【Drama Archives】

Back in the day,Drama Archives and by "the day" I mean June 2020, Twitter launched a new feature that allows people to record and tweet audio clips of their own voices.

For a day or two, my timeline was flooded with annoying and painfully unfunny audio bits. But then, almost as quickly as they were introduced, the voice tweets stopped.

It hasn't even been a full two months since Twitter started rolling out voice tweets, yet everyone's already forgotten about them. Think about it. When was the last time you made a voice tweet of your own? Heck, when was the last time you even saw an audio tweet on your timeline?

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The initial voice tweet hype wasstrong, but it proved to be fleeting. I have yet to post a voice tweet, however, as far as I saw, none of the people I follow utilized the feature after launch week. Anthony Scaramucci's 10-day stint in the White House was longer than our collective interest in voice tweets, which is a sure sign that the feature failed.

In June, which was apparently two months (and not 10 years) ago, you likely saw a bunch of jokes like these. Some tweets were genuinely funny. But others were barely worthy of a laptop unmute.

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The concept was fun for a few hours, then it got mildly irritating, and eventually it was straight-up forgotten. I haven't laid eyes or ears on a new voice tweet in July or August. And I'm not the only one who's noticed their absence.

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It's worth pointing out that none of these people tweeting "remember voice tweets?" are actually utilizing the abandoned feature. They're simply pointing out that it exists, and that it's clearly been forgotten. Why? Because voice tweets are so pointless that they're not even worth trying to bring back. Did anyone even want them in the first place?

Why did voice tweets flop so hard?

Some of Twitter's features, such as the option to mute select words or the ability to limit who can reply to your tweets, are actually helpful. They assist users in creating a more fulfilling, personalized experience, and therefore, they maintain interest. Voice tweets, however, are just there for our amusement.

Aside from variety, they don't really add much to the site. And their lack of captioning actually adds to a larger accessibility problem.

Since people need to listen to and hear voice tweets to learn what exactly is being "tweeted," users who are deaf or hard of hearing (along with anyone not using sound on a device) are unable to partake in the new feature. Though you could tweet a transcription of your voice tweet, many of the audio jokes made using the feature rely on the element of surprise that comes from listening to the audio clip.

The isolating aspects of the feature were addressed by Twitter Product Designer Maya Patterson, but the platform was still criticized for launching the feature before factoring in accessibility.

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It's also worth pointing out the impeccably poor timing of this ~fun~ feature launch.

We're in the middle of a global pandemic, racism and police brutality are being heavily protested around the world, and we're months away from the U.S. presidential election. Do any of us really have time to care about voice tweets for more than a few days? Hell no.

For some people, voice tweets were a nice, shiny distraction from 2020's soul-crushing doom vibes. But like most memes these days, their viral presence was short-lived. I, for one, am glad we've forgotten about voice tweets. And I hope they never make a comeback.