#oneaday Day 711: On Fleet

Twitter's been rolling out its new "Fleets" thing over the last few days. I usually use Web Twitter, but earlier I decided to install the Twitter app on my phone and see if there was any value to Fleets whatsoever.

There is not. At least, not for me. I scrolled through all the "Fleets" that were currently available to me, and they were all, without fail, utterly vapid nonsense that served absolutely no purpose whatsoever. On top of that, the interface for them is such a blatant ripoff of Instagram's equally pointless "Stories" feature that I'm surprised there hasn't been any sort of legal shenanigans.

I uninstalled the Twitter app less than five minutes after I installed it. Web Twitter on mobile has not, thankfully, been infected by this nonsense yet.

This is grumpy old man moaning, I know, but one of the things I used to value about Twitter was how it was a fairly lightweight, simple, straightforward approach to social media. It was originally pitched as a "microblogging" site, after all — a place where people would post short, 140-character things about what they were up to. Fairly vapid in itself, one might argue, but as people started to use it, it became clear that it was possible to have conversations and even form friendship groups.

Now, if we look at Twitter today, people often argue that it's the worst possible platform on which to have a meaningful discussion, and I pretty much agree with that. Twitter was built as a platform to, basically, chat with people, and nothing more. You'd post a thing, someone might reply, that was that. Over time, we started to get "retweets" (which, if you're a relative newcomer to Twitter, were originally implemented by someone actually copy-pasting another tweet, writing "RT @username:" in front of it and having about 5 characters left to comment) that started to dilute the original point of the platform… and this was just the beginning of the colossal mess the whole platform is now, with its constant attempts to force a non-chronological timeline on you, the constant barrage of ads and the focus on "engagement metrics" and "amplification" rather than, you know, talking to people.

Fleets is just another sign that Twitter has completely lost sight of what it was originally for — and what a lot of people on the platform wish they could still use it for. Doubtless money was involved — I suspect it won't be long before we start seeing "Promoted Fleets" — and no real care or attention was given to the actual userbase.

But you know what they say… if you're not paying for something, you're not the customer; you're the product. That, regrettably, feels more and more obvious every day!