Saying goodbye to Twitter

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 [email protected] or call us at 866-VERGE11, we love hearing from you. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:02David Pierce?

  Welcome to The Vergecast, 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

• 0:44David Pierce?

  trying to figure out the best, fastest, most elaborate, most efficient way to solve these puzzles. The competition was actually in the HyperX Esports 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's 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.

• 1:28David Pierce?

  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, 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.

• 2:05Speaker 01

  This episode is brought to you by Michelob Ultra. Good times mean competitions between you and your friends. Like seeing who can throw some pigskin the farthest, or rush the field the fastest. Winner gets an Ultra. Because it's not just a superior light beer, it's also giving fans superior access to their favorite sporting events. Superior is worth playing for. Visit michelobultra.com/superioraccess to enter. Enjoy responsibly. Copyright 2026 Anheuser-Busch InBev Michelob Ultra Beer, St. Louis, Missouri.

• 2:37David Pierce?

  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 does preserving it even mean?

• 3:22David Pierce?

  And what do you lose along the way when you do that? I'm gonna let Will take over from here, and then I'll be back for the second half of the show. Here's Will.

• 3:32Speaker 02

  The first computer my family ever owned is this Apple Mac Classic from 1991.

• 3:39Speaker 02

  It's an updated riff on the original Macintosh from 1984. A cute little all-in-one beige box with a 9-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 Brickle's and LoadRunner and Dark Castle. I can still hear the drone of the fan, the feel of the keys, and the click, click, click of the hard drive.

• 4:14Speaker 02

  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.

• 4:31Speaker 02

  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've recognized a rabbit hole when I saw one. I went deep into the world of vintage computer collectors. I learned to solder,

• 5:12Speaker 02

  and I ended up grappling with some big, heady questions about the right or wrong ways to preserve the past.

• 5:25Speaker 02

  Mac Classic battery replacement.

• 5:30Speaker 02

  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 plopped 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.

• 6:12Speaker 02

  There it goes. Okay. Once the screws were out, the whole case split in half vertically, though it took some encouraging. Ouch. 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.

• 6:57Speaker 02

  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.

• 7:38Speaker 02

  Been driving with this Mac Classic, sitting on a towel on the floor of the driver's side.

• 7:47Speaker 02

  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 Mac Classic riding shotgun. Old Ford pickup truck parked next to a Tesla. There is something fitting about that for this story.

• 8:10Speaker 02

  Hey.

• 8:11Speaker 03

  How's it going?

• 8:11Speaker 02

  Morning. How are you?

• 8:12Speaker 03

  Good.

• 8:13Speaker 02

  Good to see you.

• 8:14Speaker 03

  Good to see you.

• 8:14Speaker 02

  I hope you don't mind, I'm recording my journey. Trying to be a good podcaster.

• 8:18Speaker 03

  It is an audio podcast.

• 8:20Speaker 02

  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.

• 8:34Speaker 03

  So this is the workshop I am converting it into electronics shop. So it's been...

• 8:39Speaker 02

  Jason moved recently, so his home workshop is a bit of a mess. Picture a garagi 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.

• 8:55Speaker 03

  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.

• 9:07Speaker 02

  I'll keep my distance.

• 9:08Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 9:08Speaker 02

  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 SE that looks a lot like my classic. But also computers I'd never heard of. An NCR PC4.

• 9:25Speaker 03

  This was the first computer that I ever personally had. Somebody gave it to me.

• 9:30Speaker 02

  A funny little thing called a Naboo.

• 9:32Speaker 03

  The keyboard has like a 20-foot cable or something on it. So you'd hook this up to your TV in the living room and you'd sit back on the couch.

• 9:39Speaker 02

  A Xerox Daybreak.

• 9:41Speaker 03

  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 this.

• 9:55Speaker 02

  Just a kaleidoscope of earth-toned plastic boxes. You've got it up and running.

• 10:00Speaker 03

  This is up and running.

• 10:01Speaker 02

  Then there's the telecom collection. A shelf of gleaming, gloriously analog phones and answering machines from the 60s.

