Twitter has announced that it will shut down Fleets, its vanishing posts feature on August 3, 2021 after it failed to gain traction with users.
The shutdown comes just eight months after the social media platform launched Fleets to all its users globally, and just one month after it began testing advertising within the feature.
The Fleets feature imitated other time-limited formats like Snapchat Stories, as well as Facebook and Instagram’s own copycat versions.
“We built Fleets as a lower-pressure, ephemeral way for people to share their fleeting thoughts,” Ilya Brown, VP of product at Twitter, wrote in a recent blog post.
“We hoped Fleets 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.”
