The Year Twitter Died ⇥ theverge.com

The Verge put together a package of articles about the year Twitter died, and it must be seen to be believed. There is a slider in the lower-left so you can adjust the “Chaos” level of the layout but, even in its most normal setting, it is a uniquely challenging series to read.

If you move past that, you will find a few articles worth your time:

• Zoë Schiffer wrote about Twitter’s purported founding ideals and how it changed, even before it was acquired.

• Sarah Jeong recalled, in the best article of the set, the circumstances of targeted harassment against her, and how Twitter combined out-of-context musings and direct personal access to produce mob-like conditions.

• Nilay Patel covered the effect of Twitter on journalists individually and media as a whole.

There is also a collection of truly excellent tweets presented in, to the best of my knowledge, the most inefficient manner possible. I am not linking to it because it was — I shit you not — a 350 megabyte webpage this morning. Several hours later, it is now a 15 megabyte page on initial load which makes Vivaldi consume more than one CPU core constantly. At any rate, the HTML alone is 2.1 megabytes; the rest is a massive amount of decoration. It is a shame because I love a collection of funny tweets. I cry laughing every time. But I cannot, in good conscience, link you to something so inefficient and reader hostile.