The Vergecast - Saying goodbye to Twitter

Episode Date: December 13, 2023

Today on the flagship podcast of good tweets: 03:40 - The Verge’s William Poor goes on a vintage tech odyssey in the hopes of future-proofing his family’s heirloom Mac Classic. 28:35 - David Pierce, Alex Cranz, and Nilay Patel discuss why they spent so much time on Twitter for so many years. The year Twitter died: a special series from The Verge How Twitter broke the news Extremely softcore: the old Twitter was an idealist’s workplace and a naive business The great tweet archive Twitter was a harassment machine   It’s time for the Excel World Championships! 1:05:40 - David answers a question from the Vergecast Hotline about organizing your digital photos. Email us at [e-mail] or call us at 866-VERGE11, we love hearing from you. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Welcome to the Birchcast, the flagship podcast of Good Tweets. I'm your friend David Pierce, and I am currently standing on the casino floor of the MGM Grand Casino in Las Vegas. I've been here for the last few days, not for the national rodeo finals, which was this weekend, or for the NBA in-season tournament, which was this weekend, or for the Raiders game, which was this weekend, but for easily the biggest event of all, the Microsoft Excel World Championships. That's a real thing, and it was awesome. Basically, the idea is a bunch of the world's best spreadsheeters get together and they spend a couple of days teaching each other how to use Excel, learning some of the app's coolest new features, and then they compete. They get these incredibly complicated puzzles and they spend hours and hours trying to figure out the best, fastest, most elaborate, most efficient way to solve these puzzles. The competition was actually in the HyperXE Sports Arena at the Luxor Casino. It was a big deal.

This is the biggest one of these they've ever done. And I have to say, it was pretty dramatic, or at least as dramatic as it can be when a bunch of people are sitting on stage doing spreadsheets in ways that you absolutely do not understand and didn't even know people could do spreadsheets. But you should watch this thing. It's a few hours long, but you can kind of blow through it. The video is on YouTube. It's streamed on Twitch and on ESPN. I'll link it in the show notes. It was a ton of fun.

Cannot recommend it enough. And now I'm just basically wandering the casino floor looking for somewhere to lose $20 before I have to go get back on the plane. Anyway, we have an awesome show coming up for you today. The Verge's Will Poor is going to take us through an adventure he had when he rediscovered a 30-year-old computer and tried to figure out what to do with it. Then we're going to talk about Twitter, because in a very real way,

2023 was the year that Twitter died, and The Verge just did a big package on what it meant and kind of mourning what Twitter once was, and for all the bad stuff about it, Twitter had some moments. So we're going to talk about what those moments were. It's going to be a lot of fun. And then, of course, as we always do,

we're going to get to the Vergecast hotline. Super fun show, a lot to get to. First, I'm going to go spin the wheel of Fortune wheel. Wish me luck. This is the Vergecast. We'll be right back. Support for the show comes from Retool. Too many companies run critical operations on duct taped spreadsheets,

Slack workflows, and whatever else they could cobble together. Not because they want to, but because building internal tools means weeks of waiting on someone else's backlog. That's where Retool comes in. Build custom internal tools just by describing what you need. need. Prompt something like, build me a revenue dashboard on our Salesforce data. And Retool actually builds it on your company's data and your cloud with enterprise security built in. Go to retool.com slash Verchcast. We all need to retool how we build software. Welcome back. All right. Made it home from

Vegas. For once, I didn't get sick on the plane. It's very exciting. Let's get to the show. The first thing we have today is a story about the life of vintage computers. We talk a lot about right to repair and old gadgets and how to extend the shelf life of the gadgets that we rely on. But how do you think about that when instead of months and years you're thinking about decades? How much really can you do with gadgets to keep them alive much, much longer than you might think? That's the question that Verge producer Will Poor set out to answer. Can a 30-year-old Macintosh live on for another 30 years with the same parts? If not, what do you need to do to preserve it?

What is preserving it even mean? And what do you lose along the way when you do that? I'm going to let Will take over from here, and then I'll be back for the second half of the show. Here's Will. The first computer my family ever owned is this Apple Mac Classic from 1991. It's an updated riff on the original Macintosh from 1984, a cute little all-in-one beige box with a nine-inch black-and-white screen.

I spent a lot of time playing with this computer. growing up. I did my third grade homework on it, I drew for hours in Mac paint, and I played glorious games like Brickles and Load Runner and Dark Castle. I can still hear the drone of the fan, the feel of the keys, and the click, click of the hard drive. I asked my parents about the classic recently, and to my delight, they kept it for posterity. We pulled it out of their attic, and miraculously, after 32 years, it still works. Sort of. It doesn't always boot, and when it does, it makes a scary pinging sound

that makes me fear for the hard drive. I wanted to revisit my homework and games and everything else, but I was scared I'd break something and lose it all for good. So I decided to see what it would take to restore an old computer like this one, to find out what fails in these machines, and how to stop it from happening. so that this little time capsule could survive another 32 years. That seemed simple enough, but I should have recognized a rabbit hole when I saw one. I went deep into the world of vintage computer collectors.

I learned to solder. And I ended up grappling with some big, heady questions about the right or wrong ways to preserve the past. Mac Classic Battery Replacement. The first thing I learned about vintage computer repair is, Machines of this era are time bombs. Many have a little internal battery that keeps track of the date and time, and as the years roll by, those batteries love to leak all over the machine's innards. Everyone I talked to told me to fish that little battery out, like yesterday.

So, armed with a bunch of YouTube tutorials, I plop the Mac down on a workbench in my garage. Okay, tools. This is amateur hour. Luckily, the classic is constructed simply enough that I could work with what I had on hand. The case is held together with just four standard torque screws. Lefty, Lucy. There it goes.

Once the screws were out, the whole case split in half vertically, though it took some encouraging. All right, I am sliding this whole back plastic plate away from the computer. and... Aha! Inside, the components are all jammed densely together, which makes disassembly a little touchy. You can get a nasty electrical shock off the monitor tube, even when the computer is unplugged.

My flashlight. With some effort, I managed to unplug all the little cables connecting to the logic board, Oh, it's sticky. And slide it free. The logic board is the brains of the computer. It's an unremarkable green rectangle full of circuitry. And there, sitting in one corner, was the battery.

It was easy to spot and easier still to pop out of its little cradle, and amazingly, it didn't look leaky at all. It's in good shape. Disaster averted. But my work wasn't done. I also learned about the handful of capacitors soldered to the logic board. They're little components that hold and release energy to different parts of the computer. And they can leak and ruin things, too.

This is where I get out of my depth. I don't know what a capacitor looks like, much less how to replace one. Time to call in the experts. I've been driving with this Matt Classic sitting on a towel on the floor of the driver's side. The expert I roped into this is Jason Perkins.

He's an information security engineer who lives in a little town about an hour north of Seattle. A few weeks ago, I found myself pulling up to his house with my Matt Classic riding shotgun. Old Ford pickup truck Park next to a Tesla. There is something fitting about that for the story.

