LinkedIn is shutting down a temporary Stories product, the company announced Tuesday. According to Liz Li, the product’s senior director, the company plans to “remove the current story experience by the end of September.” The Snapchat-style video story was first released from internal testing in February 2020.
LinkedIn officially launched the story only last year. But the company began testing this feature in the form of “student voice” as early as 2018. Later in 2020, the company said it was testing the story internally.
In a blog post, LinkedIn’s senior product director, Liz Li, shared his thoughts on the company’s latest Stories-related decisions.
Part of the reason for the closure is that LinkedIn users have learned that they don’t want the video to disappear. “In developing the story, we assumed that people did not want to attach unofficial videos to their profiles and that temporary traits reduced the barriers people felt to publishing, “Li said. “I want to create a long-term video that can convey your professional story in a more personal way and show both your personality and expertise.”
After Twitter, LinkedIn also shutting down Stories
The LinkedIn move follows Twitter shutting down its Stories-like product, Fleets, in July. Like LinkedIn, Twitter has observed that users do not react as desired to ad hoc videos. IlyaBrown, Twitter’s vice president of products, said on Twitter’s blog: “The fleet was looking forward to allowing more people to comfortably engage in conversations on Twitter.” “But since introducing the fleet to everyone, the number of new people joining the conversation with the fleet has not increased as we expected.”
The two exits could indicate a widespread withdrawal of temporary video products between social media companies. However, it seems unlikely that Snapchat or Instagram will immediately abandon the Stories product.
Now we just wait for social media companies to retire from their clubhouse clones. Ki-Ul, for example, LinkedIn is doing one of them.
