Saying goodbye to Twitter

25:18The point is, whatever memories I have that are tied to newer computers, those will probably die with the hardware.

25:29Back at home, I fired up the Mac Classic. It booted 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 just a drawing of a cat. with a title that says The Calf. Can I 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. Lode Runner. Oh my gosh, Lode Runner is the best.

26:24Somehow I remembered the controls without having to think twice about it. Alright, I just need to beat this level, and then I will finish this podcast segment.

26:48After 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. These are fun. And shut down.

27:37We 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 LinkedIn. When you're a small business owner, your business is on your mind 24-7. So when you're hiring, you need a partner that works just as hard as you do. That hiring partner is LinkedIn Jobs. When you clock out, LinkedIn clocks in. LinkedIn makes it easy to post your job for free, share it with your network, and get qualified candidates that you can manage all in one place. LinkedIn's new features can help you write job descriptions and then quickly get your job in front of the right people with deep candidate insights.

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28:57Welcome 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.

29:41And 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 Nilay Patel and Alex Kranz, my co-hosts, are here to pour one out for the Twitter that used to be. Nilay, hello. Hello. Alex Kranz, 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 a blur. So we're here to talk about Twitter. And I say Twitter very specifically because Twitter ends at the day of a certain acquisition. So we're not going to talk about that. We spent a lot of time over this last year talking about what Twitter was and what it meant.

30:18We had this big package and Neela, 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? Neela, I want to hear yours first. All of them 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.

30:46But 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, this shit's fussy for old people. And then everyone tweeted pictures of my spiky bracelet. And it's like, yeah, dude, 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.

31:21I'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. Any minor scandal that we've had. The thing that I will just take out of this without listing every scandal the Virgil's 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 McCurry, a patent lawyer that we'd put on staff for the period of that trial.

31:57And we were the center of that conversation. 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 a question, it's like, when were you the main character? My immediate instinct is negative. That's fair. Kranz, what about you? Do you have a happy story? No, because the times I was a main character, it was usually like the time I got in a fight with Oh No, They Didn't. And that was 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.

32:32That was that was fun. A true rite 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.

32:59Like just that dopamine hit was so fast. I was like, oh, OK, Twitter is good. 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 congratulated so many strangers on new jobs. Same. I loved it. You're going to be great. Yeah. We launched the entire Verge on the back of Twitter in like a real way.

33:33We had the Engadget podcast and then we all quit AOL in a moment for blogging that will probably never be recreated. like national news, bunch of gadget blockers leave AOL. 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.

34:12But 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. Nicki Minaj tweeted angrily at me thinking she was tweeting angrily at Piers 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 there was somebody who tweeted at nikki that was like leave this poor nerd child alone he didn't do this uh and then nikki apologized to me again on twitter and so i got a bunch more replies and and it was just like i became i became one of the barbs which is nikki's fans and so it was it was 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 are like who are like what did you do to nikki and i'm like i didn't do anything i'm really sorry being mistaken for Piers Morgan.

35:09That'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.

35:44So this is like almost exactly a year ago. I was just like, gonna stop with social media for a while, gonna not post on the internet, gonna 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 Neelai, you wrote this piece this week, reckoning with that at like the big level, which is like we as reporters, I think we're the people like most obsessed with Twitter as a single group of people.

36:18And 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 has 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.

36:52But the process of the journalism, like 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 maybe that is me just being old and crotchety but you know I talked to Ezra Klein who obviously founded Vox and is now at the New York Times I talked to Ben Smith who founded BuzzFeed News and now runs Semaphore previously at the New York Times I talked to Corey Sika New York Magazine previously at the New York Times I talked to Lydia Pulgrein who was the editor-in-chief of the Hogan Post, now at the New York Times.

37:29Maybe 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. They were in it. And they all started blogging and 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.

38:10Let's give everything away for free and then we'll see what happens. Maybe the platforms are thinking 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.

38:48and so that's just to me i 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 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, I had something happened to me. I must complain. And then you stop doing that. And your brain just like bounces back so quickly. And you're like, Oh, I'm having fuller, richer thoughts.

39:30And that's pleasing to me in that. 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 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.

40:08And 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 OK to sometimes sit on 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. Like, I think I heard about it in 2007 from the PVP webcomic and then 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 2009.

40:39And I was like, everybody's joining. And then 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. 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 the few times I did complain, 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 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?

41:12For the first half, yes. OK. 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, Neelai, how it changed relationships between creators and their audiences.

41:43And 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 roll your eyes, was Glee. Do you remember Glee, the horrible TV show? I don't remember the horrible TV show Glee. I remember the wonderful TV show Glee. Oh, we're in different places, David. We're in different places. But when Glee came out, it was a very online show. It was like that and Shonda Rhimes doing stuff with Scandal. 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.

42:20And then they started to demand things and they started to make demands. And then sometimes the show would be like, OK, 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.

42:52Maybe don't chase that. It's just Zack 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 Zack Snyder story. To be fair, I would watch that. I would 100 % watch that. That's an objectively better idea than any other Zack Snyder cut. So, Zack, if you're listening, and I know that you are. By the way, Alex is right. By the way, Zack, 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 Zack Snyder, he did run a coordinated harassment campaign against a bunch of warner media executives on twitter yeah yep 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 in effect in their lot 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 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.

44:25But 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.

45:04Especially 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.

45:43and 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 Charlie Wurtzel, who's now at the Atlantic at one point, who said to me like, anytime 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 too. It's like people say people on TikTok and it's like, not really. It's like 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.

46:12It'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 this 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.