Hey, how are you? How are you? Good to see you. I hope you don't mind. I'm recording my journey. Trying to be a good podcaster. It is an audio podcaster. I met Jason while working on another story about an Apple computer from the 80s called The Lisa. He has an extensive collection of vintage tech. And when I reached out to him about my Mac, he immediately offered to help. So this is the workshop, man.

converting it into electronic shop. Jason moved recently, so his home workshop is a bit of a mess. Picture a garagy space filled to the brim with boxes, monitors, wires, and tools. But there's a method to the madness. In one corner, huge vintage printers sit neatly on metal shelves. For now, that's printer land. You have to be careful when you put multiple laser writers in one spot because the sheer weight can cause a black hole.

I'll keep my distance. Yeah. Then there are the computers, an assortment of diverse systems from the 1980s. There are a few more recognizable machines. An Apple Lisa, a Macintosh S.E. that looks a lot like my classic. But also computers I'd never heard of. An NCR PC4. This was the first computer that I ever personally had.

Somebody gave it to me. A funny little thing called a Nabu. The keyboard has like a 20,000. foot cable or something on it, so you'd hook this up to your TV in the living room and sit back on the couch. A Xerox daybreak. It actually has an extra card in there with an IBM 80186 processor on it, so you can have a PC emulation in a window with a hardware processor.

So you can run PC software and Xerox software on that's. Just a kaleidoscope of earth tone plastic boxes. You've got it up and running. This is up and running. Then there's the telecom collection. a shelf of gleaming, gloriously analog phones and answering machines from the 60s. In the 60s, it was actually a crime to connect any equipment not provided by the phone company to your telephone line. Oh.

So this is an answering machine which can pick up the phone, answer it, plain announcement, record a message, and hang a phone up with no connection to the phone line. Jason is an irrepressible fountain of tech knowledge. For basically every device we looked at, he gave me the full backstory on the product and company, the device's components, construction, hardware and software quirks. He constantly interrupts himself and digs up new pieces of tech to make a point. And I remember, actually, I happen to have one. So there's no hard drive in this.

And so plus development developed this thing called the hard card, where it's an expansion card with a... It's worth noting that all of this machinery is functional. The printer's print, the answering machines pick up, and the computer's word process. It took a lot of effort to fix this stuff up. But for Jason, working devices are the whole point. In 2003, the Smithsonian Institution was doing an exhibit on history of technology,

history of computing. I was so excited to go see it. And probably one of the most disappointing things I've ever experienced in my life, actually. Because we got there and it's like, oh, great. There's an original Macintosh turned off behind a piece of Plexiglass. And oh, look, there's a Xerox Alto that isn't turned on and the whole thing's behind Plexiglass. It's like you can only admire so many beige rectangles before you're like they just, it's kind of the same thing over and over again. That's not what really makes it special.

It's, if you go to an art museum, you don't sit and observe the frame. You look at the art. Like, you can look at the art and experience the art. If you have a record album, you don't just pick up the record album and look at it. You listen to it. And with the technology, it's the interaction that is, to me, the big part of it. That idea struck a chord with me. I'm here to restore my Mac so that I can do stuff with it again

and remember all the fun stuff I did 30 years ago. I'm not a collector. I'm just nostalgic. After the tour, we got down to business. I'm generally pretty good at getting these apart by hand. You just kind of tap on it a little bit. Jason dug the logic board out of my Mac and took a closer look. And it turns out I'd missed some things.

So the capacitors on this have actually started to leak. Oh, yeah? Very slightly. So if you look at this, all these little silver cans are the surface mount, electrolytic capacitors. Dotted across the surface of the board are these eight little cylindrical objects, smaller than an eraser head. Do you notice on this chip, this VLSI chip, how there's this line going diagonally across? Yeah, it's like part of the chip is a little darker colored than the gunk from this has wafted along and is halfway across this chip. Oh, no kidding. You can see it in the

dust. Oh, I never would have noticed. You also notice. See how this chip, all the little size. are nice and kind of bright. Yes. And this one, they look kind of fuzzy and dark gray. Yep. The sodders on this have been corroded by the leaking capacitor stuff. Luckily, the damage to the board was minimal. It was just really dirty.

Jason walked me through the process of cleaning up the mess and installing new capacitors. Step one, remove the old ones. So we're going to take a sharp pair of cutters. Okay. And we're just going to cut this thing all. going to cut this thing off. And the danger here is it does go flying. So watch your eyes slightly, but we'll just, you know... Covering my eyes and...

Okay, we've just snipped. Snipped it off. Step two, clean the logic board. I figured we'd use some special solvent, but we just went to the kitchen and ran the whole board under hot water. It turns out that water doesn't hurt circuit boards at all, as long as they're not plugged in while they're wet. Some regular dish soap and I've got a toothbrush. And we're going to scrubby, scrubby, scrubby. Step three, blow dry the board to get all the moisture out. So now I've just got a regular, just a little air compressor.

I'm going to blow this off. So this will be probably kind of loud. To be extra sure the board was dry, we just left it in the sun and went to lunch. After that, we were finally ready to solder on the new capacitors. I'm going to solder this guy right here, this thing. So you see we've got the two leads sticking out. I'm going to clean the tip of my iron first and the scrubby thing. That's nice and shiny.

Now, when I put the solder on here, we'll see. Watch what happens. Do you see how it's flowing all across the pad? Mm-hmm. It's not flowed onto the wire yet. There's not enough solder. So as I continue to add, now, do you see how it's, like, flowed up the wire a little bit? Yeah, it's being pulled up, yeah.

That acid cleans the surface, and it makes the solder stick. It's super fiddly work. Holding the new capacitor gently with some forceps, I placed it as precisely as possible. on the little pad where the old one was. Notice, too, how each can, there's like a black side. Yes. A little black stripe. That's the negative side.

Okay. Notice, helpfully, on the circuit board, there's a plus on each one of these. The orientation is very important. I see. If you install them backwards, they explode. Gotcha. Then I went in with the soldering iron and melted fresh solder around the tiny little capacitor. Okay, so I'm going to nudge this capacitor.

You're pretty close. Into as close a place as possible. Boop. That looks good. You smell that fish? Fishy smell? I was going to ask about that. That is the capacitor oil.

Okay. It smells like fishes. Okay. I didn't trust myself. I was like, there's no way I smell seafood right now. You absolutely do. That is the smell of leaked capacitors. Leaked capacitors smell like fish.

Yeah. If I take nothing else away from this entire project, I will have learned that. It was easy enough once I got the hang of it. and a few minutes later, we were done. Eight new capacitors on a sparkly clean circuit board. We slid the board back into the computer and put everything back together. The next step is the smoke test. You plug it in and see if it's nice.

You think I'm joking. Some of the capacitors we replaced help power the speaker, so we hope we might get one of those iconic Macs startup chimes when we flip the switch. And moment of truth. A complete computer? No bong. No bong. Whomp, womp, but no smoke.

Yeah, I'll take it. Mission largely accomplished. You'll notice this time it's going to stay on this screen a little bit longer because we have more memory. So this pattern is what it does while it's testing. After all that work, I had a feeling of satisfaction that only newbies get. I did a thing, it didn't break, I felt like we did what I came to do so this computer is immortal now, right? you can see where this is going. So without messing with it anymore,

now that we've fixed the things that we know are problems, if you had to guess how much longer this classic would last for after what is now, what, 32 or so years, what would you say? The next thing to fail will be the hard drive. I can show you why, and then we can describe it. I just happen to have another quantum, ProDrive that I was monkeying with.

