Saying goodbye to Twitter
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Welcome to the verge guests, the flagship pog guests of good tweet. I'm in friend day with peers, and I am currently standing on the casino floor of the mgm grand casino in last stage.

S i've been here for the last few days, not for the national radio finals, which was this weekend, or for the NBA in season tournament, which was this weekend, or for the raters 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 spread cheeks get together.

And they spent a couple of days teaching each other how to use excel, learning some of the apps, coolest new features, and then they compete. They get these incredibly complicated puzzles, and they spend hours and hours trying to figure out the best, fastest, most elaborate, most efficient way to solve these puzzles. The competition was actually in the hyper x exports arena at the luxury o IT was a big deal.

This is the biggest one of these they've done. And I have to say I was pretty dramatic, or at least as dramatic as IT can be when a bunch of people are sitting on stage doing precieuse in ways that you absolutely do not understand and didn't even know. People could do streets, but you should watch this thing.

It's a few hours long, but you can kind of blow through IT. The video on youtube is streamed on twitch on S P. N.

I'll link IT in the show notes. IT was a time of fun. Cannot recommend IT enough. And now i'm just basically wandering the casino floor looking for somewhere to lose twenty dollars before I have to go get back on the plane. Anyway, we have an awesome show coming up for you today.

The verge is will poor is gonna us through an adventure he had when he rediscovered a thirty year old computer and tried to figure out what to do with that. Then we're going to talk about twitter because in a very real way, twenty twenty three was the year that twitter died and diverge. Just did a big package on what I meant and kind of morning what twitter once was.

And for all the bad stuff about IT twitter heads moments. So we're going to talk about what those moments were. It's going to a lot of fun.

And then of course, as we always do, we're going to get to the verge cost hot line super fund show love to get to first i'm going to go spin the will force and will wish me luck. This is the verge gas. We'll be right back.

Support for the verge gas comes from straight stripe is a payments in billion platform supporting millions of businesses around the world, including companies like uber, B M W and door dh. Stripe has help countless startups and establish companies alike, reached their growth goals, make progress on their emissions and reach more customers globally.

The platform offers a sweet specialized features and tools to fast track growth like stripe billing, which makes IT easy to handle subscription based charges in voices and all recover ring revenue management needs. You can learn how stripe helps companies of all sizes make progress at striped com. That striped out com to learn more, make progress.

Welcome back. Are IT made home from vegas for once. I didn't get sick on the plane.

Very exciting. We 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 one ten 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 virtually producer will poor set out to answer. Can a thirty year old macintosh live on for another thirty years with the same parts? If not, what do you need to do to preserve IT? What is preserving IT even mean? And what do you lose along the way when you do that? I'm going to let will take over from here and then i'll be back for the second half of the show. Here's well.

the first computer my family ever owned is this apple mac classic from one thousand nine hundred ninety one. It's an updated riff on the original macintosh from one thousand nine hundred eighty four acute little, all in one beige box with a nine inch black and White screen. I spend a lot of time playing with this computer growing up.

I did my third grade homework on IT. I drew for hours and map paint, and I played glorious games like rickles and load runner and dark castle. I can still hear the tone of the fan, the fuel of the keys and the click of the hard drive.

I asked my parents about the classic recently, and to my delay, they kept IT for posterity. We pulled out of the attic, and miraculously, after thirty two years, IT still works. Sort of IT doesn't always boot. And when IT does, that makes a scary ping 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 I would take to restore an old computer like this one, to find out what fails in these machines and how to stop this from happening, so that this little time capital could survive another thirty two years. That seems simple enough, but I should recognize a rabid hole. When I saw one, I went deep into the world of vintage computer collectors. I learned a soter, and I ended up grappling with some big, heady questions about the right or wrong ways to preserve the past.

My classic battery replacement. The first thing I learned about vintage computer repair is machines of this era are time bombs. Many have a little internal battery that keeps track of the date and time.

And as the years roll by, those batteries love to leak all over the machines. Everyone I talked to told me to fish that little battery out like yesterday. So armed with a bunch of youtube tutorials, I popped the mac down on a work bench in my garage.

Okay, tools. This is amateur hour. Locally, 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 talk screws. After Lucy there goes, okay, once the screws were out, the whole case splitting half vertically, though IT took some encouraging. Ch, alright, I am sliding this whole back.

Plastic play away from the computer and. Inside, the components are all jammed dense sely together, which makes this assembly 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. What sticky and slide up free. The logic board is the brains of the computer.

It's an unremarkable Green rectangle for a 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 lecky at all in good shape. Disaster averted IT. But my work wasn't done. I also learned about the handful of capacity sorted to the logic board.

There are little components that hold in 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 capacity looks like, much less how to replace one time to call in the experts.

And driving with this mac classic sitting on a towel on the floor of the driver side. The expert I rope into this is chasen 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 writing shotgun, old ford pickup truck connect to a tesla. There is something fitting about that for the story. Hey, gorden, sorry.

Yeah, good to see. Yeah, see you. I hope you don't mind. I am recording my journey trying to be a good podcast. I met Jason while working on another story about an apple computer from the eighties called the lisa. He has an extensive collection of vintage tech, and when I reached out to him about my mac, he immediately offered to help. So this is okay .

conver into electronics. So Jason .

moved recently, so his homeworker p is a bit of a mess. Picture of garage space filled to the grim with boxes, monitors, wired tools. But there's a method to the madness. In one corner, huge vintage printers sit neetly on metal shelves.

For now, that's printer land. You have to be careful when you put multiple laser writers in one spot, because the sheer weight can cause a black hole.

