The great scrollback of Alexandria

This is a preservation effort, attempting to capture the funniest, weirdest, and most memorable posts before Twitter completely burns down.

Buttons break, functions disappear, power users flee, site errors abound: Twitter fell apart faster than even the pessimists anticipated. By the time we arrived on the scene, the damage was already irreversible: many of the tweets that made Twitter so iconic were already deleted, removed, or made private. It happened so quickly, we could barely comprehend what it was that we actually lost.

Not all of this information decay is the result of the Twitter acquisition. The famous Zola thread only exists in screenshots; the same goes for all-time great “four eels.” As more and more users delete their accounts — for whatever reason — these microliterary classics vanish, too.

Here, we have done our best to preserve the tweets we believed were worth saving: the entertaining, the informative, the ridiculous, the disturbed.

Collection Notes

This exhibit of great and notable tweets was curated by Verge staffers and a few friends, collected from September through October 2023. Even by that point, many historically great posts were already gone, either because users had deleted their old tweets or their accounts entirely.

In a few special cases, we manually reconstructed some tweets that had been deleted. We excluded tweets from accounts set to private. Legal advised us to not pull avatars for copyright reasons, even though we really wanted to.

For tweets with images, we opted not to add new alt text for embeds that did not already have it. We wanted to maintain the original tweet as much as possible but recognize the accessibility cost.

If a tweet of yours is included here and you would like it removed from the archive, you can contact tweetarchive@theverge.com.

Categories

HYSTERICAL – Good jokes, many of which went extremely viral

DUNKS – A tweet, usually pretty funny, at someone else’s expense

WEIRD – A special brand of Twitter humor that lived and died with the platform

BAD – Incredibly dumb, self-righteous, or ass-revealing tweets

EARNEST – Wholesome posts (a category mostly for pets)

FAMOUS – Celebrities saying something a little too honest or a little too strange

Contributors

Abigail Schooner, Andy Baio, Andy Hawkins, Barbara Krasnoff, Becca Laurie, Brendan Klinkenberg, Charlotte Shane, Danny Lavery, Eve Peyser, Jess Weatherbed, Kaitlin Hatton, Kaleb Horton, Kate Cox, Kevin Nguyen, Liz Lopatto, Marie Bertonneau, Mia Sato, Mike Isaac, Nathan Edwards, Potch, Rusty Foster, Sarah Jeong, Sarah Smithers, Tristan Cooper, Victoria Song