So this is going to get a little bit into hard drive theory. Here, Jason gets very Jason again. In a nutshell, some rubber inside the drive will eventually turn to goo. Also, the drive will slowly demagnetize, degrading the data. The point is, this hard drive could die at any moment. And when it does, it could take all my digital memories with it. So if my goal is preservation, I've got more. work to do. Probably the best long-term method would be they make hard drive replacement style that

use an SD card. Well, you install the SD card on this special converter that to the computer looks like a scuzzy hard drive. Okay. And so it's like within the SD card, there's this enclave that is pretending to be, you know, a scuzzy hard drive. A hard drive from 1991. Yeah. And the computer is essentially non-the-weiser. That sounded intimidating technically, but there was something else tripping me up. If the whole point of this exercise is to recreate the experience of using this computer in 1991, what happens to that experience

when you start making larger changes? Part of what I remember about this computer is hearing the hard drive spin up and work. If I replace it with a little SD card, I'll have preserved most of that experience, but will I have preserved the computer? Jason, unsurprisingly, has spent a lot of time with these questions. When does preservation become enhancement?

What counts as authentic or original? Well, I like having as much original hardware as I can. Even if it's like, you know, maybe slightly newer but still like an upgrade compared to what it was when it was new. I like doing that. Some people are like really into that. Like, oh, I'll get all these new boards and like build the whole thing from scratch. And it's, that's really neat, you know, but it's not, I guess that's not what my personal thing is. Yeah, what's different about that to you?

You know, one of my friends actually just built a new Lisa, like new circuit boards, because people have come up with the schematics and has made himself a Lisa from Ether. Yeah, yeah. And it's really cool. Me personally, that's not the kind of project that I would set out on. Do you think for you it's the sort of like top-down, taking something that exists and maintaining it and tweaking it versus the bottom up. I think it is, yeah, that I enjoy more of the top down of this worked at one point.

I should be able to make it work just like it did again. Let's say you take a car from the 60s and now you've like, you replace all the suspension and the running gear and the engine and the transmission with all brand new stuff. It's like, okay, it's really nice. And some of this stuff is just so expertly done. But is it really still, is it the original car at that point? Like, if you've replaced everything that makes it function with something new. There's what you're describing with, it's the ship Athesius.

It's the ship Athesius, right. The ship of Theseus is a paradox that philosophers have been arguing about for 2,000 years. Basically, there's this famous ship once sailed by the Greek adventure, Theseus. His fans pledged to preserve the ship forever by replacing any. any plank that rots out. Which is great, but it begs the question, when all the planks eventually get replaced, is it the same ship anymore?

What exactly is being preserved? What makes the ship the ship? Being a paradox, there's no clear answer. And for my Mac Classic, the thought experiment only gets weirder. Adding an SD card would be like fitting the ship of Theseus with an outboard motor. Adding modern components also starts to blur the line between restoration, and modding.

And that's where things really get wild. Welcome to the Mac Classic remodel build, in which you'll witness the process it took to convert an old Mac into a modernized PC. This video has... Click around YouTube or Reddit, and you'll find modders swapping vintage and modern parts with abandon. An obscenely upgraded Macintosh SE30 in a clear case. One listener reached out to show us their heavily modded first-generation Macintosh.

It's got an iPad for a screen and runs a vintage OS alongside a dock and FaceTime. So I've built a custom system that brings the power of Apple Silicon to this iconic design in a magical way. It is a long way from a Mac classic with an SD card in it. Jason appreciates the more inventive creations, as long as modders don't destroy working vintage hardware along the way. I definitely don't have a problem with it. I think it's just a preference of I've managed. to accumulate enough crap over the years

that, or it's the challenge of finding the original one or getting the original one going again, it's the fun of the search. That said, he sees debates play out on forums all the time. Oh, you know, it's kind of the typical, geez, am I going to date myself if I use the term

flame war? Yeah, yeah. Yeah, well, people in technology tend to have strongly held opinions. Ultimately, Jason's just glad that these computers are still out there for people to play with and fix up and argue over, it shows in the care he's put into his own collection and in the hours he was happy to spend with me. It takes a lot to preserve the experience of

vintage computing. And even then, this stuff is not going to last forever. But clearly, Jason thinks it's worth the effort anyway. All these things that we create reflect us as a society, as people, and it's valuable. People put a lot of time and effort into creating these things. You know, to conjure this thing from nothing that does something now. Like, that's, you had to picture that before it existed. That's pretty cool. And being able to continue to display or interact with that creation gives it value. And if instead it is locked away and forgotten about, we lose that value.

You know, just like if you couldn't read books that were 20 years old. I think it's a problem that historians in the future are going to be really wringing their hands about. After chatting with Jason, a small irony occurred to me. Those historians may have a much harder time preserving newer computers. My old Mac Classic was a breeze to repair, which enables a whole ecosystem of amateurs like me to learn and tinker and keep these systems alive. Whereas my 2019 MacBook Pro is rocking a one out of ten on I-Fing. its repairability meter. It is a lot more complex and miniaturized and openly hostile to

tinkering. I'd need to deal with glue and rivets and a lot more solder to pull off any significant repair. Also, I'd need something called a spudger, and I do not care to learn what that is. The point is, whatever memories I have that are tied to newer computers, those will probably die with the hardware. Back at home, I fired up the Mac Classic. Buted great. I used an external speaker for the sound, and I finally got to just sit down and explore. There is a document that is just called The Cat, and that is, it's just a drawing of a cat, with a title that says the cat.

I'm going to click on Octopus Picture. I was so patient as a 10-year-old, this computer is so slow. I found tons of drawings. It reminded me how much I used to love drawing. Lots of homework, too. There's this really sweet interview with my grandpa that I did when I was 10. And the games. Load Runner.

It's the best. Somehow I remembered the controls without having to think twice about it. All right, I just need to beat this level. And then I will finish this podcast segment. After spending all this time with the computer, I agree with Jason. What makes this thing valuable is not the beige box or the software or documents inside of it.

It's everything working in concert, like it did 30 years ago. That's what makes it a time machine. So I'm not going to mess with it too much more. I'm going to follow Jason's advice and swap the hard drive out for an SD card. That'll keep things running for a little while. But that's it. I've replaced enough planks on this ship for a few more voyages. after that, the sea can reclaim it.

They're fun. Shut down. We got to take a break, and then we're going to come back, and we're going to talk about Twitter. We'll be right back. Support for this show comes from Shopify. Starting something new isn't just hard. It can be really scary, too.

So much work goes into this thing that you're not entirely sure will even work. But here's a better thought. What if it did all work? What if your instincts were actually right all along? Shopify wants to help you get there. They're the commerce platform behind millions of businesses worldwide and nearly 10% of all e-commerce in the U.S. From established brands like Allbirds and Heinz to companies just getting started.

Their design tools make it simple to create the exact online presence you're envisioning, with hundreds of ready-to-use templates available. And with built-in marketing tools, you can launch full email and social campaigns in just a few clicks. So you can connect with customers wherever they are. It's time to turn those what-ifs into with Shopify today. You can sign up for your $1 per month trial today at Shopify.com slash vergecast. You can go to Shopify.com slash vergecast. That's Shopify.com slash vergecast.