• 10:09Speaker 03

  In the 60s, it was actually a crime to connect any equipment not provided by the phone company to your telephone line.

• 10:19Speaker 02

  Oh.

• 10:19Speaker 03

  So this is an answering machine which can pick up the phone, answer it, play an announcement, record a message, and hang the phone up with no connection to the phone line.

• 10:30Speaker 02

  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.

• 10:49Speaker 03

  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...

• 11:01Speaker 02

  It's worth noting that all of this machinery is functional. The printers print.

• 11:08Speaker 02

  The answering machines pick up. And the computers word process. It took a lot of effort to fix this stuff up. But for Jason, working devices are the whole point.

• 11:19Speaker 03

  In 03, 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 Plexiglas. And oh, look, there's a Xerox Alto that isn't turned on. And the whole thing's behind Plexiglas. It's like, you can only admire so many beige rectangles before you're... Like, they're 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.

• 12:03Speaker 03

  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, the big part of it.

• 12:19Speaker 02

  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.

• 12:35Speaker 02

  After the tour, we got down to business.

• 12:39Speaker 03

  I'm generally pretty good at getting these apart by hand. You just kind of tap on it a little bit.

• 12:46Speaker 02

  Jason dug the logic board out of my Mac and took a closer look. And it turns out, I'd missed some things.

• 12:53Speaker 03

  So the capacitors on this have actually started to leak.

• 12:55Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah, okay.

• 12:56Speaker 03

  Very slightly. So if you look at this, all these little silver cans are the surface mount electrolytic capacitors.

• 13:03Speaker 02

  Dotted across the surface of the board are these eight little cylindrical objects, smaller than an eraser head.

• 13:09Speaker 03

  Do you notice on this chip, this VLSI chip, how there's this line going diagonally across?

• 13:14Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's like, part of the chip is a little darker colored than the...

• 13:18Speaker 03

  The gunk from this has wafted along and is halfway across this chip.

• 13:23Speaker 02

  Oh, no, Ken, you can...

• 13:24Speaker 03

  You can see it in the dust.

• 13:26Speaker 02

  Oh, I never would have noticed.

• 13:28Speaker 03

  You'll also notice, see how this chip, all the little sodders are nice and kind of bright?

• 13:33Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 13:34Speaker 03

  And this one, they look kind of fuzzy and dark gray?

• 13:37Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 13:37Speaker 03

  The sodders on this have been corroded by the leaking capacitor stuff.

• 13:42Speaker 02

  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.

• 13:53Speaker 03

  So, we're gonna take a sharp pair of cutters.

• 13:59Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 13:59Speaker 03

  And we're just gonna cut this thing off. And the danger here is it does go flying. Watch your eyes slightly, but we'll just, you know...

• 14:07Speaker 02

  Covering my eyes and, oop, okay. We've just snipped...

• 14:10Speaker 03

  Snipped it off.

• 14:12Speaker 02

  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.

• 14:26Speaker 03

  Some regular dish soap, and I've got a toothbrush.

• 14:31Speaker 03

  We're gonna scrubby, scrubby, scrubby.

• 14:34Speaker 02

  Step three, blow dry the board to get all the moisture out.

• 14:37Speaker 03

  So, now I've just got a regular, just a little air compressor, I'm gonna blow this off. So this will be probably kinda loud.

• 14:46Speaker 02

  To the 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.

• 14:54Speaker 03

  I'm gonna solder this guy, right here, this thing.

• 14:57Speaker 02

  Oh, okay.

• 14:58Speaker 03

  So you see we've got the two leads sticking out.

• 15:00Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 15:00Speaker 03

  I'm gonna clean the tip of my iron first, and the scrubby thing, that's nice and shiny. Now, when I put the solder on here, see, watch what happens. Do you see how it's flowing all across the pad?

• 15:10Speaker 02

  Mm-hmm.

• 15:11Speaker 03

  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?

• 15:19Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's being pulled up, yeah.

