Twitter Circles

» see twitter.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

i never used a twitter circle. by august 2022 i was on twitter for tech news and turkish drone-engineering takes, not for the close-friends-list category. the circle feature was twitter's attempt to copy instagram's close friends list, where you could post a tweet to a hand-picked group of up to one hundred and fifty accounts and nobody outside that group would see it. honestly, the people who wanted that already had a private second account.

the rollout was global on 30 august 2022 after a few months of testing earlier in the year. the user interface put a green badge next to circle-only tweets so you could see it was a limited post. you could only have one circle at a time. you could add or remove people quietly and they would not be notified. that was the whole feature.

in april 2023 reports started piling up of circle posts appearing in the for-you algorithmic timeline of accounts not on the original poster's list. in may twitter confirmed the bug as a security incident. once a private-tweets feature lost the private part, the trust premise was gone for the kind of user who was using it.

~ the dossier ~

~ how it landed ~

the use case was always narrow. close friends on instagram worked because instagram had been about identity-curation since 2010 and the close-friends list slotted into that. twitter was a public square product. circles asked people to use a public square product for private speech, which is a small population of users. some used it to vent about work. some used it for emotional posts they did not want their professional network to see. a small number of writers used it as a beta channel for half-finished thoughts.

the security incident in may 2023 hit the trust premise directly. the people who needed circles to actually be private moved to group chats, signal, or private accounts. the feature still worked after the bug got patched but the use case had a hole in it.

~ the actual end ~

on 21 september 2023 the company posted that circles would be removed from the platform. on 31 october 2023 the feature went away. you could no longer create new circle-only posts after that date, and the existing posts stayed visible to their original audience but could not be added to. the official replacement was communities, x's facebook-groups-style feature that was already in beta and got pushed harder after the circles shutdown.

honestly, the strategic frame from the x side was that the company was leaning toward open public group spaces and away from invisible private ones (or whatever the official line was called). the techcrunch headline the day it died was just "so long, twitter circles." that was about the energy the feature went out on.

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