Twitter adding a “stories” feature is about right. Look at those image-based posts with the replies next to it; it’s an almost exact copy of Facebook’s years-old design.
Every online community platform that prioritises money above all else will inevitably trend towards Facebook.
@simonwoods I am constantly battling between being okay with Twitter and disliking it. They announced this, and I was like, “Okay, let me try it out.” That’s still a ways away, I’m sure. I would prefer they just have a default account setting that says, “Hey, all my tweets will self-destruct in xx days/minutes/hours/etc” and be done with it.
@sarcassem This definitely has the potential to be interesting specifically on Twitter, if only because the vast majority of the value in the platform originally was that everything was ephemeral. Now it's a weird hybrid but this kind of feature could help restore that original value... of course that all depends on how it is handled by the company, as with so much about Twitter in general.
It'd be interesting to see lots of people only using the main timeline for announcements, posts with links, etc, and then the ephemeral section being the genuine space for microblogging.
... even then, thinking about that, it's difficult to ignore how this pretty much makes it an Instagram clone, only for text. Like, just another version of Facebook for people who don't use Facebook as a general blog.
... and that's not a bad thing since this could be a way to leave Instagram?
IDK. I could ramble on about these platforms to such an extent that I should probably start a podcast. 😂
@simonwoods LOL I would listen. For me, I have to decide whether Twitter finally just needs to go away. That’s the place I do most all of any kind of political posting. Instagram is for me the only platform I enjoy just because it’s mostly photos and I’m drawn to it being a photographer. Facebook is something I loathe, and yes, I know Instagram is owned by Facebook, but, at least in my opinion, FB hasn’t ruined them yet.
All of them could benefit from ephemerality. And if that’s not a word, I’m making it one.
@sarcassem That's a fair assessment of the big players -- although the degradation of Instagram might just be a case of the slowly boiling pot -- and it makes me consider a reality many people seem to be unwilling to accept; these are all just different versions of blogging. Sure, there are blogging purists who are unhappy with the varying methods of implementation but when I look at what people do with their different accounts I just see blogging underneath it all, at the base of what is happening.
To that end, yes I agree entirely, ephemerality is good because not every single thing we wish to say out loud ought to be heard by every single person in perpetuity.