Okay, my distance. yeah. Then there are the computers in assorting of diverse systems from the thousand and eighty.

There are a few more recognizable machines in apple, lisa, a macintosh, esc, that looks a lot like my classic. But also computers. I'd never heard of an N C R P C, for this was the .

first computer that I, that I ever personally had. Somebody gave IT to me a .

funny little thing called a nab .

o the keyboard has like a foot care or something on IT. So you d book this up to your TV in the living room. You will sit back .

in the a ziogoon daybreak.

IT actually has an extra card in there with IBM. Eight or one eighty six process is on IT. So you can have A P, C, M elation in a window with a hardware processor. So you can run PC software and .

zip software. Just a collection cope of earth tone plastic boxes up running.

This is up and running.

Then there's the telecoms lection, a shelf of gleaming, gloriously analogue phones and answering machines from the sixties.

In the sixties, IT was actually a crime to connect any equipment not provided by the phone company to your telephone line. Oh, so this is an answering machine, which can pick up the phone, answer IT plane announcement, record a message and hang a phone up with no connection to the phone line.

Jason is an impressive fountain of technology dge for basically every device we looked at. He gave me the full back story on the product and company, the devices, components, construction, hardware and software corks. He constantly interpret himself and digs up new pieces of tech to make a point.

And I remember actually I happened to have one. So there's no hard drive in this. And so plus development developed this thing called the hard card, where it's an expansion card with .

a it's worth noting that all of this machinery is functional. The printers print, the answering machines pick up in the computer's word process. IT took a lot of effort to fix the stuff up. But for Jason, working devices are the whole point.

In all three, the Masoni an institution was doing and exhibit on history of technology, history of computing. I was so excited to go see that, and probably one of the most disappointing things I ve ever experienced my life, actually, because we got there in a like, oh, great there. An original macintosh turned off behind a piece of plexiglass and outlook.

There's a zia's alto that isn't turned on. And the whole thing behind plastic because it's like you can only admire so many beige rectangles before. You're like 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 brain. You look at the art like you look at the art and experience the art.

If you have a record alone, you don't just pick up the record of them. Look at IT. You listen to IT and with pology, it's the interaction that is to me, the big, the big part of .

IT that idea struck accord 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 thirty years ago.

I'm not a collector. I'm just start gic. After the tour, we ve got down to business.

I'm generally pretty good at get knees apart by hand. He just came up up on a little bit.

Jason, doug, the board out of my mac, and took a closer look and IT turns out i'd missed some things.

So this, the capacity on this have actually started to leak very slightly. So if you look at this, all these little silver cans are the surface mount IT darted across .

the surface of the board are these eight little celindric objects smaller than in a racer ahead?

Do you notice on this trip, this year, I trip how there's this line going diagonally across?

Yeah, like part of the trip is a little dark ker .

color than the gunk from this has wafted along in his halfway across this chip.

I don't know.

so that you can see IT in the dust.

Oh, I never would have noticed.

You also noticed. See how this chip, all the little sadness are nice and kind of bright. yes. And this one, they look kind of fuzzy in dark gray. Yep, the sorters on this has been corroded by the leaking capacity stuff.

Luckily, the damage to the board was minimal. IT was just really dirty. Jason walked through the process of cleaning up the mess and installing new capacity. Step one, remove the old ones.

So we're going to take A A sharp pair of cutter OK, and we're just gonna t the thing off. And the danger here is that does go flying. Watch your eye and .

just covering. Okay, we have just snip to slip that off. Step two, clean the logic board. I figured we'd use some special solving, 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 are not plugged in.

While they went some regular 点 soap and i've got a toothbrush。 A scrub, scrubby scrub. Step three.

blow dry the board to get all the moisture out.

So now i've just got a regular, just a little air compressor. I'm going to blow this off. So this pretty kind.

To the extra sure of the board was dry. We just left ted in the sun and went to lunch. After that, we were finally ready to sota .

on the new, this guy right here, this thing OK. So you see, we've got the two weeks sticking out. Yes, i'm going to clean the tip of my iron first and the scrubby thing that's nice in china.

Now when I put the sider on here, see, watch what happens. You see how it's flowing all across the pad. It's not float under the wire yet. There's not enough soda. So as I continue to add now, do you see how it's like float .

up the wire a little bit now next.

put that acid cleans the surface and IT makes so .

stick its super fitly work, holding the new capacity gently with some forceps. I placed IT as precisely as possible on the little pad where the .

old one was notice to how, which can there's like a black side, yes, a little black stripe. That's the negative side OK notice, hopefully on the circuit board, there is a plus. Yes, on each one of these, the orientation is very important. I see if you installed in backwards, they explode.

Then I went in with the soldering iron and melted fresh sodder around the tiny little capacity. Okay, so I am going to nudge this capacity into as close the place as possible.

Looks good. You smell that fish, fishes.

I was going to ask about that.

That is the .

capacity of oil OK IT. Smells like fishes. OK.

I didn't trust myself. I was like this. No way I smell seafood.

You absolutely do that. That is the smell of lead capacitors.

League capacity. Smell like fish. Yes, 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 capacity on a Sparkly clean circuit board. We slit the board back into the computer and put everything back together.

The next step is the smoke test. You plug IT in and see if the takes you think i'm .

some of the capacity we replaced to help power the speaker. So we hope we might get one of those iconic max start up crimes when we flip the switch and moment of truth, a complete computer.

no bone.

no bong for on pop.

but no smoke. Yeah.

i'll take IT commission, largely accomplished.

You'll notice this time it's going to stay on the screen a little bit longer because we have more memory. So this pattern is what he does. Well, it's test.

