Drew Magary: I tried Twitter fleets and they are fleeting garbage

This take will not self-destruct in 24 hours. It will remain here, in the SFGATE archives, until the end of time, or until the boardroom demons at Hearst decide that keeping my opinions online for the sake of posterity is no longer worth the minimal amount of bandwidth required. What I am about to tell you here will be permanent. Carved in digital marble. Fart jokes may or may not be included.

Many of you will not have your words commemorated in such a fashion. This is because you don’t get paid for takes, like I do. This is also because you probably don’t WANT your digital life to have an extended lifespan. To that end, Twitter today announced the unveiling of “fleets.” The way I heard the news — via regular tweets, of course — I assumed that fleets were just tweets that disappeared after 24 hours. Twitter’s own sh—ty blog seemed to reinforce the notion, rolling out the feature using the kind of CEO-goes-to-a-meditation-retreat language that all of us can now smell from 500 miles away. According to Twitter, fleets are …

“…momentary thoughts – they help start conversations and only stick around for 24 hours. Through our tests in Brazil, Italy, India, and South Korea, we learned Fleets helped people feel more comfortable joining the conversation.”

And if we Americans are known for anything, it’s our reluctance to speak up.

“We’ve learned that some people feel more comfortable joining conversations on Twitter with this ephemeral format, so what they’re saying lives just for a moment in time.”

What they mean is that they pinky swear you won’t get canceled for any of your fleets. And truly, you won’t. Because I test drove fleets on my phone and they’re aggressively worthless. Neither your fleets, nor those of anyone you follow, show up in your main Twitter feed at all. Instead, you gotta press on a friend’s profile from a row above your normal feed to see their fleets. Your response to those fleets then shows up in your friend’s DMs, because ???????

As you know, Twitter DMs are a minefield of horny racism. No one checks their DMs except for journalists who are too lazy to actually find sources elsewhere. So what we have here is Twitter aping Instagram Stories (as everyone has already noted) and then tethering them to arguably its worst feature. The whole thing is clunky and sh—ty. This is not like your average tech design complaint where I openly declare my hatred of a site tweak before getting used to it five minutes later. This genuinely sucks ass. No one will ever use it.

But fleets are instructive in the fact that they serve as proof that Twitter knows that Twitter is the worst. Look at their blog post again. They don’t want you to be frightened to tweet. These fleets … they’re only temporary (except that screengrabs have always been forever). You should feel more comfortable joining the conversation here! Everyone is welcome! No Blue Lives Matter fascist is gonna threaten to kill your family in them, we swear!

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Left unspoken in all this airy-fairy sales copy is that Twitter is desperate to make you feel comfortable because they know just how UNcomfortable it has become. Half the tweets I read every day are my friends saying, “Welp, time to open up Twitter and kill myself!” Fleets are a clumsy attempt at rebranding something that will never escape its true identity. And the more that Jack Dorsey, seen here dressed up as Lee Evans’ driver’s license photo in “There’s Something About Mary,” tries to convince the world that Twitter is NOT a big f—king Nazi stew, the more the rest of us become convinced that Twitter is precisely that.

It gets even nastier when you pull back. Twitter is late to the party with fleets, given that Insta and Snapchat have enabled self-destructing posts for years now. Also, anyone who wants to delete their actual tweets after X amount of time can simply use a third party app like TweetDelete to make it happen. I know because I installed TweetDelete after Trump won the 2016 election because I thought he would use old tweets to jail reporters (and he probably has). There are good, practical reasons for offering this service to users. Everyone lives in fear of their old posts coming back to bite them in the ass. And I have kids, so I live in fear of them s—tposting at 14 and having an employer in 2040 discover those s—tposts. There are entire books and articles written about these booby traps. So giving people the option to make posts disposable is not only a quick solution, but it helps mimic the cultural transfer of trivial conversation from the verbal realm to the digital. That all tracks.

The problem is that when you make it so that anything you say can be disposable, EVERYTHING you say ends up being disposable. No one ever has to own what they say. No one even has to MEAN what they say anymore. Everything gets to be a joke, or it gets memoryholed entirely when the joke excuse fails to pass muster. Words and pictures are supposed to have consequences. It’s how you learn and how you grow. If you can just erase all of those footprints behind you, what the fuck is left of you? Who are you? WHAT are you? Are you even a person anymore?

Giving people the option to erase their posts is a cheap out. It also discounts the fact that many of us have digital lives and that those lives are meaningful. Those digital lives also happen to be extremely messy, as real ones are. It’s important to acknowledge that mess. It’s what makes people different. It’s what makes them interesting. Making sure everyone online is “comfortable” is not only a hilariously futile endeavor — unless you’re some disgruntled racist booting up his own Substack — it’s BORING. Comfortable people are f—king boring as s—t. And so fleets are yet another flimsy way of convincing people to make themselves less interesting. It’s all digital hygiene theater.

Also, my fart jokes deserve to live forever.