• 15:21Speaker 03

  That acid cleans the surface and it makes the solder stick.

• 15:26Speaker 02

  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.

• 15:36Speaker 03

  Notice too, how each can, there's like a black side?

• 15:41Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 15:41Speaker 03

  A little black stripe, that's the negative side.

• 15:44Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 15:44Speaker 03

  Notice helpfully on the circuit board, there's a plus.

• 15:47Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 15:48Speaker 03

  On each one of these. The orientation is very important.

• 15:51Speaker 02

  I see.

• 15:51Speaker 03

  If you install them backwards, they explode.

• 15:53Speaker 02

  Gotcha. Then, I went in with the soldering iron and melted fresh solder around the tiny little capacitor. Okay, so I'm gonna nudge this capacitor.

• 16:02Speaker 03

  You're pretty close.

• 16:03Speaker 02

  Into as close a place as possible. Boop!

• 16:07Speaker 03

  That looks good. You smell that fish, fishy smell?

• 16:09Speaker 02

  I was gonna ask about that.

• 16:10Speaker 03

  That is the capacitor oil.

• 16:12Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 16:12Speaker 03

  It smells like fishes.

• 16:13Speaker 02

  Okay, I didn't trust myself. I was like, there's no way I smell seafood right now.

• 16:18Speaker 03

  You absolutely do. That, that is the smell of leaked capacitors.

• 16:23Speaker 02

  Leaked capacitors smell like fish.

• 16:25Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 16:25Speaker 02

  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.

• 16:42Speaker 03

  The next step is the smoke test. Plug it in and see if it smokes. You think I'm joking?

• 16:48Speaker 02

  Some of the capacitors we replaced help power the speaker, so we hope we might get one of those iconic Mac startup chimes when we flip the switch. And, moment of truth.

• 17:00Speaker 03

  A complete computer? No bong. No bong. Womp womp. But no smoke? Yeah, I'll take it. Mm-hmm.

• 17:09Speaker 02

  Mission largely accomplished.

• 17:12Speaker 03

  You'll notice this time it's gonna stay on this screen a little bit longer, because we have more memory. So this pattern is what it does while it's testing.

• 17:20Speaker 02

  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.

• 17:35Speaker 02

  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?

• 17:53Speaker 03

  The next thing to fail will be the hard drive.

• 17:55Speaker 02

  Uh-huh.

• 17:55Speaker 03

  I can show you why, and then we can describe it. I just happen to have another Quantum Pro drive that I was monkeying with. So, this is gonna get a little bit into hard drive theory.

• 18:08Speaker 02

  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.

• 18:33Speaker 03

  Probably the best long-term method would be to... They make hard drive replacements now that use an SD card. Where you install the SD card on this special converter that to the computer looks like a Scuzzy Hard Drive.

• 18:44Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 18:45Speaker 03

  And so it's like, within the SD card, there's this enclave that is pretending to be, you know, a Scuzzy Hard Drive.

• 18:52Speaker 02

  A hard drive from 1991, yeah.

• 18:54Speaker 03

  And the computer is essentially none the wiser.

• 18:57Speaker 02

  That sounded intimidating technically, but there was something else tripping me up.

• 19:04Speaker 02

  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 whir. 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?

• 19:41Speaker 03

  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.

• 20:04Speaker 02

  Yeah, what's different about that to you?

• 20:05Speaker 03

  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.

• 20:17Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah.

• 20:18Speaker 03

  And it's really cool. Me personally, that's not the kind of project that I would set out on.

• 20:24Speaker 02

  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?

• 20:34Speaker 03

  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 do you, 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?

• 21:05Speaker 02

  There's that, what you're describing with, it's the

• 21:07Speaker 03

  Shipethesis.

• 21:08Speaker 02

  It's the Shipethesis, right.

• 21:12Speaker 02

  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 adventurer Theseus. His fans pledged to preserve the ship forever by replacing 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.

• 21:55Speaker 02

  Adding modern components also starts to blur the line between restoration and modding. And that's where things really get wild.