After all that work, I had a feeling of satisfaction that only newbies get. I did a thing I didn't break. I felt like we did what I came to do. So this computer is a mortal now, right? You can see where this is going. So without messing with IT anymore, now that we've fixed the the things that we know our problems, if you had to guess how much longer this classic would last for after what is now, what, thirty two or so years, what would you say?

The next thing to fail will be the hard, uh, I can show you why, and then we can describe IT. I just happened to have another quantum program that I was monkey with. So this is onna. Get a little little bit into hard .

drive theory here. Jason gets very Jason again. In a nutshell, some rubber inside the drive will eventually turn to goo.

Also, the drive will slowly d magnetize degrading the data. The point is, this hard drive could die at any moment. And when IT does, they could take all my digital memories with IT. So if my goal is preservation, i've got more work to do.

Probably the best long term method would be, they make hard driver placements that use S D card. You install the sd card on this, this special converter that to the computer looks like a guzy harddrive OK. And as so it's like within the sd card, there's this on clay that is pretending to be Scotty hard drive.

hard drive from ninety yeah and the .

computer is essentially on the wiser.

That sounded intimidating technically, but there was something else tripping me up. If the whole point of this exercise is to recreate the experience of using this computer in one thousand and ninety one, what happens to that experience when you start making larger changes? Part of what I remember about this computer is hearing the hard drive, spin up and work.

If I replace IT with a little S, D 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 is authentic or original?

Well, I I like having as much original hardware are as I can, even if it's like maybe slightly newer, but still like upgrade compared to what I was when I was new. I like doing that. Some people like really into that, like i'll get all these new boards and like build the whole thing from scratch and it's that's really need you. But it's not I guess it's not what my personal thing is.

Yeah, what's different about that to you?

And 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 either yeah, yeah and it's really cool me personally. That's not the kind of project that I would set out.

Do you think for you, it's the sort of like top down taking something that exists in maintaining IT and tweaking IT versus the bottom up?

I think that is yeah that I enjoy more on the top down of this worked at one point. I should be able to make IT work just like I did again. Let's say you take a car from the sixties and now you've like you replace all the suspension and the running year and the engine and the transmission with all brand new stuff, like, okay, it's really nice and swing. This stuff is just so expert tly done, but do is IT really still the is the original car at that point? Like if you've replaced everything that makes IT function with something new.

there's what you're describing with its the the shipyard iis, right? The ship of theseus, us, is a paradox that philosophers have been arguing about for two thousand years. Basically, there's this famous ship once sailed by the greek adventure thusia.

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 planes eventually get replaced is at 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 in sd card would be like fitting the ship of thusia with an outboard motor. Adding modern components also starts to blur the line between restoration and moving, and that's where things really get wild. Well, going to the mac classic remodel build in which you'll witness the process IT took to convert a little mak into a modern ized PC. This video has click around youtube redit, and you'll find models swapping vintage and modern parts with .

abandon and see the upgraded macinnes sh. s. thirty. In a clear case.

one listener reached out to show us their heavily moted first generation macintosh. It's got an ipad for a screen and runs of vintage O S. Alongside a dark and face time.

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

IT is a long way from a mac classic with an sd card in IT. Jason appreciates the more inventive creations as long as motors don't destroy working vintage hard ware along the way.

I definitely have a problem with IT. I think it's just a preferences of i've managed to accumulate enough crap over the years that yeah or is the chAllenge of finding the original one, getting the original one going again? It's the fun of the search.

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

Oh, you know, it's kind of the typical just and i'm gonna date myself if I use the term flame war. But yeah.

yeah, yeah, well.

people in technology tend to have strongly held opinions.

Ultimately, Jason's just glad that these computers are still out there for people to play with and fix up and argue over IT shows in the care he's put into his own collection and in the hours he was happy to spend with me. IT takes a lot to preserve the experience of vintage computing. And even then, the stuff is not gonna last forever. But clearly, Jason thinks it's worth the effort anyway.

All these things that we create reflect us as a society, as people, and it's valuable. People put a lot of time and effort into creating these things, you know, to counter this thing from nothing that does something. Now like that, you had you had to picture that before IT existed.

That's that's pretty cool. And being able to continue to display or interact with that creation gives the value. And if instead IT is locked away and forgotten about, we lose that value. You know what? Just like if you couldn't read books that we're twenty years old, I think it's a problem that historians in the future are going to really ring their hands about.

After chatting with Jason, a small irony occurred to me, those historians may have a much harder time preserving newer computers. My old mac classic was a breeze to repair, which enables the whole ecosystem of amateur s like me to learn and tinker and keep these systems alive. Where is my twenty sixteen macbook pro is rocking a one out of ten on I fix its repair ability meter.

IT is a lot more complex and militarized and openly hostile to tinkering. I'd need to deal with glue and rivets and a lot more sorter to pull off any significant repair. Also, i'd need something called us butter.

And I do not care to learn what that is. The point is, whatever memories I have that are tied to newer computers, those will probably die with the hardware. Back at home, I fired up the mac classic.

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.

But the title that says the cap and click on octopus picture. I was so patient as a ten year old, this computer so slow, I found tons of drawings. They reminded me how much I used to love drawing.

That's a homework too. There's this really sweet interview with my grandpa that I did when I was ten and the games load runner. Is the best. Somehow I remember of the controls without having a think twice about IT. I just seem to beat this level, and then I will finish this podcast segment.

After spending all this time with the computer, I agree with Jason. What makes this thing valuable is not the beige box or the software documents inside of IT. It's everything working in concert like I did thirty years ago.