46:54But there's no part of me that looks back on that and is like, huh, you know, like all of 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 for 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 food to like make everything from scratch or like do things the hard way or be natural.

47:30And 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. 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.

48:10But 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 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 mine 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.

48:46I 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 too 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 four and it feels way less fun it's like You can still find some of that.

49:23There's still community. There's still interesting people, all that stuff. But this sense of 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. 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 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, Like, I have. Yeah. Anyone who had Twitter notifications on after about 2014 was like a glutton for punishment.

49:56Yeah. 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 I just it just seems to me you can't have one side of that without the other yeah I did actually the early part of Twitter I was really into different communities like I was really into to film Twitter and and and all of those folks and there was this ability to find a group and find find your people so to speak but that wasn't just inherent to Twitter that's that's like like Those communities form everywhere.

50:49And in fact, the Twitter ones were probably the most disparate because it did move so fast because it was like just 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. 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 is going to come in and be like, no, you can't do that. You're out and kick you out.

51:21And 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 Letterboxd and just like started cussing at people, like they would either kick you out of Letterboxd 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.

51:51So 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 what we are 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.

52:18And 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 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 in 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.

52:50And 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 a ratio. The point of that was the word ratio. Yep. That's like fascinating. Like that's a probably media studies PhD. Like that's the only platform I can think of that truly works like that.

53:27Even text posts on Facebook don't truly work like that. Twitter, the absolute collapse, I think, just led to radically different dynamics. Yeah. Again, the Threads example there is really interesting. Adam Masseri even talked about that in the very early days of Threads, that 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 has not actually panned out that way. And you can see it. Everybody kind of knows that if you reply to your own post on Threads, your second post gets downranked in the algorithm.

53:57them 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 nila 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.

54:32But it just, it did it. 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.

55:06We'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 outlet for all the world to see over and over again. And all of all of Gen Z just watched that happen. I would just like to interrupt quickly to let our Gen Z audience know that Neelai's email address is Neelai at the bridge.com.

55:46This is not, this is a, this is a, you can email me and that's fine. I'm Gen X. So I'm outside of this. I, I, 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 to be 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 as this.

56:21So 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 out 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.

56:53Not 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, Eli, the people coming up are likely not going to go down the same road of like how they exist online as we did in 2007. 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.

57:29Like, 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 Kranz, David Pierce, and Nicki Minaj were all and Pierce Morgan over in the corner were 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.

58:06Yeah, 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 realized, 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 those communities are cropping up in smaller places where they can close themselves off, where they can say, actually, we don't want the person who just jumps in and says cusses or Piers Morgan just accidentally like Nicki Minaj tweeting at David instead of Piers Morgan.

58:40That'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 is about, 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 realized 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.

59:14Ezra 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.

1:00:00They 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 sped a lot of that up.

1:00:39It'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, Krantz, 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 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.

1:01:16I'm friends with Nicki Minaj now. I mean, I think it was a really important era. And I think 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. And 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.

1:01:51Yeah, I mean, is Threads going to be Nicorette or is it going to be a Juul or is it going to be those weird off-brand nicotine mints you can buy at the 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 story of Twitter. I was talking to a former Verge reporter, now platformer managing editor, Zoe Schiffer, about this. And we sort of landed on the idea that Twitter is defined.

1:02:31The story of Twitter is defined by two power users, Donald Trump and Elon Musk. And like that, that's, that's a, it's, 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? 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 that Threads is successful because they're going to federate and everyone knows how I feel about that.

1:03:08But 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.

1:03:48They're all actually like the big discourse right now is that everybody's doing it for the likes on AO3 and Wattpad. And that's just inherently hysterical to do that anyway. But you're seeing younger people, 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, Gen Z alignment. It's right there. Yeah. But like young millennials and older Gen Z are still like, I just do it.

1:04:23Like I have AI right by One Direction fanfic. And it's like, think about what you've just said. Do you really want that to be your legacy online? Alex's email is alex.cranz.com. If you use an AI to write your fic, 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. Yeah. 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 Lite and MarbleLites.

1:05:01it 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 we're going to say what's our new thing it's gonna be great all right thank you both yeah yeah it's good twitter I loved it all right we gotta take one more break and then we're going to get to the We'll be right back.

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1:06:46All 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-VERGE-11 to reach us. We try and answer at least one question every week. Thank you, as always, to everybody who calls and emails. We've gotten tons of stuff about the USBC episode in particular. Very excited. Thank you to everybody who's reached out. Today, we have a question about organizing photos, which is a thing I care very deeply about. Here's that. Hey, Verge. was just culling through my iPhone photo library. My most recent number in my iPhone photo library is 74 ,224 photos.

1:07:27We 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.

1:08:17Because 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.

1:08:54So 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 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.

1:09:29And 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 slide box. And one is called swipe wipe. Personally, I have mostly used swipe wipe. But both slide box and swipe wipe. 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.

1:10:09Slidebox, 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 Swipe Wipe, I think, is more expensive. It's like six bucks a week, but you get three days for free. So if you just wanna do it once and just spend a couple of hours going through all of your photos, you can do it without having to pay any money.

1:10:42And 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 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.

1:11:25Again, VergeCast to the Verge.com. 866-VERGE-11 is the hotline number. But again, back them all up somewhere and then Slidebox and SwipeWipe 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 posted. All right, that is it for the VergeCast today. Thank you to everybody who's on the show. And 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.

1:12:02That 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-VERGE11. 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.

1:12:32The Vergecast is a Verge production and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. Milai, Alex, and I will be back on Friday to talk about, like I said, Epic vs. Google, all the stuff going on with Beeper and Apple, and lots more. We'll see you then. Rock and roll.

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