• 22:03Speaker 04

  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-

• 22:12Speaker 02

  Click around YouTube or Reddit, and you'll find modders swapping vintage and modern parts with abandon.

• 22:18Nilay Patel?

  An obscenely upgraded Macintosh SE30 in a clear case.

• 22:22Speaker 02

  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.

• 22:34Speaker 06

  So I built a custom system that brings the power of Apple silicon to this iconic design in a magical way.

• 22:41Speaker 02

  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.

• 22:52Speaker 03

  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-

• 22:59Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 23:00Speaker 03

  Or it's the challenge of finding the original one, or getting the original one going again. It's the fun of the search.

• 23:06Speaker 02

  That said, he sees debates play out on forums all the time.

• 23:10Speaker 03

  Oh, you know, it's kind of the typical- Geez, am I gonna date myself if I use the term flame war?

• 23:16Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah.

• 23:19Speaker 03

  Yeah, well, people in technology tend to have strongly held opinions.

• 23:23Speaker 02

  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 gonna last forever. But clearly, Jason thinks it's worth the effort anyway.

• 23:47Speaker 03

  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 gonna be really wringing their hands about.

• 24:32Speaker 02

  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 1 out of 10 on iFixit's 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.

• 25:16Speaker 02

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

• 25:27Speaker 02

  Back at home, I fired up the Mac Classic.

• 25:32Speaker 02

  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... it's just a drawing of a cat with a title that says "The Cat". I'm gonna click on "Octopus Picture".

• 25:57Speaker 02

  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. LoadRunner. Oh my gosh, LoadRunner is the best.

• 26:22Speaker 02

  Somehow I remembered the controls without having to think twice about it.

• 26:30Speaker 02

  Alright, I just need to beat this level, and then I will finish this podcast segment.

• 26:45Speaker 02

  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 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 gonna mess with it too much more. I'm gonna 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.

• 27:23Speaker 02

  And shut them down.

• 27:35David Pierce?

  We gotta take a break and then we're gonna come back and we're gonna talk about Twitter. We'll be right back.

• 27:43Speaker 01

  This episode is brought to you by Michelob Ultra. Good times mean competitions between you and your friends, like seeing who can throw some pigskin the farthest or rush the field the fastest. Winner gets an ultra because it's not just a superior light beer. It's also giving fans superior access to their favorite sporting events. Superior is worth playing for. Visit michelobultra.com/superioraccess to enter. Enjoy responsibly. Copyright 2026 Anheuser Busch InBev Michelob Ultra Beer, St. Louis, Missouri.

• 28:14David Pierce?

  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.

• 28:57David Pierce?

  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 Neelai Patel and Alex Cranz, my co-hosts, are here to pour one out for the Twitter that used to be. Neelai, hello. Hello. Alex Cranz, not wearing glasses and squinting. I wish everyone could see the face Alex is making right now.

• 29:19Alex Cranz?

  Am I squinting really badly?

• 29:20David Pierce?

  Yes.

• 29:21Alex Cranz?

  It's blur.

• 29:22David Pierce?

  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 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? Neelai, I want to hear yours first.

• 29:53Nilay Patel?

  All of them are bad.

• 29:55David Pierce?

  Okay.

• 29:56Nilay Patel?

  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, uh, when you're like, what is the closest you've come to being the main character? It's like, the Apple Watch review?

• 30:08David Pierce?

  Ooh, the original Apple Watch.

• 30:10Nilay Patel?

  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, I'm that person. Not your dad. Go away. Get in your Rolls Royce and drive away from my face.

• 30:28Alex Cranz?

  Do you have a spiky bracelet Apple Watch band?

• 30:31Nilay Patel?

  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.

• 30:37Alex Cranz?

  I'm just so excited to learn this. This just made my gift giving a lot easier. Thank you.

• 30:42Nilay Patel?

  For the man who has everything.

• 30:43David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 30:44Nilay Patel?

  There, I mean, there's other ones, like any minor scandal, uh, that we've had, like, the thing that I will just take out of this without listing every scandal that Verge has ever had. You asked me that question and all of my instincts were negative.

