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Twitter starts testing 'Fleets,' its version of Stories

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Re: Twitter starts testing 'Fleets,' its version of Stories

#121
I wonder how this is going to change the tweet prediction markets. I’ve spent a significant amount of time on my tweet count models and have finally reached the point of 5% weekly returns and it would be a real shame if this fleets thing becomes popular among certain people (rdt, aoc, etc)! You spend months making a model and then when it finally starts generating real stable cash flows, you get sent back to square one. Such is the nature of zero-sum games though..

Re: Twitter starts testing 'Fleets,' its version of Stories

#122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Snapchat sends a notification to the sender when someone screenshots their content, will be interesting to see if Twitter does the same.

Twitter can't. Lots of people use third-party clients or the website, where detecting a screenshot simply isn't possible.

It is possible to detect when that screenshot is subsequently shared within the platform. Twitter could prevent blocked users from sharing screenshots of tweets by the people who have blocked them, they just choose not to because eNgAgEmEnT.

Re: Twitter starts testing 'Fleets,' its version of Stories

#123

I really don't get it. Twitter has five thousand full-time employees. I have to assume at least 20% of them are in product development in some capacity. What exactly are these people doing all day? I can't point to a single notable product innovation they've had in years. And they continue to ignore the drumbeat of user asking for an edit button, and are completely unable to come up with any kind of reasonable soluti…

What exactly are these people doing all day? I can't point to a single notable product innovation they've had in years. Maybe Twitter is less caught up on the SV "gotta change/break something user-facing today to justify my job" treadmill than other tech companies. Or maybe the changes they make are on the back end. It's been a long time since I've seen a fail whale. Considering the global societal impact that Twitte…

If it's not broken it doesn't have enough features yet.

Re: Twitter starts testing 'Fleets,' its version of Stories

#124
post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

why not have a edit history but still show the most recent tweet at the time?

It doesn't mesh well with the retweet functionality if a user can retroactively change the content.

That doesn't seem to be a problem on Facebook. Shared posts can still be edited later.

Re: Twitter starts testing 'Fleets,' its version of Stories

#125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You cannot prevent that and it cannot be policed.

Why can't it be prevented? Doesn't seem like they should have much difficulty recognizing that it was a screenshot of a "fleet", but other commenters make it sound like it's too difficult. So I'm wondering what others are taking into account that I'm missing.

How exactly would twitter know if something is screenshotted? The way snapchat does this is check screenshots folder for new files while you are watching the story - to avoid this all you need is an different screenshot app that saves screenshots somewhere else.

Now twitter has multiple apps, multiple platforms including desktop. You'd need some absurd DRM that would be broken anyway to enforce this.

Re: Twitter starts testing 'Fleets,' its version of Stories

#126
post #91

I wonder why social media in general enforces everything to be ephemeral. Sure, Stories are specific about it, but even regular old posts in Facebook, Instagram, Twitter are very hard to track and consume. They are there, you can search if you are looking for something specific, a Facebook resurface some old memory for you when an algorithm decides it should. But they are not made to be a memory repository for users.…

This is a huge problem with Facebook groups which are replacing many forums and are unindexable. I'm part of few groups and the same questions and discussions are being held asked daily.

Re: Twitter starts testing 'Fleets,' its version of Stories

#127

I always see Stories as an engagement ploy. Come back every day... or else FOMO.

For companies - sure but for people it's great. People don't usually put important stuff there and it's just fun to catch up with what they are up to.

That was initial idea behind microblogging and twitter but people started to write actual blogs there and started having long discussion on a platform that is fundamentally incompatible with it.

Re: Twitter starts testing 'Fleets,' its version of Stories

#128
post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They don't want their daily utterances to be a matter of record. Experience being stalked and harassed online for years and you'll hate it as well. Imagine in your 30s having your job threatened because you made a dumb post when you were a teenager, and no one will ever let it go or accept that people change. Many people are uninteresting, and never have this experience. Celebrities have large support networks and…

> Nothing will stop stalkers from crawling stories with archive.is or even just taking screenshots. What stops this is not being interesting at the time you post. So if you're some random high school kid in 2020 who posts something stupid, nobody is going to obsessively catalog what you say in case you become an NFL quarterback or a congressperson in 2030.

That was true of the old internet, and might possibly be true still, but not for long.

Nowadays we have archive.org and people who wish to datamine and hoard things. I can absolutely see someone coming out with a search interface to browse through peoples' Twitter stories that they've secretly been archiving for years with a small bot scraper. The guy running archive.is has been spending thousands of dollars a month to run it for ostensibly no reason whatsoever.

The rules have changed and the stakes have escalated. I think the world will wise up and we'll start seeing greater opsec efforts around personal anonymity. People will start acting online like they do in real life in any situation that they even remotely care about (even under their pseudonyms), and anonymous communities will continue to grow and thrive as the outlet for all of the hatred that people harbor.

Re: Twitter starts testing 'Fleets,' its version of Stories

#129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why can't it be prevented? Doesn't seem like they should have much difficulty recognizing that it was a screenshot of a "fleet", but other commenters make it sound like it's too difficult. So I'm wondering what others are taking into account that I'm missing.

How exactly would twitter know if something is screenshotted? The way snapchat does this is check screenshots folder for new files while you are watching the story - to avoid this all you need is an different screenshot app that saves screenshots somewhere else. Now twitter has multiple apps, multiple platforms including desktop. You'd need some absurd DRM that would be broken anyway to enforce this.

> The way snapchat does this is check screenshots folder for new files

Does this mean that the Snapchat screenshot detection doesn't work if you don't give it the storage permission?

Re: Twitter starts testing 'Fleets,' its version of Stories

#130
post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They don't want their daily utterances to be a matter of record. Experience being stalked and harassed online for years and you'll hate it as well. Imagine in your 30s having your job threatened because you made a dumb post when you were a teenager, and no one will ever let it go or accept that people change. Many people are uninteresting, and never have this experience. Celebrities have large support networks and…

> Nothing will stop stalkers from crawling stories with archive.is or even just taking screenshots. That assumes many things, the first being that someone thinks you're important enough to archive, and that you were important enough to archive long ago. This is exceedingly rare for that middle ground you're discussing. You're right in that anything CAN be saved if its online and someone is motivated enough, but the a…

> That assumes many things, the first being that someone thinks you're important enough to archive, and that you were important enough to archive long ago. This is exceedingly rare for that middle ground you're discussing.

What is to stop someone from writing a crawler that goes around and captures Twitter stories for every user into a permanent archive that they make available online in a few years or sell to stalkers? That would be an extremely valuable pool of content.

Just think of how much money you could make if you had 2020 dirt on a major political candidate in 2040. Maybe you know their secret fetish, their racist tirade, their thoughts on a controverisal subject, something the media would devour.

> All of these points you're making rely on extreme stalking already happening. Not only stalking, but archiving of that stalking.

It's a lot more common than you think, and nowadays they have Cloudflare to protect them so they're incredibly resilient. I was blinded to it as well.

The problem with this line of thinking is that you're only an uninteresting target until suddenly you're not. It just takes one crazy person coming across you to radically change your life. That new app or service you developed may take off overnight before you know it. Or it may happen so slowly that you don't realize that the rules have changed for you and you need to start being much more discreet.

The way these sites work is they build up dossiers before they go public with them. You'll think you are not being targeted for months, and then all of a sudden you get it all dumped on the web at once.

These kinds of ephemerality promises are dangerous, even if you are lucky enough to never be targeted.

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