Twitter Hall of Fame

A poorly understood aspect of male culture is that we express affection by curating content on the Internet to share with the people we love. It’s a bit like being a modern hunter-gatherer. So instead of “Why is Doug showing me this dog video?” you should perhaps think “Wow, of all the content in the world Doug picked this for me. He really cares.”

Screenshot of Twitter Hall of Fame mini-site

Now honoring the inaugural 267 inductees.

Circa 2008 to 2023, I spent too much time on Twitter. Was it good for me? No. But did I love every minute of it? Absolutely not. I will say this, however: I curated the hell out of some tweets. Over 10,000 gems. Consider for a moment how many tweets a person has to read in order to find 10,000 good ones. A million? Ten million? That amount of curation takes a tremendous toll, but it’s just something the modern man does for his loved ones.

Thankfully we were able to close that chapter, but the long-term effects on my mind remain. Under certain conditions I am physiologically compelled to recall specific tweets. Poor financial decisions? Please help me budget this my family is dying. My past actions return to me? Me sowing, me reaping. My kids’ latest pile of plastic junk? Marie Kondo in tears. Some random stimulus I haven’t quite figured out? Uh your dragon really should be trained by now.

As these once-bright stars of Twitter fade, I opened the Twitter Hall of Fame to capture the dying light.

  • I crawled through the GraphQL API with credentials sucked out of my browser to download 10,064 old likes.
  • I put them in a little local UI.
  • I took these already curated tweets and ran them back again to find the ones that are (1) text-only, (2) not replies, and (3) made me laugh.
  • Then I took the 267 tweets that passed that filter and put them into a little single-page archive.

Yes, you read that right. I took already curated content and re-curated it. Please remember this is a great sign of respect and affection in my culture. Enjoy the tweets.

(Right after I finished everything, I remembered The Verge did the same project. If your thirst for content cannot be sated, I’m sorry, but definitely check it out.)