• 30:56David Pierce?

  Hmm.

• 30:57Nilay Patel?

  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 McCary, 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 in a very real way. But when you asked me that question, it's like, when we're the main character, my immediate instinct is negative.

• 31:27David Pierce?

  That's fair. Cranz, what about you? Do you have a happy story?

• 31:30Alex Cranz?

  Hmm.

• 31:31David Pierce?

  No.

• 31:32Alex Cranz?

  No, because the, 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, that was fun. The, in the time that, like, Tucker Carlson used one of my tweets and put it in his thing, being like, the liberal journalist. That was, that was fun.

• 31:51David Pierce?

  A true rite of passage on Twitter.

• 31:53Nilay Patel?

  And Cranz was like, these Netflix prices are out of control. And Tucker Carlson was like, these liberals.

• 31:57David Pierce?

  This is why millennials can't buy houses.

• 31:59Alex Cranz?

  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, 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, that dopamine hit was so fast. I was like, Oh, okay. Twitter is 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.

• 32:28David Pierce?

  Yeah. Personal news Twitter, I think, was like consistently one of the best things on Twitter.

• 32:32Alex Cranz?

  Yes.

• 32:33David Pierce?

  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.

• 32:42Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 32:42David Pierce?

  I congratulated so many strangers on new jobs.

• 32:45Alex Cranz?

  Same.

• 32:45David Pierce?

  I loved it.

• 32:46Nilay Patel?

  You're gonna be great.

• 32:47David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 32:47Nilay Patel?

  We launched the entire verge in the back of Twitter in like a real way. We had the NGadget podcast, and then we all quit AOL in a moment for blogging that will probably never be recreated. Like, national news. Bunch of gadget bloggers leave AOL.

• 33:01David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 33:02Nilay Patel?

  This was in the New York Times.

• 33:03Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 33:04Nilay Patel?

  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.

• 33:34David Pierce?

  Yes.

• 33:34Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, you never like, main character in a romance novel, cool. Main character on Twitter, bad.

• 33:39David Pierce?

  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.

• 33:48Nilay Patel?

  That's pretty good.

• 33:49David Pierce?

  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 Nicki that was like, leave this poor nerd child alone. He didn't do this. And then Nicki 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 Nicki'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 Nicki? And I'm like, I didn't do anything. I'm really sorry.

• 34:23Nilay Patel?

  Being mistaken for Piers Morgan. That's bad, dude.

• 34:27Alex Cranz?

  That's just bad.

• 34:28David Pierce?

  It's the worst. The single worst thing about Twitter has been, like, I got a very good Twitter handle. I was at Piers 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.

• 34:51Nilay Patel?

  That's really funny.

• 34:53David Pierce?

  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, 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, were the people like, most obsessed with Twitter as a single group of people.

• 35:35David Pierce?

  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?

• 35:41Nilay Patel?

  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. But 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.

• 36:26Nilay Patel?

  Like, and 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 Cenophore, previously at the New York Times. I talked to Corey Seika, New York Magazine, previously at the New York Times. I talked to Lydia Polgreen, who was the editor in chief of the Huffington Post, now at the New York Times. Maybe you can see a trend here.

• 36:47David Pierce?

  It's also very funny, by the way, that all of those people are like, big deal media executives now. And I, all of them were like OG Twitter stars.

• 36:56Nilay Patel?

  Exactly.

• 36:56David Pierce?

  Like, if you rewind 10 years ago, they were like Twitter-loving bloggers who became

• 37:01Nilay Patel?

  They were in it.

• 37:01David Pierce?

  Massive things. Yeah.

• 37:02Nilay Patel?

  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 they, from there, they were able to do all the amazing things they'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 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.

• 37:43Nilay Patel?

  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 that's like, I have more to say than 240 characters, yeah, 280 characters. 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.

• 38:28Nilay Patel?

  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 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 that I know so many people who've had that exact experience to like, oh, it's more rewarding to think longer thoughts and not seek the dopamine hit of instant feedback all the time.

