[ad_1]
I.
In March 2017, I went to the Menlo Park Instagram offices to meet founder Kevin Systrom. The topic of the meeting had not been disclosed to me in advance, and when we sat in a conference room, Systrom had a surprise for me: His team had cloned the popular stories feature from Snapchat and was planning to import more or less the wholesale design into Instagram.
It was a cheeky move, especially by US business standards, but it was undeniably effective: Instagram usage increased dramatically and Snapchat leveled off. Soon, stories started popping up everywhere: Tinder, Google Photos, LinkedIn, and Medium, to name a few. (A recurring joke argues that Excel will one day add stories; at this point, I wouldn’t bet against it.)
One place the stories never appeared was an app where their inclusion seemed obvious to me, at least to me: Twitter. CEO Jack Dorsey initially envisioned the service as a way to share status messages, like those once found on AOL Instant Messenger, and statuses were the original ephemeral stories. Then in March, fleeting tweets finally appeared on Twitter. The company called them Fleets, and after testing the feature in Brazil and India, they rolled them out worldwide yesterday.
Here is Kurt Wagner in Bloomberg:
Company executives said research has shown that many users are too intimidated to post or interact with others on the service, which has led to an effort to find new ways to elicit interaction. .
“Tweeting, retweeting, engaging in a conversation can honestly be incredibly terrifying,” said Nikkia Reveillac, chief researcher on Twitter. “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. Instagram’s central thread had become a place where users expected to find only the most polished, polished photos in a person’s life; articles offered them a way to publish less under pressure. The fleets are designed to work the same way, and I guess they will.
Twitter is entering the ephemeral publishing game with real advantages on its side. First, the format is familiar – if you’ve posted an Instagram story, you already know how to post a fleet. Second, the real-time nature of Twitter lends itself to documenting the photos and videos of the moment – an area in which fleets excel. (Twitter has never really gotten into sharing photos or videos; I suspect Fleets will help them make inroads there.)
And third, tweets have always been best viewed as primarily a fleeting format anyway. The old joke on Twitter is that this is where you go to discuss what you had for breakfast. Now the fleets are here and there’s never been a better place to post your bowl of Cheerios.
Of course, Twitter also has its downsides to contend with. The reason the format is familiar is that it is already everywhere; fleets have a lot of competition, and many of those competitors already have rich and compelling feature sets. (Compared to what you can do with video on Instagram, TikTok, or Snapchat, the fleets are barely on the starting line.) Second, Twitter’s historically frigid iteration pace means fleets could take a long time. to catch up – and the competition will be. inventing new creative tools all the time.
And third, it’s worth considering whether Twitter could have gotten a lot of benefits from a story-like feature just by giving users the ability to create tweets ephemeral. The fleets look like a clever, albeit belated, way to fight the last war. Wasn’t the real leapfrog here to take the Twitter graphic and create the first “story first” social app?
II.
One of the things Fleets copied from Instagram is the idea of one-click story reactions: a heart, a fire emoji, a crying emoji, etc. It’s interesting to reflect on this development against the backdrop of Twitter’s long-standing drive to spark more “healthy conversations” on the platform.
This initiative, which dates back to more than two years now, is a broad and somewhat amorphous effort to address Twitter’s longstanding issues of harassment and abuse on the platform. One way to do this is to structure conversations at the product level – and encouraging users to respond to each other with hearts and other cool emoji can be an effective way to do this.
Stories can also promote healthier conversations by making responses private. There is a lot of abuse in DMs, it’s true, but there may be less incentive to harass someone if your reply isn’t visible just below the original post, accumulating likes and retweets as more people see it.
Another way to structure conversations is to set boundaries around who can participate. That’s why I was struck by the way Twitter is approaching the rollout of new Clubhouse-style audio chat rooms inside the app called “Spaces,” which are due to start testing later this year. The company essentially hand-selects which users it will allow to participate in by testing the audio chat. Here is Nick Statt at The edge:
The company plans to start testing the feature this year, but notably, Twitter will give first access to some of the people most affected by abuse and harassment on the platform: women and people from marginalized backgrounds, the company says. .
In one of these conversation spaces, you will be able to see who is in the room and who is speaking at any given time. The person creating the space will have moderation controls and will also be able to determine who can actually participate. Twitter says it will experiment with how these spaces are discovered on the platform, including ways to invite attendees through direct messages or directly from a public tweet.
Clubhouse has had moderation issues since launching earlier this year. Twitter’s decision to start with women and other underrepresented users represents an intriguing effort to learn from Clubhouse’s mistake. And at least before opening the floodgates to all users, it seems like a way to bring more good conversations to the platform.
On a call with reporters yesterday, I asked Kayvon Beykpour, Product Manager at Twitter, what he saw in audio. Notably, he led with his ability to generate empathy in conversations. This is what he told me:
“Our mechanics encourage very short and very short conversations which is amazing and powerful and has led to all the impact Twitter has had in the world. But it’s a very specific type 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 kind of behavior. When you can hear someone’s voice, you can empathize with them in a way that’s just more difficult to do when you’re in an asynchronous environment. … We think audio is powerful, because that empathy is real and raw in a way that you can’t reach over text the same way. “
A lot of times when we talk about how to make better social platforms, we are discussing it in terms of what or who they should ban. What I love about Twitter’s moves this week is that they show another way platforms can move forward: by designing conversation spaces with intention, announcing those intentions at launch, then us. encouraging everyone to make them responsible as they go. The success of fleets or audio spaces is far from guaranteed. But in some important ways they seem like a real step forward to me.
This column was co-published with Platform, a daily newsletter on Big Tech and democracy.
[ad_2]
Source link