have tried to release their own version of popular Snapchat stories, but it seems Twitter will be the first to admit that its experience with disappearing content has failed.

Twitter announced on Wednesday that it would cancel the "Fletes" feature on August 3, less than a year after its launch, because users showed less interest than the company expected to share their "passing thoughts" on the platform.

“We introduced Fleets as a low-pressure, transitory way for people to share their fleeting thoughts,” Elijah Brown, Vice President of Products, said on Twitter. But we haven't seen an increase in the number of new people joining Fleets as we'd hoped."

Fleets are posts that disappear after 24 hours that are displayed sequentially by time of publication at the top of users' home posts page. Unlike regular tweets, Fleets tweets cannot be retweeted, liked or commented on, but instead, users can only reply to their publisher through direct messages. The company hoped the product would encourage non-frequent Twitter users to engage with the platform more frequently.

Twitter began testing Fleets in Brazil for the first time in March of 2020, and officially launched it in November.

Although the feature “Fletes” did not get the attention of Twitter users, similar products are popular on other social networking sites, as the “Snapchat” platform pioneered the concept of content that disappears after 24 hours in 2013, and since Several platforms, including Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and LinkedIn, have released their own versions of the feature.