• 39:01David Pierce?

  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. 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.

• 39:33Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, I think, I think it's okay 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 it was like, what? That's stupid. I'm not going to use that.

• 39:50David Pierce?

  That's pretty early, by the way. I think you're, you're still good on that front.

• 39:53Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, I'm still, 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 so I just had a very, I think I feel like I had a different relationship with it than 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 up for everybody else to see too. And I'm like, I don't, I don't need that.

• 40:21David Pierce?

  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?

• 40:27Alex Cranz?

  Hmm. For the first half, yes.

• 40:30David Pierce?

  Okay.

• 40:30Alex Cranz?

  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, Neel, 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, and like, you guys are both going to roll your eyes, was Glee. Do you get, you remember Glee? The horrible TV show?

• 41:09David Pierce?

  I don't remember the horrible TV show, Glee. I remember the wonderful TV show.

• 41:12Alex Cranz?

  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 Rhimes 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, the creators and the, 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 gonna 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, like, it's just bad. It just

• 41:57Alex Cranz?

  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.

• 42:10Nilay Patel?

  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.

• 42:19Alex Cranz?

  That was every episode.

• 42:21Nilay Patel?

  Glee on these streets, the Zack Snyder story.

• 42:23David Pierce?

  To be fair, I would watch that.

• 42:24Alex Cranz?

  I was like, I would a hundred percent watch that.

• 42:26David Pierce?

  That's like, that's an objectively better idea than any other Zack Snyder cut. So Zack, if you're listening, and I know that you are.

• 42:33Nilay Patel?

  By the way, Alex is right. By the way, Zack, if you're listening, glee on these streets, you can have it.

• 42:39Alex Cranz?

  I want that.

• 42:40Nilay Patel?

  But to Alex's point, this actually did happen a lot. Like this joke about Zack Snyder, there, he did run a coordinated harassment campaign against a bunch of Warner Media executives on Twitter.

• 42:50David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 42:51Alex Cranz?

  Yep.

• 42:51Nilay Patel?

  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 if it was lies, even if it was coordinated bot activity from glee fans.

• 43:34Alex Cranz?

  Led to bad things.

• 43:35Nilay Patel?

  Is the world shaped more or less by coordinated bot activity by glee fans? It's more than you think.

• 43:41David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 43:42Nilay Patel?

  But it's, and it's because everyone just wants the feedback and Twitter was there to provide it.

• 43:45David Pierce?

  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.

• 44:21Nilay Patel?

  Especially on X.

• 44:22David Pierce?

  Yeah, exactly. And so I, I think part of what has been. So strange is that like I 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.

• 45:05David Pierce?

  Like, I think it was, I think it was Charlie Wartle, 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.

• 45:18Nilay Patel?

  That's how I think about TikTok too. It's like people say people on TikTok and it's like, not really. It's four people.

• 45:23David Pierce?

  It's a video.

• 45:25Nilay Patel?

  And you can't even find, at least on Twitter, you could go find the four people on TikTok. It's, it's totally segmented away. The thing that I, 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, I think on the show I have 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.

• 46:08Nilay Patel?

  And then I quit and it was really hard to quit. But 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 gonna 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're like, if you weren't doing this on camera to an audience, this would be so boring.

• 46:52Nilay Patel?

  If you had to wake up and make bread every day to feed your family, it's no wonder the Industrial Revolution happened.

• 47:02Nilay Patel?

  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 gonna 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.

• 47:47David Pierce?

  Totally.

• 47:48Nilay Patel?

  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 gonna be careful. I think we're probably just gonna start smoking again.

• 48:05David Pierce?

  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 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.

• 48:46David Pierce?

  Or just this feeling like, my pocket is buzzing because something is always happening underneath that Twitter icon, like...

• 48:52Nilay Patel?

  Wait, did you have notifications turned on Twitter until the very end?

• 48:55David Pierce?

  No, dear God, no.

• 48:56Alex Cranz?

  Oh, my God.

• 48:56Nilay Patel?