Welcome back. This week, the Verge published a whole bunch of stories about the fall of Twitter. Collected into a series we're calling the year Twitter died. You should go read all of them. They're really great stories and the art to go along with them is like deranged in the best possible way. It's one of the most fun things we've had on the verge all year. I really encourage you to go check it out. We'll link it in the show notes.

But today on the show, I want to talk more about what Twitter was, which is a weird way to think about it. I know. But I think as we get some hindsight from this weird website that we spent so many hours staring at and talking about and that felt so central to life and culture for so. many people for so long, I think we're getting a little closer to figuring it out. And as Twitter becomes X, which becomes something else, I think now is a good time to talk about what Twitter meant to us for so long. So, Neely Patel and Alex Kranz, my co-hosts are here to pour one out for the Twitter that used to be. Neelai, hello. Hello. Alex Krantz, not wearing glasses and squinting. I wish everyone could see the face Alex is making right now. Am I squinting really badly?

Yes. It's blur. So we're here to talk about Twitter. And I say Twitter very specifically because Twitter ends at the day of a certain acquisitions. We're not going to talk about that. We spent a lot of time over this last year talking about like what Twitter was and what it meant. We had this big package. And, Neelai, you wrote a story. But I realized the first thing I want to talk about because I was thinking like what is,

when I think of Twitter, what's the first thing that comes to mind? And I want to know from both of you, what was the closest you ever got to being the main character on Twitter? For good reasons or bad reasons. Like, what was the biggest moment you ever had on Twitter? Nilai, I want to hear yours first. All of mine are bad. Okay.

You know, I'm the editor of a thing. Like, anything goes wrong, and it's my fault. Which is fine. That's the job. That's what the money's for. But when you're like, what is the closest you've come to being the main character? It's like, the Apple Watch review? Ooh.

The original Apple Watch. People got really mad at me because I said the, what was it, the Milanese loop? I was like, the shit's fussy for old people. And then everyone tweeted pictures of my spiky bracelet. And it's like, yeah, dude. I'm that, I'm that person. not your dad go away

get in your Rolls Royce and drive away from my face do you have a spiky bracelet Apple watch band I don't no one's ever gotten me one I would welcome one send me one without any weird powders in the envelope and I'll happily wear it I'm just so excited to learn this this just made my gift giving a lot easier thank you

for the man who has everything yeah I mean there's other ones like any minor scandal that we've had like the thing that I will just take out of this without listing Every scandal the Virgins ever had. You asked me that question, and all of my instincts were negative. There's a flip side to this, right?

When we were covering Apple versus Samsung, we were in the center of that coverage of that trial. And I was writing patent explainers with Matt McCarrey, a patent lawyer that we'd put on staff for the period of that trial. And we were the center of that conference. And that was a really positive experience that made our careers. It made the early part of the verge, like a very real way. But when you ask me that question, it's like when were you the main character, my immediate instinct is negative. That's fair. Cranes, what about you? Do you have a happy story? No.

No, because the times I was a main character was usually like the time I got in a fight with, oh, no, they didn't. And that was fun in the time that like Tucker Carlson used one of my tweets and put it in his thing being like the liberal journalists. That was fun. A true right of passage on Twitter. And Kranz was like, these Netflix prices are out of control. And Tucker Carlson was like, these liberals. This is why millennials can't buy houses. Don't tweet on vacation is what I learned.

But there was one time I had to make, like, when I left my last job, I made a big announcement on Twitter. And that was actually like really nice because I got tons of people I'd never even heard of. Like tons of like big folks in tech and everybody just being like, you're awesome. And it was just like an enormous morale boost. And it was just instant. Like just that dopamine hit was so fast. I was like, oh, okay, Twitter's. good. And then like, but that was like 2020. So I was like late to the party when it comes to

having like really good Twitter experiences like that. Yeah, personal news Twitter, I think, was like consistently one of the best things on Twitter. Yes. The like somebody gets a new job, leaves a job, changes careers, whatever. And it was just like a random outpouring of enthusiasm every single time. It was great. I, I congratulated so many strangers on new jobs. I loved it. You're going to be great. We launched the entire verge in the back of Twitter in like a real way. We had the NGadgett podcast, and then we all quit AOL in a moment for blogging that will probably never be recreated. Like, national news, a bunch of gadget bloggers leave AOL.

Yeah. This was in the New York Times. Yeah. We took our audience with us because we had the big podcast audience. It's now this show. And we communicated to all of them about what we were doing and where we were going on Twitter. And that, you know, that's a core memory. That's a thing that we did that was not.

No one could do before these tools existed in that way. And so, yeah, I have these happy memories, like outpourings of affection. But when you say main character, my mind leaps to the goal is to not be the main character. Yes. You never, like, main character in a romance novel, cool. Main character on Twitter, bad. That's fair. The closest I ever got was in, I think, 2021.

Nikki Minaj tweeted angrily at me thinking she was tweeting angrily at Pierce Morgan. That's pretty good. I got, I don't know, 10,000 replies that day from people who were mad at me. And then there was somebody who tweeted it, Nikki, that was like, leave this poor nerd child alone. He didn't do this. And then Nikki apologized to me again on Twitter. And so I got a bunch more replies. And it was just like I became one of the Barbes, which is Nikki's fans.

And so it was a lovely moment. They were very mad at me for like an hour. And then they were very nice to me after that. I still get DMs from people who were like. who were like, what did you do to Nikki? And I'm like, I didn't do anything. I'm really sorry. Being mistaken for Pierce Morgan.

That's bad, dude. That's just bad. It's the worst. The single worst thing about Twitter has been, like, I got a very good Twitter handle. I was at Pierce on Twitter. So when you type at P-I-E-R, because you want to be mad at Piers Morgan, there was a non-zero chance that my name would be the first thing that came up. So like every few days, somebody would get extremely mad at Piers Morgan in my mentions.

and I do not miss that at all. That's really funny. The thing that I've been trying to reckon with over the course of the last year or so, and like I basically stopped tweeting when I went on parental leave. So this is like almost exactly a year ago. I was just like going to stop with social media for a while, going to not post on the internet and going to go like be a dad on parental leave for a few months. And I was like, I'll come back.

It'll all be the same. Everything will be fine. And I haven't tweeted since and I haven't missed it at all. And so I've spent this year like trying to figure out, why Twitter was so central in my life and then what changed and why it went away. But, Nelai, you wrote this piece this week reckoning with that at like the big level, which is like, we as reporters, I think, were the people like most obsessed with Twitter as a single group of people. And you asked around to talk to a bunch of people. Do you have like a unified theory of

what Twitter did to us as journalists? It gave us a direct connection to an audience in a way that no other platform is ever done. Even the ones now that seem like they have a more direct connection, like TikTok or whatever. There's still artifice there. Twitter was you type, you hit the button, maybe some people will yell at you and come back to you. You could work out an idea in public. A lot of reporters built their brands

by just firing half-cocked ideas out into the world and then working them out and then publishing the fully cocked idea, which maybe nobody even ever read. But the process of the journalism built a brand for people or the ability to immediately synthesize and react, built the brand for people.

and the more I think about what that did to our ability to think, the more I think that we should stop it. Like, and maybe that is me just being old and crotchety. But, you know, I talked to Ezra Klein, who obviously founded Vox and it's now at the New York Times. I talked to Ben Smith, who founded BuzzFeed News and that run semifor, previously the New York Times. I talked to Corey Sika, New York Magazine, previously at the New York Times. I talked to Lydia Pull Green, who was the editor-in-chief of the Hulgin Post, now at the New York Times. maybe you can see a trend here.

