The 24-hour “story” social media post format was first popularized by Snapchat, before Meta’s Instagram copied the feature and actually became more popular than Snapchat’s original interpretation. From there, everyone began doing it. And by everyone, we really mean everyone. Almost all social media platforms out there have, or used to have, some sort of temporary post feature similar, if not identical, to stories. YouTube was one of the first to hop on this bandwagon, and now they’re hopping off. But I don’t imagine most people reading this remembered YouTube Stories existed, anyway.
YouTube channels won’t be able to post any more Stories starting on June 26 (via The Verge). From there, Stories will be visible for the usual seven-day period they’re available for, after which they will disappear, putting an end to YouTube’s run with the feature. It’s not the first app to backtrack on stories after implementing them — Twitter’s Fleets have that honor. But some might still argue they took way too long to die.
Stories on YouTube first became a thing in 2018 under the name Reels. Unlike the implementations in other apps, where all stuff posted there would last 24 hours before deleting itself, YouTube Stories were available to see for a whole week. They were mostly used as a means for content creators to promote content they released or were about to release, and they were surprisingly effective for this purpose given their longevity.
YouTube wants content creators who used these stories to post other kinds of non-video content, including YouTube Shorts and text-only Community Posts, with the latter getting the option to make posts expire after a certain period of time, reintroducing that ephemeral nature. And of course, Shorts are the hot thing right now, with everyone imitating TikTok just the way they did Snapchat back in the day.
If you want to post YouTube Stories, make sure to enjoy them for the month that’s left, because they’re going away.
