Twitter As We Know It Is Gone. Here Are 17 of Its Greatest Tweets.

Elon Musk, another billionaire afflicted with the disease of being addicted to the computer, recently bought Twitter “for teh lulz XD” and as a result is probably going to tank it inside the next week. After firing a huge amount of people (including news curation teams), and implementing various nonsense policies, including, phenomenally, what amounts to a ban on anyone impersonating a verified account – which was IN NO WAY a reaction to the recent meme whereby people were pretending to be him – it seems that Elon is taking us straight through to the end days of twitter.com.

In a lot of ways, it would not be particularly sad to see the back of the most soul-sucking website on earth, on which people call each other “murderous cunts” because of their attitudes towards letting pet cats outside, though to say that Twitter has done no good would, in all fairness, be wrong. 

It is the site of the internet’s all time greatest posts – where language twirls and transforms in the air, “them slags” spinning magnificently in the halflight – though so far any attempts to memorialise its status as such have been crap, twee, and written by people not nearly internet-pilled enough. 

That is where I, a person whose brain has been annihilated by many years of devotion to the bad screen, come in. In order to preserve Twitter’s most actually important moments of human genius in amber (or at least on VICE.com), lest Elon Musk should accidentally sit on the button that wipes the whole site off the face of the earth (likely), I have used my useless but encyclopedic knowledge to assemble its actual Hall of Fame posts – the ones that have burrowed into people’s brains so unavoidably that they’ve essentially become adages in themselves – here. You know it’s decent because “jail for mother” did not make the cut. 

Flying out of the gate here, we have both a) one of the greatest observations ever made about respectability politics and the transactional nature of sex and attention in the contemporary emotional economy, and b) the phrase “fuck the Text Man for texts” which is funny to weaponise against any particularly down bad friends.

A relatively new entry to the canon, but it excoriates essentially every single person I know who dates men, which is how you know it’s good.

As she so often does, Cher said it best. This tweet is perfect at the level of both content – indeed, this is existentialist philosophy that interrogates the alienation of the individual from their own self, as fostered by capitalism – and form, as punctuation is eschewed for a focus on the urgency of the sentiment. It is also written in the exact cadence used by girls crying in smoking areas. 10/10.

Very few people with a hit rate on the tweets like the man known as @DaftLimmy and no Hall of Fame would be complete without him. While his eternal wind-up “sound of the summer” tweet is legendary, it’s this bang on mockery of the smug, performative, tightly smiling way people talk about dead people that burrows its way into the brain most of all, to the point where I immediately thought it when the Queen died.

Years ago when Twitter was good, or at least better and mostly populated by users trying to have the craic rather than like, the “no kink at Pride” people, it was down in large part to Scottish Twitter. It was definitely a place and time thing – probably killed off by the Scottish tourist board using big tweets on billboards – but some Scottish Twitter tweets have gone the distance, and I’d like to put forward the theory that this one has endured for the simple reason that to be honest sometimes ye do jus wanty wrap yersel up in tin foil nice and cosy and then just fucking get right inty the microwave and blow yersel up tae fuck. Sometimes you do!

There are some tweets where it’s useless trying to explain why they are funny and this is one of them. The first time I read this I cried laughing for like 15 minutes.  

Tale as old as time: power user @MULLET_FAN_NEO epicly owns brand account. Lots of reasons why this is so good – “ON HERE”; the annoying Pret-like way the Toblerone account is tweeting that everyone hates but that brands insist on for some reason – but it does ultimately come down to “FUCK OFF YOU TRIANGLE CUNT”, which is of course pure, perfect music.

Some tweets are good because they are really funny (see: above); some are good because you end up using them as a frame of reference literally every day (see: this one). I can’t believe this was only first tweeted in 2019 because it feels like an ancient scroll or something.

This is not an especially earnest list in terms of honouring any particular Twitter milestones, but the Zola Thread of 2015, tweeted by Zola aka A’Ziah King, about a deranged weekend she had in Florida, makes the list because it marked the invention of the thread, and is also a narrative masterclass (sorry to Mrs Dalloway and the flowers but “Y’all wanna hear a story about why me and this bitch fell out?” has to be the most compelling opening line of all time).

It is a crime that threads started out this well and have since seen themselves co-opted by the “BUCKLE UP GUYS IT’S STORYTIME” crowd, who proceed to write 40 tweets about something banal that happened to them in the supermarket, but Zola’s remains the original and the best, and genuinely expanded the potential of what Twitter could be.

No tweeter has impacted the game like @dril, a user so naturally gifted that seeing him tweet is like watching Michael Jordan play basketball in 1993, or hearing Brian Cox tell someone to fuck off. While some of his tweets now seem passe, that is simply a result of the impact they have had, though if you had to label any @dril tweet as definitive you would probably select this one, I guess because it was one of the first to inspire widespread memeification across the site. You do, however, also have to admire it on its own terms, which are utterly stupid and therefore completely sublime.

Probably the single most important entry into the “changing your screen name and avatar while verified” genre of comedy tweet – thank you, Jaboukie.

Here Patti Harrison perfected the above form and also showcased the best possible use of Twitter in its current era i.e. boiling the piss of a brand via identity politics and then getting kicked off the site forever. 

The greatest commemorative tweet – or indeed statement – of all time. Belongs on a plaque somewhere, should be carved in marble. 

9/11 has inspired not one but two of the best tweets ever, the second of which comes from Donald Trump – a hideous and vile person, and an absolutely liquid gold tweeter – who, pre-presidency on 11th September 2013, just wanted to cordially extend to everyone, even his personal enemies (who at that point included Kristen Stewart), a very happy anniversary of the single most catastrophic contemporary event to befall his country.

A quick moment for Football Twitter which occasionally remains one of the only lights in the barren, banterless darkness of the site as it currently exists. “Hi rio do u want picking up in the morning pal” – a tweet sent by Wayne Rooney, presumably meant to be a DM for Rio Ferdinand, but which to this day has, gloriously, not been deleted – is one of the classics, and has since become a mainstay of shithousing when someone is, as the parlance goes, “owned” (i.e. “Liz Truss do u want picking up in the morning pal” might have got you like, 12 favs when she resigned the other week).

One of the stupidest exchanges that has ever happened not only on Twitter but in the history of the planet. You could have existed at any point during humanity’s long slog, but you were blessed enough to be here for @1886_ArsenalFC typing “He’s 28 until he becomes 29. That’s how it works”. Doesn’t that make it all worth it?

Very, very occasionally, in among the idiocy and “debate” about whether certain members of society are as entitled to human rights as others, Twitter is capable of profundity. Though it was disappointing to find out that the @Horse_ebooks account didn’t just bizarrely conjure this up out of an algorithm, it’s still maybe the most concise encapsulation of what it is like to have a brain right now. 

In fact, the simplicity of the statement kind of gets to the heart of Twitter itself – why we find it so hypnotic, why it is so bad for us, and why so few of us can quit it. Perhaps soon we will be forced to, and perhaps that will be a good thing. The Michael Caine “locked in attick” tweet will simply have to live on in our hearts.

@hiyalauren