It's also very funny, by the way, that all of those people are like big deal media executives now, and all of them were like OG Twitter stars. Exactly. Like, if you rewind 10 years ago, they were like Twitter-loving bloggers who became massive things. Yeah. They were in it. And they all started blogging. And they, you know, all of them owned an audience on blogs. And then they moved to Twitter, which is an interesting shift.

And then from there, they were able to do all the amazing things I've done. since then. And all of them, I think, agree that giving all of our best work to Twitter for free was a mistake because all of the media institutions collapsed in the wake of that decision. Let's give everything away for free and then we'll see what happens. Maybe the platforms are think that we're important enough to pay for the news. I don't know why anybody thought that this was true because the platforms are very happy to just move on to the next 20-something who will burn out. And that is the cycle they're on. But I think what the other thing that happened there that Ezra talked about really specifically is that we started making the content for Twitter.

And he said this thing to me that I keep thinking about, which is you can feel how it made you smaller. We increased the scale of our communication, but we decreased the quality of it by fitting everything into the same box. And so that's just to me, I felt that. But by the end of the Twitter moment, I was communicating in tweets. And we, that's like, I have more to say than 240 characters, you know, 280 characters. So that, that to me is like the core thing that I think people are reacting to now, that if you get away from Twitter for just a minute, David, you quit and you didn't look back.

I know so many people have quit over the last year. And it's like, for a day or two, you're like, something happened to me. I must complain. And then you'd stop doing that. And your brain just like bounces back so quickly. And you're like, oh, I'm having fuller, richer thoughts. And that's pleasing to me. And I know so many people have had that exact experience to be like, oh, it's more rewarding to think longer thoughts and not seek the dopamine hit of instant feedback all the time.

Yeah, I've actually discovered recently that I now have the opposite problem, which is like as somebody for whom it is like debatably but potentially professionally, useful to like be present online and be a person who posts a lot the number of things that now don't get through my filter of I should post this on the internet is like way too high and and I need to like I need to get back to saying dumb shit on the internet because that's like what we all do all day and it's way I now have just like complaints that stay in my head and then they just go away and like that's not that's not what the internet is for like I'm doing this wrong yeah I think I think it's okay to sometimes sit on your your complaints and things right like that's that's why Twitter sucked a lot of the times. I didn't use it as much as you guys did. I came to it kind of late. I think I heard

about it in 2007 from the PVP webcomic and then it was like, what? That's stupid. I'm not going to use that. That's pretty early, by the way. I think you're still good on that front. Yeah, but I didn't join until like 2009. And I was like, everybody's joining. And then I didn't, I didn't hit like, I didn't post really until I started working, I think at Gawker, because that was a place that was very digital media and was very like everybody was online. right and and so I just had a very I think I feel like I had a different relationship with it than you guys to some extent because I did the few times I did complain like Tucker Carlson was like okay cool let me just put that out for everybody else to see too and I'm like I don't I don't need that

do you think you had a healthier relationship with it like do you look back and think like oh I spent an appropriate amount of time using and thinking about Twitter for the first half yes for the second half no like as your followers would go up you just like you start doing it more because you want more followers. You want to see more. You want the engagement. And like, you get into that cycle. And once you're in that cycle, you can't escape it. And you do, like, start to be, do dumber and dumber things. And then Tucker Carlson is retweeting you or putting you up on his show. So yeah, like I definitely felt like I watched it all happen. But I think the thing that really sticks out to me was to your point, Neely, how it changed relationships

between creators and their audiences. And it wasn't, it was like, journalism was a big one. But the one that I always go back to was in like, you guys are both going to. to roll your eyes was Glee. Do you get, you remember Glee, the horrible TV show. I don't remember the horrible TV show Glee. I remember the wonderful TV show. Oh, we're in different places, David. We're in different places. But, but when Glee came out, it was a very online show. It was like that and Shonda Rhymes doing stuff with scandal. Those, those two shows were really all about using Twitter and everything. But with Glee, the audience was a lot younger. And that audience learned that they could like, because they had the direct relationship with the creators and the actors and

everything, they had that direct relationship. And then they started to demand things and they started to make demands. And then sometimes the show would be like, okay, you guys want these two characters to make out? We're going to do it. And then it was like, oh, no, that's actually terrible. Like, actually, you shouldn't have that relationship between creators and the people taking it in because, like, can you imagine? It was just bad. It just led to bad TV. And then a lot of TV shows and a lot of movies and stuff started chasing that, started chasing like, well, what will the fans think. And it was like, actually, there's only four fans and they're very vocal, and they have a bunch of sock puppet accounts. Maybe don't chase that. It's just Zach Snyder being

like, make it darker. Just can you grit this up? I'm looking for glee, but there's a murder. Come on. That was every episode. Glee on these streets, the Zach Snyder story. To be fair, I would watch that. I was like, I would 100% watch that. That's like, that's an objectively better idea than any other Zach Snyder cut. So, Zach, if you're listening, and I know that you are. By the way, Alex is right. By the way, Zach, if you're listening, Glee on these streets, you can have it. I want that. But to Alex's point, this actually did happen a lot.

Like, this joke about Zach Snyder, he did run a coordinated harassment campaign against a bunch of Warner Media executives on Twitter. Yeah. It's a real thing. And no one could parse the difference between the real fans who are spending money and just the volume of noise that existed in the world. And really the thing I have come to think about Twitter the most is everyone is so desperate for feedback. They're so desperate to complete the loop between cause and effect in their life. And Twitter just slotted neatly into that hole in everyone's brain. Oh, I can just get some feedback here.

Oh, I can just see what's going on. Oh, I can just, I can put my finger on whatever the pulse of this group of people is. And that felt enough like feedback. Even if it was wrong, even it was lies. even though it was coordinated bot activity from Glee fans. Led to bad things. Is the world shaped more or less by coordinated bot activity by Glee fans? It's more than you think.

Yeah. But it's because everyone just wants the feedback and Twitter was there to provide it. Yeah. And I feel like we also never figured out how to put it in context, which I think is still true of a lot of social stuff right now, right? Like I remember so many perceived scandals or bad things that happened were just like four people being mad on Twitter. And we got to the point, like, there was a whole genre of story on the internet that was like, the internet is mad about X, Y, and Z. And it just would embed four

tweets as, like, evidence of the internet being mad about something. And that's so not reflective of anything, except, like, I could find four people who believe anything, literally anything at any time. Especially on X. Yeah, exactly. And so I think part of what has been so strange is that, like, we have not solved that problem. in any way, right? And I think so much of Twitter was that everything felt big and fast and vibrant and chaotic. And it was like, I think there were people who used Twitter in a like group chatty kind of way where you just like find your handful of people and you have sort of a public messaging service to each other on there. And that's a totally valid use of Twitter that I think is

not being replaced really anywhere. And I think that's really interesting. But this thing that it was just like it just felt lively and whatever you cared about it felt like other people cared about it too and you could tell any story you wanted with it. And we just like never figured out how to put any of that in context. Like I think it was, I think it was Charlie Wirtle, who's now at the Atlantic at one point who said to me like, any time I read the internet on the internet, I read 12 people on Twitter and it changes the context of how you think about everything. And I still think about that all the time. That's how I think about TikTok to you. It's like people say people on TikTok and it's like, not really. Take four people. It's a video. And you can't even find, at least on Twitter,

you could go find the four people on TikTok. It's totally segmented away. The thing that I just want to bring some balance back to this, it's very easy now to look back on Twitter as a very negative force, especially because of what it has become. And all of us have gotten away from it. But I think on the show, I've compared Twitter to smoking like a million times. Yes.