That's what makes IT a time machine. So i'm not going to mess with that too much more. I'm going to follow Jason's advice and swap the hard drive out for an sd card.

We'll keep things running for a little while. But that said, i've replaced enough planks on the ship for a few more voyages. After that, the sea and reclaimed.

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We got to take a break and then we're going to come back and we're going to talk about two are we're going back. Support for the show comes from crucible moments, a podcast from scope capital. We've all had turning points in our lives where the decisions we make end up having lasting consequences.

No one knows this Better than the founders of some of today's most influential come in Christmas moments. Let's listeners in on the maker break events that define the major companies like dropbox, youtube, Robin hood and more told by the founders themselves. Tune in to the season two of crucial moments. Today, you can listen at crucial moments, stop com, or wherever you .

listen to podcasts.

Welcome back this week, the verge published a whole bunch of stories about the fall of twitter, collected into a series, were calling the year twitter died. You should go read all of them. There are really great stories.

And the art to go along with them is like dragged 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 out willingly in the shona. But today on the show, I want to talk more about what twitter was. This is a weird way to think about IT, I know.

But I think as we get some hindside from this weird website that we spent so many hours staring at and talking about, and that IT felt so central to life and culture for so many people for so long, I think we're getting a little closer to figure that out. And as twitter becomes x, which becomes something else, I think now is a good time to talk about what twitter meant us for so long. So I like to tell in alex cranes, my co hosts are here to poor one out for the twitter that used to be nee, hello, hello. Alex cranks not wearing glasses and squinting. I wish everyone could see the face .

alex is making and my squinting really badly. Yes.

plr. So we're here to talk about twitter. I say twitter very specifically, uh, because twitter ends at the day of a certain acquisitions.

We're not going to talk about that. We spent a lot of time over the last year talking about like what twitter was and what I meant. We had this big package. And ella, you wrote a story, but I really is the first thing I want to talk about because I was thinking, like what when I think of twitter was the first thing 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 a good reasons or bad reasons? Like what was the biggest moment you ever had on twitter? I wants to hear yours first. All that are bad OK.

You have the editor of a thing like anything goes wrong. It's my fall, which just fine. That's the job that's of the money for but when you are like what is the closest you've come to be the main character, it's like the apple .

watch of you, the original .

apple watch people that I said, what was that? The milanese loop as like the shits flux y for old people and then ever in tweet pictures my makey brace that and like, yeah, did i'm that person, not your dad? Go away getting your roles away and drive away from my face. Do you have a .

spiky brace lid apple watch band?

I don't. And no one's ever got to me one. I would welcome one, send me one without any weird powders. The end to open on happily. weird.

I'm just so excited to learn this this my gift giving a ladies here.

Thank you for the man who .

is everything .

yeah there even there's other ones like any minor scandal we've had like the thing that I will just take out of this without listing every scandal the versions ever had, you asked me a 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 macaria, patent lawyer that we d put on staff for the period of that trial. And we were the center of that congress. And that was a really positive experience that made our careers, that made the early part of the verge like a very real way. But when you ask me a question, it's like one really the main character, my immediate instinct is negative.

That's fair. Currents, what about you? Do you have a happy story? No, no.

because the times I was a main character was usually like the time I got to fight with, or no, they didn't. And that was, that was fun in the time that, like tuck carlson, use one of my tweet, put IT in his thing being like the liberal journalist, that that was fun. A true right of passage on twitter.

like these netflix Prices are out of control and tucked across like these liberals.

This is my millennial scap by houses.

Don't tweet on vacation is what I learned. But there was one time I had to make, like, when I love my last job, I made a bit, I spent lunch witter and and that was actually like, really nice because I got tons of people I never even heard of, like, tons of, like, big focus and tech. And everybody just been like, you are awesome and that was just like enormous moral boost.

And IT was just instant, like just that that dopa mean hit was so fast as, like, okay, twitter a is good. And then like, but that was like, twenty, twenty. 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 get a new job, leaves the job, changes careers, whatever. That was just like a random outpouring of enthusiasm every single time was I congratulated so many strangers on new jobs, saying, I love IT. You're very great.

We launched the entire verge in the back of twit. And like a real way, we have the engaging dcs, and then we all quit A O in a moment for blogging that will have never be recreated. National news bunch of gauge block risley.

Well, yeah, this was in the new york times. yeah. We took our audience with us because we had the big podcast audience. It's now this show.

And we communicated all them about what we were doing and where we were going on twitter, and that 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 do you say main character? My mind leaps to the goal is to not be the main character.

Yeah, you never like main character and romance novel, cool. Main character twitter, bad.

That's fair. The closest I ever got was in, I think, twenty twenty one nickey man, oh, tweed angrily at me, thinking SHE was eating angrily at pears. Morgan, that's pretty good.

I got, I don't know, ten thousands replies that day from people who were mad at me. And there there was somebody who treated at nicky that was like, leave this partner child alone. He didn't do this.

And then nicky apologize to me again on twitter. And so I got a bunch more replies, and and I was just like, I became, I became one of the barbs, which is keys fans. And I IT 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 really like, who are like, what did you do to nicky do anything .

really being mistaken for peers? Morgan.

that's bad.

That's 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 s that my name would be the first thing that came up. So like every few days somebody would get extremely mad, appears Morgan in my mansions and um I do not miss that at all.

That's really fundy the thing .

that i've been trying to reckon with over the course last year. So and like I basically stopped twisting when I went on parental leave. So this is like almost exactly a year ago, uh, I was just like, gonna stop with social media for a while, gonna post on the internet gonna like be a dad on parental for a few months.

