Snapchat did it, Facebook copied it and added it to WhatsApp, Instagram, etc. – Heck, even Twitter had “Stories” known as “Fleets” at one point (rest in peace) and WordPress now does it, too. For a few days, I’ve tried out “Stories” and just wanted to know what it’s like to post them and what happens to them. The idea of fleeting blog posts is weird and kind of counterintuitive, so I figured there may be something to it that I don’t get and that I’d only get once I tried it.
Hence, for the past couple of days, I’ve been posting using a WP Story whenever I went live. My issue with it, however, is that it’s only possible using the mobile app and you can’t turn off Jetpack’s auto-tweeting (etc.) for it, so I had to delete the generated tweet and uh… I also deleted the “stories” after the streams because quite literally, it’s just annoying. It’s not a real post… It’s just a picture in the vertical format that effectively offers little to nothing that a post would offer.
Now, the last “story” is still up on the blog but it’s weird? By that, I mean that it has a story-preview that shows all the stories at the bottom of the “post” and it has a very big vertical image showing what I posted there essentially. If I were to record a video, it would probably only show a still from said video. The bottom part of the post probably will vanish tomorrow? The top section most likely will stay though, I’d reckon.
That part is what I don’t get: Blog posts are meant to save words, stories, ideas, prompts, thoughts, sentences, articles, ramblings, moments, and whatever else you wanna call it for eternity. The idea of stories is that you could post nudes on them and it would be gone on the next day unless someone screenshots it. That’s the point of it. It’s gone after a while. That sounds counterintuitive, in my opinion, and I’m a bit confused as to what the point is. More than that, though, I wonder what the story itself looks like on the Reader. It’d be lovely if I could utilize it more often but somehow set it up to not tweet out about since I tweet out when I go live anyway. Similarly, it’d be great if I could change the layout and formatting somehow but… It’s not really possible on the phone. I wonder why WP did this? Was it really just to jump on the Story/Fleets trend of other corps?
Either way, I’d love to hear your thoughts on what this looks like, how you like it and whether or not you’re bothered by it. I’d love to post more “short-term” content in the form of announcements or schedule changes or maybe even a sneak peek at upcoming reviews? I feel like that could be cool. It’d be nice to use the stories for these going-live posts/tweets but specifically on Twitter, I’d have to remove it, I guess. And well, once I’m offline, I’d have to remove the post as well so that people don’t get annoyed by it. Do you have input as a reader on this? Let me know!
Cheers!
This post was first published on Indiecator by Dan Indiecator aka MagiWasTaken. If you like what you see here and want to see more, you can check me out on Twitch and YouTube as well.
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