I can't smoke a cigarette anymore. Like I'm an old man and I haven't smoked in a long time. And every now and again, I see someone doing it. And I take a drag. And the next day, I'm like, why? I'm like, I'm still coughing. When I smoked, it ruled. Like, it was the best.

And I, like, organized my days around this activity. And then I quit. And it was really hard to quit. But there's no part of me that looks back on that. And it's like, huh, you know, like, all my whole life would have been better or different. It's like, that is the thing that happened for better or worse. Lots of people enjoyed smoking. And now maybe we're going to quit.

But it made everyone's life exciting. I can't tell if I'm talking about cigarettes or Twitter right now. Twitter made everyone's life exciting. Like most people's lives are not inherently exciting. I'll give you this one example. I think about this all the time. I love watching like cooking TikToks. There's all this movement in foods like make everything from scratch or like do things the hard way or be natural.

And you know, if you weren't doing this on camera to an audience, this would be so boring. If you had to wake up and make bread every day. to feed your family, it's no wonder the industrial revolution happened. Right? Like, this is actually not a rewarding task unless you have an audience or it's a special occasion. If this, if your life is just like this mundane every single day, like, of course you're going to go look for some outside validation. And what phones generally have brought people is like an enormous way to go gain the

outside validation. And so if Twitter did that for people, I think you can look at all the negatives that came along with it, but I think you can also look at the idea that a random kid in the middle of the country or around the world could go find not only external validation for whoever they wish to become, but also a sense of excitement that they too could like reach the audience. And that changed the nature of how we think about a lot of things, positive and negative. Totally. There's something to mind there.

There's something to take out of there that says, oh, we can actually make our lives like meaningfully different and better if we are just careful to not bring the baggage of the noise along with us. I don't know that we're going to be careful. I think we're probably just going to start smoking again. Well, and I do think all that stuff is totally inseparable, right? Which is like why Twitter is fascinating. Because I think what it did was basically like lean into this sort of feeling of liveliness and like there's always something going on to like the 100th degree. And it made everything feel chaotic and problematic and everything moved to. quickly, but it also had that, like, it, it vibed in a way that nothing else like it has. And we're

seeing this on threads now, too, where they've, like, very deliberately turned that dial down from a 10 to, like, a 4, and it feels way less fun. It's like, you can still find some of that. There's still community. There's still interesting people, all that stuff. But this sense of, like, something is happening, I have to go on Twitter or just this feeling like my pocket is buzzing because something is always happening underneath that Twitter icon. Like, wait, did you have notifications turned on Twitter until the very end? No, dear God, no. Oh, my God.

I turned off notifications on Twitter like the second year. I was like, no, thank you. All the people who had notifications on from Donald Trump when he was president during that presidency is like, oh, I have, yeah, anyone who had Twitter notifications on after about 2014 was like a glutton for punishment. Yeah. But there was, I just mean like that, that feeling of like, if I hit the Twitter icon on my phone, something is going to be happening. Like, is that a problematic drug in a very real way? Yes, but it was also the thing that made it so fun and made it so lively and meant that everyone was there. So there were all these opportunities.

And like, we talk a lot about how badly run Twitter was for all of its existence. And I think there's an interesting sort of parallel universe in which it's much better run. And I actually don't think the outcome ends up being all that different. Because it just seems to me you can't have one side of that without the other. Yeah. I did actually, my early part of Twitter, I was really into different communities. I was really into to film Twitter and all of those folks. And yet there was this ability to find a group and find your people, so to speak.

But that wasn't just inherent to Twitter. Those communities form everywhere. And in fact, the Twitter ones were probably the most disparate because it did move so fast. Because it was like, you'd get tons of noise in there. You'd be like, oh, I really like this movie too. And then somebody just blast in and say like a horrible cuss, like chant it. And you're like, get out. And I thought Sarah Jong's piece in the Twitter package was really good about, was talking about this and specifically that moderation.

Because, like, you know, if you do that on a forum or live journal or Tumblr or Reddit even, somebody's going to come in and be like, no, you can't do that. You're out and kick you out. And Twitter was always like, no, everybody's voice matters. And it's like, we learned that actually some people are just jerks and their voice. Like, we don't actually need to hear a bunch of cusses in a row after like an interesting conversation. Speak for yourself. Well, and I think the other part of that, Alex, is like, if you went on letterboxed and just, like, started cussing at people, like, they would either kick you out of letterboxed or just be like, we don't talk about that here, right? And, like, Reddit would do that too.

They have moderators. They do that stuff. But Twitter was just like, it was everything everywhere all the time. So it's like, as long as you're not breaking the rules, you can talk about whatever you want. So, like, you might follow me for tech stuff, but you're also going to get me yelling at Delta when my flight is delayed. And then you're going to get mad that your flight is delayed. And now we've gone down a whole crazy rabbit hole way away from. from what we were like ostensibly here to talk about or why you followed me in the first place.

And it just, it's like that pull is so intense that I feel like even like film Twitter eventually became politics Twitter because it was just the thing it felt like everybody was talking about. And it's so you have to be like personally disciplined to not do that. And I think if Twitter taught us anything, it's that we're not personally disciplined enough to not do that. I'm trying. I tried for a very long time. There's something in there too that is very important that there was total collapse and form on Twitter. So if you watch a TikTok and you don't like the TikTok, it is perhaps likely that you'll make a duet or a stitch or something.

It's much more likely that you're just going to leave a text comment. And that means you have sort of downranked yourself in the experience, right? The video is the primary element and then your comment is next to it. And maybe people will never see it. And even if you make a duet video, no one's going to see it unless you find your video, right? It's not in line. On Twitter, it's all the same. Right.

Someone tweets and someone replies and it's all the hierarchy of that information is the same. which meant drive-by cuss words were elevated to the same level as the main thing all the time and could quickly become the point, right? Like a bad tweet with 10,000 people below it saying ratio. The point of that was the word ratio. Yep. That's like fascinating. Like that's probably media studies, PhD.

Like that's the only platform I can think of that truly works like that. Even text posts on Facebook don't truly work like that. Twitter, the absolute collapse, I think, just led to radically different. dynamics. Yeah. Again, like the threads example there is really interesting is like Adam Maseri even talked about that in the very early days of threads that like the thing that worked about Twitter was that sort of evening of all the content where it's not like a thing and then comments on the thing. Everything is the same. But threads is not actually panned out that way and you can see it. Like everybody kind of knows that if you reply to your own post on threads, your your second post

gets downranked in the algorithm. And just because everything is algorithmic, like you just end up playing a different game. Whereas Twitter, even though it was algorithmic was so much less carefully curated for your interest, that there was just this sense of like, you could just tweet the word ratio, and there was a really good chance it was going to show up in somebody's timeline.