And I was like, I come back, it'll be the same, everything will be fine. And I have to tweet that since 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 watch changes.

And I went away. But neurotic this piece this week, reckoning with that at like the big level, which is like we s reporters. I think we are the people like most obsessed with twitter as a single group of people. And you ask around to talk to one of people, do you have like a unified theory of what twitter did to us as journalists?

He gave us a direct connection to an audience. Anyway, no other platform is ever done, uh, even the ones now that seems like they have a more direct neck like tiktok, whatever. There's so artistic there.

Twitter was you type, you hit the button, maybe some people yellow 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 cock ideas out into the world and then working them out and then publishing the fully quality, which maybe nobody even ever read.

But the process of the journalism, like build a brand for people, or the ability to immediately synthesized and reacted 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 may, maybe that is me just being old and crushed. But and I talked that as our client have a seat founded box in something in our times, I talked to b. Smith, who founded by three news, and that on four previously in her times, IT talks Chris', a new york magazine previous in your times, the lady a paul Green, who is the entry for having post now the times, maybe you can see a tree here.

It's also very funny about the way that all of those people are like big deal media executives now and I all of them were like og twitter stars exactly like if you rewind ten years ago, they were like twitter loving bloggers who became they're in IT massive .

were in IT and they all started blog and you know all of them owned an audience on dogs and then they moved to twitter, which is an interesting shift. And they from there they're able to do all the amazing things are done since then. In 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 we'll see what happens. Maybe the platforms, I think that we are 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 twenty something who will burn out.

And that is the cycle grown. But I think what the other thing happened there that israel talked about really specifically. Is that we started making the content for twitter, and he said the things 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 decrease the quality of IT by fitting everything into the same box.

And so that's just to me, I I felt that but by the end of the twitter moment, I was communicating in tweet and we that's like, I have warned to say two other and forty characters yeah two one of eight characters 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 quit and you don't look back. I know some people have quit over the last year and it's like for a day or two you're like, I something happens to me, I must complain and then you stop doing that and your brain, just like, bounces back so quickly. No, oh, i'm having fuller, richer thoughts and that's pleasing to me and that I know so many people have had that exact experience to o 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 I now have the opposite problem, which is like as somebody for whom IT is like debate timely but potentially professionally useful to like be present online and be a person who posted that the number of things that now don't get through my filter of I should post the internet is like way too high and I need like I need to get back to saying dum shit on the internet because that's like what we all do and its 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 with the internet is for like i'm doing this wrong .

yeah I think I think it's okay to sometimes sit on your your complaints of things, right? Like that's that's why twitter sucked. At the time. I didn't use IT as much as you guys did. I came to a kind of play like I think I heard about in two thousand seven from the P, V, P web comic and IT was like, 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 so but I didn't join until like two thousand nine 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 docker because that was a place that was very digital media and was very like everybody was online, right. And and so I just had a very I think I feeling I had a different relationship with the you guys to some extent that I did a few times. I did complain like techy carson and was like, okay, cool, let me just put that up, everybody else to see you and like, I don't I don't need that.

Do you think you had a healthy eer relationship with IT? Like do you look back and think like I spent an appropriate amount of time using and thinking about .

twitter for the first half?

yes. O, K. For the second half. Note like this, 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 in that you can escape IT and you do like start to be do dummer and dummer things and then ducker er cross that is is retreating you putting you up on on his show so yeah like I definitely elt like guess I watched IT all happen but I think the thing that I really sticks out to me was, to your point, me like how IT changed relationships between creators and and their audiences. And IT wasn't if like journalism was a big one. But the one that I always go back to was in lake, you guys, the broth going to run your eyes was glee meggy the horrible TV show.

I don't remember the horrible T V. sugar. I remember .

the wonderful T. V show. We're in different places. We're in different places.

But when click came out, IT was a very online show. IT was like that, and shana rives to stuff 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 the creators and the actors in everything they had that direct relationship, and then they started to demand things and they started to make demands.

And sometimes the show would like be like, okay, you guys want these two characters to make out we're gonna do IT yeah and then he was like, oh, no, that's actually terrible. Like actually you shouldn't have that relationship between creators and and the people in taking IT in because like, can you imagine is just bad, just lead to bad TV. And then a lot of T V shows and a lot of movies and just started chasing that, started chasing.

Like what will the fans think? And IT was like, actually there's only four fans, and they are very vocal and they have a bunch to sock up at accounts. Maybe don't .

chase that. It's just ax neither 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 is a nice story.

to be fair.

I would watch that and I would a hundred percent watch that.

That's like that's an objectively Better idea than any other's exciter. So that if you're listening and I know that .

you are Better way, alex is right. But that is that if you're listening gree on these streets, you can have IT.

I want that.

But to Alice this point, this actually did happen a lot like this joke. Exeter, there's what he did, run a coordinated harassment campaign against a bunch of water mean executive on twitter. Yes, it's a real thing in no one could pass the difference between the real fans who are spending money and just the volume of noise that existed in the world.

And really, a thing I have come to think about twitter of 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 neily 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 IT was wrong. Even IT was lies. Even IT was coordinated about activity from glee fans. Little bad things. Is the world shaped more or less by coordinated about activity by gli fans? It's more than you think yeah but it's because everyone just wants the feedback and .

twitter was there to provide yeah and I feel like we also never figure out 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. We're just like four people being that on twitter.