  I turned off notifications on Twitter like the second year. I was like, no, thank you.

• 49:00David Pierce?

  All the people who had notifications on from Donald Trump when he was president during that presidency is like, oof, I have, yeah, anyone who had Twitter notifications on after about 2014 was like a glutton for punishment.

• 49:13Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 49:13David Pierce?

  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 that 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.

• 49:47Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 49:48Alex Cranz?

  I did actually, very 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 yet 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. And 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'd just blast in and say like, a horrible cuss.

• 50:18David Pierce?

  Right.

• 50:19Alex Cranz?

  Like chant it. And you're like, oh, get out. And, and I thought, I thought Sarah Jeong's piece in the Twitter package was, was really good about, was talking about this, and specifically that moderation. Because like, you know, if you do that on a forum, or LiveJournal, or Tumblr, or Reddit even, somebody's going to come in and be like, no, you can't do that. You're, you're out, and kick you out. And, 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.

• 50:50David Pierce?

  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. 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 gonna get me yelling at Delta when my flight is delayed. And then you're gonna get mad that your flight is delayed. And now we've gone down a whole crazy rabbit hole, way away from what we were ostensibly here to talk about, or why you followed me in the first place. And it's like, that pull is so intense, that I feel like, even like, film Twitter eventually became politics Twitter, because it was

• 51:32David Pierce?

  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.

• 51:42Alex Cranz?

  I'm trying. I tried for a very long time.

• 51:44Nilay Patel?

  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 gonna leave a text comment. And that means you have sort of down-ranked 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 gonna see it unless you find your video, right? It's not in line. On Twitter, it's all the same. 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

• 52:26Nilay Patel?

  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."

• 52:36David Pierce?

  Yep.

• 52:37Nilay Patel?

  That's like, fascinating. Like, that's probably a 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.

• 52:51David Pierce?

  Yeah, one, again, like the threads example there is really interesting because like Adam Mosseri 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 has 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 second post gets down ranked 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,

• 53:36David Pierce?

  and Eli, 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, 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?

• 54:13Nilay Patel?

  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 linked that story in the show. Right? Like, they are worse at the technical aspects of computing.

• 54:30David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 54:30Nilay Patel?

  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.

• 54:56David Pierce?

  I would just like to interrupt quickly to let our Gen Z audience know that Neelai's email address is [email protected].

• 55:03Nilay Patel?

  This is no, I'm, this is a, this is a, you can email me, that's fine. I'm Gen X, so I'm outside of this. I, I cast no aspersions on anyone. I think all of you should get off my lawn, get back to work.

• 55:15Alex Cranz?

  We don't remember your generation, it's fine.

• 55:17Nilay Patel?

  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, that was the water, right? Like that, that's very native, that's not a new idea. And so I, 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 is.

• 55:38David Pierce?

  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 out the way that it did, right? It, 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, Krantz, but like-

• 56:11Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, no, no, no, I agree.

• 56:12David Pierce?

  Like, 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.

• 56:19Nilay Patel?

  It was just the worst podcast of all time. For four years, CNN was just very expensive haircuts reading tweets.

• 56:27David Pierce?

  Mm-hmm. 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 kinda wants to be Twitter, but kinda doesn't want to be Twitter. X kinda wants to be Twitter, but doesn't want to be Twitter. Like, are we ever gonna get another thing that feels the way that Twitter did in 2015?

• 56:53Alex Cranz?

  I totally don't think so. And, and my rationale for this is that essentially, the internet happened and, and everybody could suddenly communicate. And then Twitter and, and Facebook and all these things were like, okay, what if everybody could communicate? What if Tucker Carlson, Alex Cranz, 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?

• 57:14Nilay Patel?

  I would go to that coffee shop so quickly. Just to see Nicki mistake David for Pierce and then turn on Pierce Morgan like.

• 57:23Alex Cranz?

  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 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 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. 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 had this really great moment in the internet, where we said, what if everybody could talk at the same time? And then we went, wait,

• 58:06Alex Cranz?

  no, that's bad. And I think collectively, and just both like collectively, us and in 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.