And like, yeah, and again, I feel like, and you talk about this in your piece, Neelai, that like the upside of that was it, it brought in new voices who never would have had a chance otherwise. It gave everybody what amounts to like one-to-one access to everybody else, which is terrifying and like exhilarating all at the same time. But it just, it did.

It sort of broke every barrier, like, up and down and left and right of how we talk to each other. And it feels like, I almost wish we had gotten like 50 more years of Twitter and we could see if we ever got good at it. And I'm not sure we would have, but it would have been an interesting thing to play out. And it's like, would Gen Z have figured it out and have like healthier relationships on Twitter? You don't think so? No. I think in one very important way, Gen Z is much worse at technology. than anyone cares to admit.

Like, this is a generation that does not know about file systems. We've written that story. We just link that story. Right. Like, they are worse at the technical aspects of computing. Yeah.

In some meaningfully measurable ways. And then they are much better at media literacy in other meaningful, measurable ways. Like, an entire generation of millennials were, like, experienced the I Did Bad Tweets problem and, like, just loudly stuck their finger

in the outward. for all the world to see over and over again. Yeah. And all of Gen Z just watched that happen. I would just like to interrupt quickly to let our Gen Z audience know that Nelai's email address is Nelai at the bridge.com. This is a, this is a, this is, you can email me. That's fine.

I'm Gen X, so I'm outside of this. I cast no aspersions on anyone. I think all of you should get off my lawn. Get back to work. We don't remember your generation. It's fine. I raised myself, Alex. But I think that the media literacy of, oh, I need to curate this persona for the world.

My social media presence is something that I need being in control of. That was the water, right? Like that's very native. That's not a new idea. And so I don't know if Gen Z would have figured it out as much as they would have stopped using the tool in a way that made it as vibrant and this is. So to that point, actually, one of the things I'm curious what you guys think is if we are ever going to get something like this again. Because I think on the one hand, nobody would have predicted Twitter to turn up. the way that it did, right? It grew in weird, unusual, surprising ways. And I think it did a lot of

things really well. And it was like culturally vibrant in ways that very few tech products have ever been culturally vibrant to the point where Tucker Carlson is reading Alex's tweets on television, which like if you just think about it is objectively insane. Like nothing about that makes any sense. Not just you, Kranz. Yeah. No, no, no. I agree. We talk about a decade of cable news is just like news anchors reading tweets to each other. And like it was. It really, really was. It was just the worst podcast of all time. For four years, CNN was just very expensive haircuts reading tweets. But I also think, like, to your point, Neelai, the people coming up are likely not going to go down the same road of, like, how they exist online as we did in, you know, 2007.

So, like, Threads kind of wants to be Twitter, but kind of doesn't want to be Twitter. X kind of wants to be Twitter, but doesn't want to be Twitter. Are we ever going to get another thing that feels the way that Twitter did in 2015? I totally don't think so. And my rationale for this is that essentially the internet happened and everybody could suddenly communicate. And then Twitter and Facebook and all these things were like, okay, what if everybody could communicate? What if Tucker Carlson, Alex Cranes, David Pierce and Nicky Minaj, we're all in Pierce Morgan over in the corner, we're all in the same coffee shop. Wouldn't that be great?

I would go to that coffee shop so quickly. Just to see Nikki mistake David for Pierce and then turn on Pierce Morgan. Yeah, and it sounds really compelling, right? It sounds like a cool-ass coffee shop, but we're all talking at the same volume. And also there's 100,000 other people all talking at the same volume in the same coffee shop. And we realize, wait a minute, that's actually too much. Actually, we do. And we've seen that, right?

We've seen like the decentralization of social media. And it's happening a lot faster. And so those communities are cropping up in smaller places where they're. They can close themselves off where they can say, actually, we don't want the person who just jumps in says cusses or Pierce Morgan just accidentally, like, Nikki Minaj tweeting at David instead of Pierce Morgan. That's actually bad. We don't want that. And so I think, like, it was a moment where we have the internet and we have this really great moment in the internet where we said, what if everybody could talk at the same time? And then we went, wait, no, that's bad.

And I think collectively and just both like collectively us and kind of what our package was about and what we've been talking about here. and also everybody out in the world who didn't use Twitter because it wasn't actually one of the most popular social media apps all realize together, no, this isn't actually something we want. Like I think the market spoke and the market was all of humanity coming together and saying, never mind. Ezra raises this point in the piece that I wrote, he said he thinks that Twitter reached its peak at sort of 2020 with COVID and the Black Lives Matter protests and that. whole reckoning that occurred and the sort of tearing down of institutions. And he says, that was its peak. And after that, a bunch of large institutions, the government, big companies, they all said, do we want Twitter to have this much influence over us? And they sort of collectively decided no. And then that barrels straight into January 6th, that barrels straight into Elon buying Twitter.

And you see that his point was, even if Elon hadn't bought Twitter and turned it into X and sort of dismantled it, the institutions were pushing back on it. They were saying, this is too much. And people, like Ezra, were saying, this is too much and I need to get away from it. And so there would have been a natural pendulum swing based on how intense 2020 was. But then Elon showed up and...

He just accelerated. He put a little rocket on the pendulum. He's like, here's a falcon that doesn't work. Kaboom. Yeah, no, I think that's right. I think it's like, if we've learned anything from the last couple of years, it's that everything changes.

And we are very, in so, so, so many ways at the end of like a very specific era of technology. And I think it's definitely true that the pandemic spent a lot of that up. It's definitely true that Elon Musk sped a lot of that up. But I think this was all kind of coming anyway. And I do think I think you're right, Kranz, that like at some point in the last five years, everybody kind of looked around and was like, this is all a mess. And like this thing where we just all hang out together in one. one place is bad. Like, I know my family's political opinions in a way that I'm not interested in

knowing. And this is not helpful or good or making me feel better. And it was going to happen eventually. But that said, I will look back on this whole era as like pure chaos, but there were good times. I'm friends with Nikki Minaj now. I mean, I think it was a really important era. And I think we still haven't fully grasped just how big an impact it had on us culturally and, like, as a society. I do think that it was a big deal. And it's going to, we're going to keep thinking about it later on. We're going to keep learning those lessons and thinking about the lessons we learned from it. Yeah.

I do think we're still in the like Nicorette gum phase of quitting smoking here. Like we're definitely not out of whatever brain space we've been in for a long time. Yeah. Threads is just like a vape. Yeah. I mean, is threads going to be Nicorette or is it going to be a jewel or is going to be those weird off-brand nicotine mints you can buy it that CVS? I've gone through it. I'm just saying, ideally, we have none of them.

We are not reliant on an even weaker diluted, centralized social media experience. What we are going to do is we're going to build some distributed platforms that let people own their audiences and don't put all of our, like, the source. story of Twitter, I was talking to former Verge reporter, now platformer managing editors Zoe Schiffer about this. And we sort of landed on the idea that Twitter is defined, the story of Twitter is defined by two power users,

Donald Trump and Elon Musk. And like that, that's a fun thing to think through. And Zoe is on Decoder and you can listen to that episode. We thought it through together and that was good. But you take a step back, you're like, should that be how the world works? Like, should that be how media works?

that like two people who get really good at getting likes on a platform suddenly like warp the world around. Like that shouldn't be how that works. You should be able to find your own little network. So I'm hopeful. I'm hopeful that threads is successful because they're going to federate and, you know, everyone knows how I feel about that. But I'm also much more hopeful that people seek out smaller pockets of the internet. And that is actually what we aim for as opposed to just mindlessly centralizing once again.

