In less than a year of debuting its disappearing tweets feature, Twitter will be shutting down “fleets” after reporting low usage among its online users.
According to a blog post from the platform, Ilya Brown — Head of Product, Brand & Video Ads at Twitter — reports that Twitter has not seen growth among users making good use of the Fleets feature — which allows users to share thoughts, photos and tweets for up to 24 hours — since launching last November. As a result, the feature will be discontinued on Aug. 3.
“We built Fleets as a lower-pressure, ephemeral way for people to share their fleeting thoughts,” Brown wrote. “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. Because of this, on August 3, Fleets will no longer be available on Twitter.”
The blog post also states that while Fleets will cease to exist on the platform, Twitter is “trying bigger, bolder things to serve the public conversation” online and enhance how people interact via social media.
“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,” the blog post concludes.
News of the abandoned feature arrives at a time where Twitter is trying out a slew of other new features to elevate users’ experience — including Twitter Spaces and allowing people to limit who can reply to their tweets even after posting them.
The platform is also doubling down on its commitment to rolling out new features centered around conversation health and privacy to better protect users online. Of these new features comes a one-stop “privacy check-in” feature, TechCrunch reports, that also allows users to control conversations and easily navigate between public and private tweets.