And we get to the point like there is a whole genre of story on the internet that was like the internet is not about X, Y and z and IT just would in bed for tweet as like evidence of the internet being mad about something and that's so not reflective of anything is like I could find four people who believe anything, little anything at any. Yeah, exactly. And so I I think part of what has been so strangers 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 I was like, I think there were people who used twitter in 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 valued you to twitter that I think is not being replaced really anywhere. And I think that's really interesting.

But this thing that I was just like, I just felt lively in at whatever you Carried 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 out how to put any of that in context. Like, I think that was, I think IT was charly wortle, who's now of thy atlantic at one point, who said to me, like, and anytime I read the internet on the internet, I read twelve people on twitter. And IT changes the context of how you think about everything. And I still think about that all the time.

Everything will take. Talk to you is like people say people want to .

talk and like not really a video.

And you can even find, at least on twitter, you can go fine, the four people and take, 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 is very negative. Force is first because what IT has become and all this has gone away from IT.

But I 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 spoke in a long time and every now again, I see someone doing IT and I take a drag in the next day and like why I am still coughing ing when I smoke, IT ruled like was the best. And I like organized my days around this activity and then I quit and I was really hard to quit. But there is 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 gna quit. But IT made everyone's life exciting.

I can't tell him talking with twitter now. Twitter made everyone's a life exciting, like most people's lives not inherently exciting. I'll give you this one example.

I think about this all the time. I love watching like cooking tiktok. Here's all this move in in foods.

Like make everything from scratching. Like do things the hard way or being natural. And you know, if you weren't doing this on camera to an audience, this would be so bored.

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 a special occasion. If this, if your life is just like this mundane every single day, like, of course, you're gonna a go look for some outside validation.

And what phones generally have brought people is. 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 of IT, 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 sensitive excitement that they too could like reach the audience. And that change the nature, how we think about a lot of things, positive and negative tally. There's something to mind there.

There's something to take out of there that says, oh, we can actually make our lives like meaningfully different and Better. If we are just careful to not bring the baggage of the noise long with us. I don't know that we're going to be careful. I think we're probably 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 one hundred degree and IT made everything feel chaotic and probably tic and everything moved too quickly. But I also had that like IT vive in a way that nothing else like IT has.

And we're seeing this on threads now too, where where they've like very deliberately turn that dial down from a tender like a four and IT feels way less fun. It's like you can still find some of that. They're still community.

They're still interesting people. All that's up at this sense of lake, something is happening. I have to go on twitter or just this feeling like my pocket is buzzing because something is always happening underneath that twitter icon.

Like did you have notifications? Turn on twitter until the very end?

No, dear god.

no H I turned n off notifications on twitter like the second year as like I know.

Thank you all the people who had notifications on from Donald trump and he was president during that presidency is like, I have yeah anyone who had twitter notifications on after about two thousand and fourteen was like a gutton for punishment yeah but there was, I just mean like that that feeling of, like, if I hit the twitter icon on my phone, something is going to be happening.

Like, is that a problematic drug in a very real way? Yes, but I 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 is much Better run. And I actually don't think the outcome ends up being all that different because I just I just seems to me you can't have .

one side of that without the other. Yes, I did actually very early part of twitter. I was really into different communities. I was really to film twitter, and in all of those folks 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 that, like, look, those communities form everywhere. And in fact, that twitter ones were probably the most desperate because IT would didn't move so fast because I was like, just you'd get tons and noise and and there you would be like A I really like this movie too. Then somebody just blast in and say, like a horrible cuss, like chanted, you know, get out and and I think I thought Sarah jung's peace in the twitter package was was really good about was talking about this specifically that moderation because, you know, if you do that on a forum or live general or time or a read IT, even somebody going to come in to be like, no, you can do that. You you're out and kick you out and and twitter was always like, no, everybody's voice matters and like, we learned that actually some people are just jerks and their voice did like we don't actually need to hear a bunch of cusses in a row after like an interesting conversation.

Speak for yourself. Well.

I think the other put that, alex, is like if you went on letter box and just like started causing IT people like they would either kick you out of letter box or just be like we don't talk about that here, right? And like read IT would do that too. They have moderators to do that up.

But twitter was just like IT was everything everywhere all the time. So it's like as long 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 you're flight is delayed.

And now we've gone down a whole crazy rabid hole away, away from what we are like us sensibly here to talk about or why you follow me in the first place. And just it's like that poll is so intense that I feel like even like film. Twitter eventually became politics and twitter because I was just the thing IT felt like everybody was talking about. And if so, you have to be like personally discipline to not do that. And I think if twitter taught us anything, it's that we're not personally discipline to not do that.

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

there's something in there too that is very important that there was total collapse and form on twitter. So if you watch a tiktok and like the tiktok IT is perhaps likely that you'll make a dewa or a stich or something, it's much more likely additionally, the text comment, and that means you have sort of down ranked yourself in the experience, right?

The video is the the primary element in the near comment is next to IT and maybe people will will never see IT. And even if you make a duet video, you going to see and let you find your video, right? It's not in line on twitter.

It's all the same, right? Someone tweet and someone replies and it's all the hierarchy that information is the same, which meant driving by cosworth 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 ten thousand people below its saying the point of that was the world ratio.

That's like fascinating. Like that's a pretty media studies. P, H, D, like that.

The only platform I can think of that truly works like that, even texted st. On facebook don't truly work like that. Twitter, the absolute collapse, I think just LED to radically different.

Yeah one again, like the the threats example there is really interesting is like adam msy even talked about that in the 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 threats is not actually paying 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 get downright in the algorithm. And just because everything is algorithm makes like you just end up playing a different game.

