Jon reviews his old crappy tweets (2024)

A while back, Twitter introduced a "request your archive" feature. It is available on the settings page, and you should not click the button unless you want to grind your teeth into cricket flour.

If you've ever looked through decade-old emails you've sent, you can partially grasp the feeling, but only partially. Even all those years ago, you probably had a pretty decent grasp on the basic nuances of email. Twitter, on the other hand, is a profoundly different medium that exploded in popularity very quickly, and it kind of messed us all up.

In lieu of looking through your own sh*tty tweets, I am offering mine up for tribute. Here is my first tweet of all time. Let's see what you were up to, Jon!

In The Old Days, PittsburghPirates Were Actual Pirates http://sbnation.com/e/920425
— Jon Bois (@jon_bois) November 13, 2009

Jon, you're an enormous dipsh*t.

For the first couple months, my Twitter was nothing more than an auto-tweeting link dump. When I published an article, the system tweeted the headline and link from my account. You canview the story here if you want. In November, a month completely saturated with sports, I decided to post something on a century-old baseball poster on no occasion that nobody had any reason to care about. I didn't even post the poster itself, I tried to tell you to click through to another site to look at it.

This is the most useless piece of content anyone has ever written. And to sell it, I decide it's good enough to just Tweet Out The Headline With Every Word Capitalized and just drop it in front of you like it's a rent check. Good job, Jon! Heh! Write about some sports, share it on Twitter! This'll get people talkin' and get 'em clickin'! Heh! God you're such a goofus.

B-B-B-Bengals And The Jets, As Simulated By Tecmo Super Bowl And Madden 10 http://sbnation.com/e/1005844
— Jon Bois (@jon_bois) January 9, 2010

Heh, an Elton John reference ... right on, right on ... cool beans ... gotta, uh, gotta click on that ... good stuff, cool deal ...

I sent out like 50 of these before I ever actually wrote an actual tweet. It's a tweet in the same way the protein bars made out of co*ckroaches in Snowpiercer were food. The actual post, by the way, was about how I simulated that day's Bengals-Jets playoff game in Madden. I didn't show any of the game or talk about anything that happened in it, I just posted the final score.

This is completely sub-useless for any reader, of course. And at the time, I knew it was sub-useless. Here was the deal: as SB Nation's weekend editor, I ran the entire website by myself on the weekends. There were no other editors, and there were no other writers. I had to write a news update about a golf tournament I wasn't watching, and then write a short op-ed of some kind, and then post an injury update about a player I had never heard of, and then update a post about a coaching search in a sport I knew jack sh*t about, and then desperately make up some other sports opinion to have. I was one guy doing about six to nine peoples' jobs, and doing a horrible job at all of them.

See Also

Google Earth Studio

Tiny gadgets are everywhere these days. Smaller TVs, phones, & computers. Seems like the only thing getting bigger...is my credit card bill!
— Jon Bois (@jon_bois) March 18, 2010

This one didn't get any favorites or replies either, but I'm still pretty happy with it. Actually, the complete absence of interaction makes this so much more beautiful. I could knock the capital letters off this thing and tweet it out right now. It would get a few favorites and replies, and if you were a stranger who stumbled across it, you'd see those interactions and think, "OK, well, at least this tweet is 'for' somebody out there."

But this tweet just sits here, like a tri-fold "global warming is a hoax" display all the adults are ignoring at a science fair. There is no evidence that anyone ever acknowledged it. This is from a time when I had very few followers, and hadn't really tweeted a lot of silly stuff yet. I don't think people really knew what they were looking at. They probably just thought I was a giant idiot.

If this were anyone other than me, my heart would break. There are few things sadder than a stupid lonely person.

4
— Jon Bois (@jon_bois) March 17, 2010

I never even saw this until today. It took me more than five years to notice it. I'm pretty sure it's my only butt-tweet. But hey, I tweeted it at 4:20. And you know what that means! Heh! Bet I was--

wait, that's 4:20 on a wednesday morning

good god jon get your sh*t together

In my opinion. University of Louisville fields a basketball team that plays against other basketball teams.
— Jon Bois (@jon_bois)March 11, 2010

This is the exact sort of thing you tweet when you have absolutely nothing to say but still harbor an overwhelming urge to take up two and a half seconds of everyone's time. That urge is very real, and explains about 30 percent of my tweets to this day.

Around this time I was using a barely-working desktop I had built, and I squinted at an old CRT box monitor all day. The display was so blurred-out and fuzzy that half the time, I honestly couldn't tell whether I had typed a period or a comma. That explains the weird punctuation. As I would later learn, this problem can be avoided if you just stop using punctuation altogether.

Sorry about the brief site issues, everybody. SB Nation is now back in action.
— Jon Bois (@jon_bois) March 14, 2010

Building a site from nothing is really hard.

Prior to 2009, SB Nation was a collective of team-specific blogs that had their own unique ecosystems, but the actual main site -- sbnation.com -- was really just a portal to take you to those blogs. We weren't sprouting off from some huge existing publication, and social media wasn't what it is now, so we couldn't pull in a lot of traffic that way. It started from scratch, more or less.

So we all recognized that the first few months were about figuring it the hell out. (SB Nation had a "beta" tag on its logo for the first year.) During my shifts as weekend editor -- which would have made me the boss, were there other people around to be the boss of -- there was this unmistakable sensation that I was working on the Moon. Nobody commented on any post, ever. I'd look over at the real-time traffic data and see that literally 21 people were visiting the site, and only four or five were actually clicking around on it.

Then I'd look back to the recap I was writing of that night's regular-season Hawks-Magic game. I was recapping a game I didn't watch, because there were only so many things I could actually watch. As I painstakingly tried to assemble the box score into some sort of farcical account of the game, I'd know that a) three human beings would see it, and b) I was letting them all down. Both felt bad; the latter felt horrible.

But I kept my head up, because there wasn't really a choice. And I'd tweet things like this

Sorry about the brief site issues, everybody. SB Nation is now back in action.
— Jon Bois (@jon_bois)March 14, 2010

to my 77 followers and pretend that any of them gave a sh*t. Right now, no one does. Nobody, Jon. The good stuff comes later. You don't get to have that stuff yet. Right now, you will sit in your monitor-lit apartment with both its ceiling lights shorted out, hunched over a keyboard with the 7 key missing and a pencil you use to poke the contact whenever you need to type a 7, and you will get to work shoveling dung for nobody.

Oh, and stop capitalizing your tweets, you chucklef*ck. Capitalizing on Twitter is like swimming with your shirt tucked in.