Read on Twitter
I’m not a huge fan of stories-like features. I get why they exist - any bit of user research shows great swathes of people are uncomfortable posting things that will reflect on them later for employment or whatever.
They also make posting faster and anything that reduces friction both increases engagement and also changes the medium in some way to make new things possible.
But I have to admit there’s something a little dispiriting about seeing Twitter so completely follow a pattern developed elsewhere, and it’s less obvious to me why it makes sense here versus on Facebook / Instagram.
Partly it makes me think about the way Twitter’s core mission has drifted and shifted over the years in slightly incoherent ways. Originally it was a place to post about your life, then there was a radical shift towards it being a place for liveness...
... before becoming a mostly consumption medium for many people, primarily focused on politics and news. In my opinion, focusing on any one to the exclusion of the others creates its own set of problems and issues. News and politics are considerably more contentious than lunches
And so the swing to news resulted in an explosion of collisions between people in different bubbles coming together to scream at each other, which then necessitated a Twitter commitment to healthier conversation that might have been less necessary if the heart was friendships.
I maintain that a healthy social network is strengthened by supporting a *mix* of reasons to connect, and made more fragile and brittle by only focusing on one.
I guess in the end this may reflect a swing back to a more balanced network where we’re able to post stuff about our actual lives and connect with friends more openly alongside our work stuff. But, I dunno. I hope that’s true, but I’m not sure.
Do the people who follow me because of politics or tech really want to see pictures of my lunch in fleets? Are they any less likely to be irritated by those than they would be in my main feed?
There’s no “close friends” feature or way of focusing them to just people you know IRL that would mean you could maintain both kinds of relationships concurrently.
So what *do* they become in this space? Seems to me that in a politically charged environment they could become a space for signaling and pushing far more controversial statements that you wouldn’t want in your main feed or “permanent record”
I’m worried about the younger far right who will use these features to signal toward fascism and racist groups. Who’ll use the spaces to spread disinformation and threaten violence and their stuff *just won’t be seen* by anyone outside their circle.
I’m worried about the fairly mainstream commentator who uses fleets to spread anti-trans messaging they don’t want to be held accountable for and can deny existed later in their careers.
In short, this feels like a feature that has been implemented for competitive reasons without a clear sense of how it might support or negatively affect the kind of space Twitter has created. And not for the first time...
... and as the state of our social networks more and more impacts and directly distorts the shape of our real world social spaces, politics and governments, I don’t think that’s a good thing.