Where's twitter? Even though his agreement was so much less carefully created for your interest that there was just this sense of like you could just tweet the world ratio and there was a really good chance IT was going to show up in somebody y's time line and like, yeah and again, I feel like and you talk about this in your pieces, I like the upside of that was IT IT brought in new voices who never would have had a chance. Other's, they gave everybody what amounts to, like, one to one access to everybody else, which is terrifying and like exhilarating all 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 IT feels like I almost wish we had gotten like fifty 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. Let's like, would jensie have figured that out and have like healthier relationships on twitter? You don't think so.

No, I think in one very important way, gene is much worse at technology than anyone cares. To me, like this is a generation that does not know a file systems we've written next where we just link that for 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 meaning full measurable ways like an entire generation of milenio were like experience, the I did bad tweet problem, and like just loudly stuck their finger in the outlet for all the world to see over and over again in all all of jensie. Just watch that. I would just like .

to interpret quickly till let our jene audience know that new zed email address is new.

This, no, this is, this is. You can even really in the time i'm genets so i'm outside of this, I cast no this persons and anyone. I think all of you should get off my one good pets to work.

We don't remember your generation.

It's fine. I raised myself, Alice, but I think the the media literacy of, oh, I need to create this persona for the world. My social media presence is something I need being controlled LED.

That that was the water right like that. That's very native. That's on a new idea. And so I don't know jensie would have figured out as much as they would have stopped using the tool in a way that made IT as viBrant.

And this is so to that point, actually one of the things i'm curious what you guys think is if we are ever going to get something like this again, because I think, on the one hand, nobody would have predicted twitter to turn out the way that I did, right? IT. IT grew in weird, unusual, surprising ways.

And I think IT did a lot of things really well. And I was like culturally viBrant in ways that very few tech products have ever been culturally viBrant. To the point retch a carson is reading, alex is tweet on television, which like, if you just think about IT, is objectively insane. Like nothing about that makes any a sense not just you cry no.

I agree. I we talk about a decade of .

cable news is just like news hankers reading to IT to each other yeah and like IT IT really.

really was IT was just the worst podcast of all time for four years. CNN was just very expensive haircuts reading tweet.

But I also think like to your point, me like 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, two thousand and seven. So like threads kind of wants to be twitter, which kind or doesn't to be twitter. X kind of 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 tony fifteen?

I totally don't think so. In my my rationale for this is that essentially the internet happened and and everybody could sudenly communicate. And then twitter and in facebook, all these things we're like, okay, what if everybody could communicate? What if tucker carson, alex grant, David, sick age, we're all in paris, Morgan, over in the corner, we're all in the same coffee shop.

Wouldn't be great. I would go to that coffee shop so quickly just to see nicky mistake David for peers. And then turn on the more good like.

yeah and that sounds really compelling, right? That sounds I got cool as coffee shop, but we're all talking at the same volume and also there's one hundred thousand people all talking at the same value in the same coffee shop. And we realize way to minute that's actually too much.

Actually we do. And and we've seen that, right? We've seen like the decentish zone. So media um and is helping 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, says, cues or pears. Morgan, just accidentally like nicky manoj treeing at David instead of peers. Morgan, that's actually bad.

We don't want that. And so I think click 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 and kind of what our package is about, what we've 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. I'll realized together, no, this is and actually something we want like I think the the market spoke in the market was all of humanity coming together and saying.

never mind as a raises uh this point in the piece that I wrote, uh, he said he thinks that twitter reached its peak IT sort of twenty twenty with covered in the black lives matter protein, that whole reckoning that occurred and the sof 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 in that barrels straight into january six, that bail straight into iran buying twitter.

And you see that his point was, even if you, elon, hadn't about twitter and turned in the accents of dismantle, that the institutions were pushing back on IT. They were saying this is too much and people like israel, we're saying this is too much, and I need to get away from IT. And so there would have been a natural pendulum, m swing, based on how intense twenty twenty was. But anyone should happen.

He just accelerated. He put a little rocket on the time, right?

Is like, here's a falk and that doesn't work.

But yeah, I think that's right. I think it's like if 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 pending mic spt, a lot of that up. It's definitely true that you must a lot of that up. But I think this was all kind of coming anyway.

And I do think I think you're right, crank that like at some point in the last five years, everybody kind of looked around him, like this is all a mess and like this day 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 am not interested in knowing, and this is not helpful or good or making me feel Better. And IT was onna happen eventually. But that said, I will look back on this whole era as like pure chaos. But there were good times and friends and name in oh, now.

And I think IT was A A really important era. And I think I think we still haven't fully grasped just how big and impacted IT out on this culturally. And like as a society, I do think that IT was a big deal and and it's a we're gonna 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 lake neck at gum phase cutting 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 vate.

Yeah, I mean, is is threads gonna neck at or is this going to be a druel or is going to be there was weird off prin nickey's you can buy IT the cvs i've gone through IT. I've just saying ideally, we have none of them. We are not reliant on even weaker diluted centralized social native 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 talking to a former verge reporter, now platform managing editor. So we have about this and we serve landing an idea that twitter is defined the story of twitter is defined by two power users, Donald trump in elan musk and like that. It's a it's that's a fun thing to think through.

And so on the color, and you can listen that episode we thought IT through together, and I was, but these a setback. Like, should that be how the world works? Like, should that be how media works? And 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 model networks. But i'm hopeful, i'm hopeful that threads is successful because I they're gonna federate and you know, ever knows I feel about that, but i'm also a much more helpful that people seek out smaller pockets of the internet, and that is actually what we aim for as supposed to just mindlessly centralizing once again.

Yeah, I think that 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 hard to do.

