Twitter will shut down fleets, the social media’s disappearing tweets feature in August this year due to low activity, the company said on Wednesday.
we’re removing Fleets on August 3, working on some new stuff
we’re sorry or you’re welcome
— Twitter (@Twitter) July 14, 2021
This comes just eight months after Fleets was launched last November and it also started testing ads on the feature last month.
According to Ilya Brown, Twitter’s head of product Fleets was built as a lower-pressure, ephemeral way for people to share their fleeting thoughts and they hoped it would help more people feel comfortable joining the conversation on Twitter.
“But, in the time since we introduced Fleets to everyone, we haven’t seen an increase in the number of new people joining the conversation with Fleets like we hoped,” He said in a blog post.
The company had hoped the feature would instead address some of the anxieties that hold people back from Tweeting.