Mashable: The video giant is focusing on YouTube Shorts and Community posts instead.

YouTube viewers are used to YouTube Stories expiring after seven days. Next month though, YouTube Stories will be going away for good.

On June 26, YouTube will officially sunset its YouTube Stories feature. Beginning on that Monday, users will no longer be able to create YouTube Stories. Any story created before that date will expire as normal, 7 days after the story was created, meaning there will no longer be any YouTube Stories viewable starting the following Monday, July 3.

YouTube explained that the reason its dropping YouTube Stories was so that it could focus on its other, more popular recent features. The company specifically focused on its shortform video feature, YouTube Shorts, as well as Community posts. The platform recently rolled out Community posts to all YouTube channels, as it was formerly a feature(opens in a new tab) that was only activated after a channel accumulated 1,000 subscribers.

"Today, there are many ways to create on YouTube – from Community posts to Shorts, to long-form and Live," YouTube announced in a post in its community forum. "To prioritize these key features, Stories are going away.

"While Stories are going away, we’ve seen that both Community posts and YouTube Shorts are great alternatives that can deliver valuable audience connections and conversations," the announcement continued.

Much like how YouTube Shorts is the company's answer to TikTok's dominance in the shortform video space, YouTube Stories(opens in a new tab) was the platform's response to Instagram's popular Stories feature. YouTube Stories began rolling out to some creators in 2018 and officially launched in 2019(opens in a new tab).

The feature allowed creators with at least 10,000 subscribers to create ephemeral short video compilations that appeared on subscribers' home page. YouTube Stories lasted for 7 days before expiring, much like how Instagram Stories are temporary.

However, on YouTube, Stories never really took off. At least, not when compared to other features.

According to YouTube, creators who used both YouTube Shorts and YouTube Stories found that Shorts drove "many more" subscribers than Stories did. 

YouTube also mentioned that Community posts, which again is now more broadly available, drives better interaction with subscribers. The company recently rolled out(opens in a new tab) a feature that enables Community posts to expire after 24 hours too, in case there are creators who will miss the ephemeral nature of Stories.

While there will certainly be users who miss the YouTube Stories feature, it's a good thing to sometimes shut down lesser-used features so the platform doesn't get bogged down with too many confusing options, which in turn could drive less traffic to videos and channels.

However, with all that said, it is still interesting to see YouTube's official Twitter account, @TeamYouTube(opens in a new tab), tell a user that YouTube Stories is "slowly rolling out to more creators" just two days ago.