I think it's okay. And and i'm going to point back to fandom because my my big theory of the universe is fan m is we're 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 what pad, and that's just inherently hysterically to do that anyway. But you're seeing Younger was particularly Younger people like Younger gens e and genie and like we don't like that. And then like all the old millennial and and genetics is being like we also don't like that. And so you're seeing people reject IT in a way that feels like harting not totally.

It's still the alignment .

right there. Yeah just but like like Young, millennial and older jensie are still like, I just do IT I like I have A I write by one direction fan fan k and is like, think about what you've just said and do you really want that to be your legacy online?

Alex is the email is alex are.

You use an A I to write your fix.

your bets, and alex links all of your favorite A I generated and fix, please.

I do actually want to read that.

Alright, we need girl. I will miss twitter. Yeah, i'll just say that was good. We had a good run. I miss when I could just, dm, random strangers who happened to follow me on the internet, access those. Look at this.

My entire personality was like Miller light in maroo lights. I was good, had a good time in my.

and I have to figure out a new thing yeah, it's time you're same for all of us. Figure out a new thing that's twenty twenty four goal, the end, twenty twenty four. We're going to come back. We're going to do this, were going to say, what's our new thing? It's going great, right?

Thank you about yeah good twitter. Yes, I love IT.

right? We got to take one more break and then we're going to get to the first chase hot line. We wear that.

Hey, italian from decoder with neither top. We spent a lot of time talking about some of the most important people in taking business about what they're putting resources to and why do they think it's so critical for the future. That's why we're doing this special series, diving into some of the most unique ways companies are spending money today.

For instance, what does that mean to start buying and using A I at work? How much is that costing companies? What products are they buy? And most importantly, what are they doing with IT? And of course, podcast? Yes, the thing you listen to you right now, well, it's increasingly being produced directly by companies like venture capital firms, investment funds and a new crop of creators who one day want to be investors themselves.

And what is actually going on with these acquisitions this year, especially in the A I space, why are so many big players in deciding not to acquire and instead license can hire away co founders? The answer, IT turns out, is a lot more complicated than that seems. You'll hear all that and more this month. I'm decoder with light detail presented by strike. You can listen to decoder whatever you get your pocket.

right? We're back. Let's do a question from the verge cast hot line.

As a reminder, you can always email verge cast at the virt dot com or call eight, six, six verge one one to reach us. We try to answer at least one question every week. Thank you.

As always, everybody calls and emails. We've gotten tons of stuff about the USB c epo de in particular. Very excited.

Thank you to everybody who was 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 calling through my iphone photo library. My most recent number in my iphone photo library is seventy four thousand, two hundred and twenty four photos. We can all be real about the fact that these are not all photos that I need to have in my life.

And I am wondering if there's any at website, any kind of tool that any of you have used that has been helpful in terms of creating your photo library in mass. Actually want to that big hope you cannot know. Thank you. O, K, I have a bunch of thoughts on this subject. The first thing I would say is take all of those photos, all seventy four thousand, 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 the 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 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 screwed down and you get to the list of media types.

And that 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 screen shots saved here, and I don't need any of them. So if you just open up Green shots, you can select all really easily delete them.

That's a huge portion of them gotten. You can do the same with videos, with self is 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 why would start. The second thing is to go to duplicate, which is down at the very bottom of that almost page, and merge all the duplicate 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 are moving stuff around between devices, odds are you going to get duplicate photos. And the iphone is a pretty good job of managing that and knowing when two photos are at nal. 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.

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.

啊。 Personally, I have mostly used swipe wipe, but both sy box and swipe wipe, these are ridiculous things to say out out 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 keeper toss, keeper toss, keeper toss, slide box, I think has more organization. You can put them into albums and suffering that. But for me it's just like writing left.

Keep don't keep is a surprisingly quick way to get through a tonne photos. They both costs some money. But if unremembering ing correctly, slide box I think is ten dollars once for the premium account.

Then you get up and swipe, wipe, I think, is more expensive. It's like six books a week, but you get three days for free. So if you just want to do IT once and just like spent a couple of hours going through all of your photos, you can do IT without having to pay any money.

And that's actually what I would do. My favorite later 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 the lake, put on a podcast or watch a movie and just swipe through photos, just swipe swiped, swipe, swipe.

And you'll be amazed how quickly you get through stuff. Seventy four thousand 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. So that's what I would do.

I am sure there are other apps. If you have one that you really like for organizing and cleaning up your camera roll. Let me know again, verge, cast to the verge outcome, eight, six, six.

Verge, one, one is the hot line number. But again, back on all up somewhere. And then slide x and swipe wipe, or the two that I ve found that I really like.

They're very helpful. I hope that helps. And if you get through, I wanted know how many of those seventy four thousand actually sick around. So keep me posted.

All right.

That is IT for the verge cast today. Thank you to everybody who is on the show, and thank you, as always, for listening. There's lots more on everything we talked about at the first shot com.

The twitter package is fantastic. John holster has been doing amazing coverage of the epic versus google trial that we're going on friday, but there's a ton news there decides has been really great even as we went towards the holidays. So come check out the home page, but also puts them in in the show notes.

Find our bylines goods up everywhere if you have thoughts, questions, feelings, favorite tweet or anything else you want to talk about again, you can always email us verge cast at the verge dot com or call the hotline eight, six, six, five, 一， one. We do a how line question at least once every week, so you can comment, this show is produced by any marino, leon, James and William poor cases of production in part of the x media. d. Mei, alex and I will be back on friday to talk about, like I said, epic versus google, all the stuff going on with peeper and apple and lots more. You see IT and rock.

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