6 reasons why stories/fleets might not work for Twitter like it did on Instagram:

  • Instagram is mostly a visual medium with very few text posts. Stories on Instagram is about sharing mundane things about your day through photos. Twitter is the opposite, with text dominating over photos, at least based on my own Timeline.

  • Stories took off on Insta because people were worried about spamming their friends’ feed with too many posts. That is how the feature is marketed. But power users of Twitter already do that. We mostly don’t care about overwhelming our followers’ timeline.

  • Instagram feed = Highlight reel of users’ life. Instagram Stories = Random shit. For Twitter our timeline is already an intersection of both. I worry that for Twitter power users/creators like me, we won’t know what to fleet and what to tweet. The use case is not pretty clear.

  • People on Twitter think of their timeline as ephemeral. They tweet, like, and retweet a lot. And timeline is chronological for most. Ephemerality through fleets might not be a strong buy.

  • Will fleets get users to post more? I am not sure. If it is about engaging new users, then explaining value proposition of the Twitter product is much more important than shoving another feature down their throats.

  • Fleets mostly feels like something they are doing as pressure from Activist investors is rising for their failure to innovate on their product.

Counter argument from other folks who replied on my tweet thread:

  • But till stories happened, it wasn’t the behavior on Insta either? People would post only nice looking photos once in a while - a habit that stories helped change. Fleets helps for specific use cases like sports/event specific tweets I think.

  • Some folks (maybe a small niche, and maybe not power users) will like them for specific kinds of content - like political posts if they are not really political professionally.

  • A usecase can be influencers/movie stars/authors for sharing and promoting upcoming projects and reviews.(happens on YouTube stories).

  • Also to increase engagement on tweets, people might keep pushing the same tweets and new responses on it through stories for few days.