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I.
In March 2017, I drove to the Instagram offices in Menlo Park to meet with founder Kevin Systrom. The meeting topic hadn’t been disclosed to me beforehand, and as we sat in a conference room, Systrom had a surprise: His team had cloned Snapchat’s Popular Stories feature and planned to roughly import the layout in bulk. greatest on Instagram.
It was a blatant move, particularly by American business standards, but it was undeniably effective: Instagram usage increased dramatically and Snapchat stalled. Stories soon started popping up everywhere: Tinder, Google Photos, LinkedIn, and Medium, to name a few. (A running joke holds that Excel will one day add stories; at this point, I wouldn’t bet against it).
One place where stories never appeared was an app where their inclusion felt obvious, at least to me: Twitter. CEO Jack Dorsey first envisioned the service as a way to share status messages, like those once found on AOL Instant Messenger, and the statuses were the original short-lived stories. Then in March, short-lived tweets finally appeared on Twitter. The company called them Fleets, and after testing the feature in Brazil and India, it released them globally yesterday.
Here’s Kurt Wagner at Bloomberg:
Company executives said research has shown that many users are too intimidated to post or interact with others on the service, leading to an effort to find new ways to engage.
“Tweeting, retweeting, engaging in a conversation can honestly be incredibly scary,” said Nikkia Reveillac, Twitter’s head of research. “We don’t know how others will react to us, we don’t know if someone will respond, and we don’t know if anyone will care.”
This is a version of what Systrom told me when introducing Instagram Stories. The central Instagram feed had become a place where users expected to find only the most polished and cared-for photos of a person’s life; the stories offered them a way to publish with less pressure. Fleets are designed to work the same way, and I suspect they will.
Twitter enters the ephemeral post game with some real advantages on its side. One, the format is familiar – if you’ve posted an Instagram story, you already know how to post a fleet. Two, the real-time nature of Twitter lends itself to documenting photos and videos in the moment, something that fleets excel at. (Twitter never broke the photo or video sharing – I suspect the Fleets will help you make inroads there.)
And three, tweets have always been best regarded as a mostly ephemeral format anyway. The old joke about Twitter is that it was the place where you went to talk about what you had for breakfast. Now the fleets are here, and there’s never been a better place to post your plate of Cheerios.
Of course, Twitter also has some downsides to deal with. The reason the format is familiar is because it is already everywhere; fleets have a lot of competition, and many of those competitors already have rich and attractive feature sets. (Compared to what you can do with videos on Instagram, TikTok, or Snapchat, fleets are barely on the starting line.) Second, Twitter’s historically frigid pace of iteration means fleets could take a long time to catch up, and competitors will be. inventing new creative tools all the time.
And third, it’s worth wondering if Twitter could have gotten many of the benefits of a story-like feature simply by giving users the option to do tweets ephemeral. Fleets seem like a smart, if late, way to fight in the last war. Wasn’t the real leap step here to grab the Twitter chart and build the first “story first” social app?
II.
One of the things that Fleets copied from Instagram is the idea of one-touch story reactions: a heart, a fire emoji, a crying emoji, etc. It’s interesting to think of this move in the context of Twitter’s long-expressed desire to stimulate more “healthy conversations” on the platform.
That initiative, which goes back more than two years now, is a broad and somewhat amorphous effort to solve Twitter’s long-standing problems with harassment and abuse on the platform. One way to do this is by structuring conversations at the product level, and encouraging users to respond to each other with hearts and other supportive emoji can be an effective way to do this.
Stories can also promote healthier conversations by keeping responses private. A lot of abuse occurs in DMs, it’s true, but there may be less incentive to harass someone if your response isn’t visible just below the original post, accumulating likes and retweets as more people view it.
Another way to structure conversations is to set limits around who can participate. That’s why I was surprised by the way Twitter is approaching the launch of new in-app Clubhouse-style audio chat rooms, called “Spaces,” which will begin testing later this year. Basically, the company is personally selecting the users that it will allow to participate while testing the audio chat. Here’s Nick Statt at The edge:
The company plans to start testing the feature this year, but in particular, Twitter will provide first access to some of the people most affected by abuse and harassment on the platform: women and people from underserved backgrounds, the company says.
In one of these chat spaces, you can see who is in the room and who is speaking at any given moment. The person creating the space will have moderation controls and will also be able to determine who can actually participate. Twitter says it will experience how these spaces are discovered on the platform, including ways to invite participants through direct messages or directly from a public tweet.
Clubhouse has struggled with moderation issues since its launch earlier this year. Twitter’s decision to start with women and other underrepresented users represents an intriguing effort to learn from the Clubhouse mistake. And at least before it opens the floodgates to all users, it seems like a way to bring more good conversations to the platform.
During a call with reporters yesterday, I asked Kayvon Beykpour, Twitter Product Manager, what he was seeing on audio. It should be noted that he led with his ability to generate empathy in conversations. This is what he told me:
“Our mechanics incentivize very short and very short conversations, which is amazing and powerful and has generated all the impact that Twitter has had on the world. But it’s a very specific kind of speech, right? It is very difficult to have long, deep and thoughtful conversations.
Audio is interesting to us because the format lends itself to a different behavior. When you can hear someone’s voice, you can empathize with them in a way that is more difficult to do when you are in an asynchronous environment. … We believe that audio is powerful, because that empathy is real and raw in a way that cannot be achieved with text in the same way. “
Often when we talk about how to build better social platforms, we discuss them in terms of what or who they should ban. What I like about this week’s Twitter moves is that they show another way platforms can move forward – by designing conversation spaces with intention, announcing those intentions at launch, and then encouraging all of us to hold them accountable as they go. The success of fleets or audio spaces is far from guaranteed. But in some important respects, they seem like a real step forward to me.
This column was co-edited with Platformer, a daily bulletin on Big Tech and democracy.
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