• 58:31Nilay Patel?

  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 6, 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

• 59:14Nilay Patel?

  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.

• 59:30Alex Cranz?

  He just accelerated this. He put a little rocket on the pendulum.

• 59:35Nilay Patel?

  He's like, here's a falcon that doesn't work. Kaboom.

• 59:38David Pierce?

  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. 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, 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,

• 1:00:22David Pierce?

  or making me feel better. And it was gonna 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 Nicki Minaj now.

• 1:00:34Alex Cranz?

  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 gonna, we're gonna keep thinking about it later on. And we're gonna keep learning those lessons and thinking about the lessons we learned from it.

• 1:00:56David Pierce?

  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.

• 1:01:05Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, Threads is just like a vape.

• 1:01:06Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I mean, is Threads gonna be Nicorette? Or is it gonna be a Juul? Or is it gonna 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 gonna do is we're gonna build some distributed platforms that let people own their audiences.

• 1:01:36Nilay Patel?

  And don't put all of our, like, the story of Twitter, I was talking to a former Verge reporter, now platform managing editor, 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, that's a, 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 middle network. So I'm hopeful, I'm

• 1:02:19Nilay Patel?

  hopeful that Threads is successful, because they're gonna federate, and, you know, everyone knows how I feel about that. But I'm also, I'm 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.

• 1:02:36David Pierce?

  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 gonna be hard to do.

• 1:02:51Alex Cranz?

  I think it's okay. And I'm gonna point back to fandom, because my, 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, they're like, the big discourse right now, is that everybody's doing it for the likes on A O three and Wattpad. And that's just inherently hysterical to, to do that anyway. But, 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, you're seeing people reject it in a way that feels like heartening. Not totally, it's still happening.

• 1:03:31Nilay Patel?

  Gen X, Gen Z alignment, it's right there.

• 1:03:32Alex Cranz?

  Yeah. Just, but like, like, young millennials and older Gen Z are still like, I just do it. I like, I have AI, right? 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?

• 1:03:49Nilay Patel?

  Alex's email is [email protected].

• 1:03:53Alex Cranz?

  If you use an AI to write your fic, you're bad.

• 1:03:55David Pierce?

  Send Alex links to all of your favorite AI-generated fanfic, please.

• 1:03:59Alex Cranz?

  I do actually want to read that.

• 1:04:01David Pierce?

  All right, we need to go. I will miss Twitter.

• 1:04:04Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:04David Pierce?

  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.

• 1:04:14Nilay Patel?

  My entire personality was like Miller Lite and Marlboro Lights. It was good. I had a good time in my twenties.

• 1:04:20David Pierce?

  And now you have to figure out a new thing.

• 1:04:22Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:23David Pierce?

  It's time.

• 1:04:25David Pierce?

  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.

• 1:04:34Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, no, it's good. Twitter. I loved it.

• 1:04:39David Pierce?

  All right, we got to take one more break, and then we're going to get to the Vergecast hotline. We'll be right back.

• 1:04:49Speaker 01

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• 1:05:23David Pierce?

  All right, we're back. Let's do a question from the Vergecast hotline. As a reminder, you can always email [email protected] or call 866-VERGE11 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.

• 1:05:50Speaker 08

  Hey Verge, I was just culling through my iPhone photo library. My most recent number in my iPhone photo library is 74,224 photos. Can I 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.

• 1:06:24David Pierce?

  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.

• 1:07:07David Pierce?

  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 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 Albums page,

• 1:07:52David Pierce?

  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- 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 SwipeWipe, but both Slidebox and SwipeWipe, these are ridiculous things to say out loud,

• 1:08:34David Pierce?

  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

• 1:09:18David Pierce?

  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. 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

• 1:10:00David Pierce?

  roll, let me know. Again, [email protected], 866-VERGE11 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 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.

• 1:10:42David Pierce?

  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, [email protected], 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 Moreno, Liam James, and William Poor. The 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 versus 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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