Yeah, I think that's right. I certainly hope that's true. I have a cynical piece of my brain that wonders if we've now spent so long teaching people how good it feels to chase giant audiences that telling them to chase smaller audiences is going to be hard to do. I think it's okay. And I'm going to point back to fandom because my big theory of the universe is fandom is where all online like behavior incubates. And so in fandom, they've all gotten really upset. They're all actually like the big discourse right now. is that everybody's doing it for the likes on AO3 and WAPAD. And that's just inherently hysterical to do that anyway. But you're seeing particularly younger people, like younger Gen Z and Gen A being like, we don't like that. And then like all the old millennials and Gen Xers being like, we also don't like that. And so you're seeing people reject it in a way that feels like heartening.

Not totally. It's still happening. Gen X alignment. It's right there. Yeah. But like young millennials and old. older Gen Z, or still like, I just do it. Like, I have AI write my One Direction fanfic.

And it's like, think about what you've just said. And do you really want that to be your legacy online? Alex's email is Alex.cranx. If you use an AI to write your fick, you're bad. Send Alex links to all of your favorite AI generated fanfic, please. I do actually want to read that. All right, we need to go. I will miss Twitter.

I'll just say it. It was good. We had a good run. I miss when I could just DM random strangers who happened to follow me on the internet accidentally. Those were good days. My entire personality was like Miller Light and Marlite's. It was good. I had a good time in my 20s.

And now you have to figure out a new thing. Yeah, it's time. It's time for all of us to figure out a new thing. That's our 2024 goal. At the end of 2024, we're going to come back, we're going to do this, and we're going to say, what's our new thing? It's going to be great. All right. Thank you both.

Yeah, no, that's good. Twitter. I loved it. All right, we've got to take one more break and then we're going to get to the Virchcast hotline. We'll be right back. Support for the show comes from Upwork. The days of doing it all, all by yourself, are over.

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That's upw-w-rk.com. Upwork.com. All right, we're back. Let's do a question from the Vergecast hotline. As a reminder, you can always email Vergecast at theverge.com or call 866-Vorge11 to reach us. We try and answer at least one question every week. Thank you, as always, to everybody who calls in emails. We've gotten tons of stuff about the USBC episode, in particular. very excited. Thank you to everybody who has reached out. Today we have a question about organizing photos, which is a thing I care very deeply about. Here's that. Hey, Verge, I was just culling through my iPhone photo library. My most recent number in my iPhone photo library is 74,224 photos. We can all be real about the fact that these are not all photos that I need to have in my life. And I am wondering

if there's any app, website, any kind of tool that any of you have used, that has been helpful in terms of curating your photo library in mass, especially one that's that big. Hope you can help me out. Thanks. Bye. Okay. I have a bunch of thoughts on this subject. The first thing I would say is take all of those photos, all 74,000, however many it was,

and put them all somewhere. Before you start organizing, before you start putting things in the places that they deserve, to go, just take the whole batch and put them, I don't know, in Amazon photos, which you might have if you have a prime subscription or in Google photos or put them on a hard drive somewhere or back them up to another computer. Like, put all of your photos somewhere because at least in my experience, there's always been a time where I delete something because I didn't think I'd want it and then I want it or I'm going through stuff later and I accidentally should have kept something that I didn't. Just take the whole number and shove them somewhere. Then I have

three organization tips. The first thing is on your phone, open up photos and then go to albums and then scroll down and you get to the list of media types. And that's actually an incredibly good way to organize some of your photos, really just to delete a lot of them. Like for me, I have hundreds and hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of screenshots saved here and I don't need any of them. So if you just open up screenshots, you can select all really easily, delete them. That's a huge portion of them gone. You can do the same with this. videos, with selfies, with live photos, with panoramas. It's not a perfect way to weed stuff out, but it's actually a pretty good one in my experience.

So that's where I would start. The second thing is to go to duplicates, which is down at the very bottom of that album's page, and merge all the duplicates you can. This is less of an issue if you do most of your photography actually on your iPhone, but if you do a lot of importing from other cameras or moving stuff around between devices, odds are you're going to get duplicate photos. and the iPhone does a pretty good job of managing that and knowing when two photos are identical. So I've just been able to go through, select all, merge all, and boom, there go hundreds of my

different photos all into the correct number of photos. So that's what I would do. And then there are two apps that I have to recommend. One is called Slidebox and one is called SwipeWipe. Personally, I have mostly used swipeWap, but both SlideBox and SwipeWipe, these are ridiculous things to say out loud, are on iPhone and Android, and they're basically like Tinder for your photos. You just open the apps up, swipe through, and you quickly just choose basically keep or toss, keep or toss, keep or toss.

Slidebox, I think, has more organization. You can put them into albums and stuff like that. But for me, it's just like right and left. Keep, don't keep is a surprisingly quick way to get through a ton of photos. They both cost some money, but if I'm remembering correctly, Slidebox, I think is $10 once for the premium account, and then you get it forever. And SwipeWipe, I think, is more expensive. It's like six bucks a week, but you get three days for free.

So if you just want to do it once and just like spend a couple of hours going through all of your photos, you can do it without having to pay any money. And that's actually what I would do. My favorite way to do this is to go through all my photos, basically on the largest screen you have, like the iPad's a good one. Phone works fine. Mac works fine. Doesn't have the apps, but is like a bigger screen you can look at it on.

I usually do this on my iPad personally. Download the apps, start looking at your photos. I tend to like put on a podcast or watch a movie and just swipe through photos. Just swipe, swipe, swipe, swipe, swipe, swipe. And you'll be amazed how quickly you get through stuff. 74,000 photos is a lot of photos, but also you don't have to go through every single one of them in order to have a much better handle on your camera roll. So that's what I would do.

I'm sure there are other apps. If you have one that you really like for organizing and cleaning up your camera roll, let me know. Again, Vergecast to theverge.com. 866, Verge11 is the hotline number. But again, back them all up somewhere and then slidebox and swipe wipe are the two that I've found that I really like. They're very helpful. I hope that helps. And if you get through, I want to know how many of those 74,000 actually stick around. So keep me posting. All right. That is it for the Vergecast today. Thank you to everybody who is on the show. And thank you, as always, for listening. There's lots more on everything we talked about at theverge.com.

The Twitter package is fantastic. Sean Hollister has been doing amazing coverage of the Epic versus Google trial. That one we're going to talk a bunch more about on Friday, but there's a ton of news going on there. The site's been really great, even as we wind towards the holidays. So come check out the homepage, but also we'll put some links in the show notes, find our bylines, good stuff everywhere. If you have thoughts, questions, feelings, favorite tweets or anything else you want to talk

about, again, you can always email us, Vergecast at theverge.com or call the hotline 866. verge 1-1. We do a hotline question at least once every week, so keep them coming. This show is produced by Andrew Marino, Liam James, and William Poore. Vergecast is Verge production and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. Nil, Alex, and I will be back on Friday to talk about, like I said, Epic versus Google, all the stuff going on with Beeper and Apple, and lots more. We'll see you then. Rock and roll.