2022 in Tweets
Documenting Twitter’s hot takes and main characters throughout another year of being extremely online.
January 2022
January Highlight: Wordle
Software engineer Josh Wardle created a word-guessing game for him and his partner in 2021. Josh called it ‘Wordle’ — a play on his last name. Players have six chances to guess a five-letter word on a 5×6 grid, with squares on the grid turning yellow if the player correctly guesses a letter, or turning green if the player correctly guesses both a letter and its position in the word. Josh’s family group chat on WhatsApp went wild when Wardle shared Wordle with them, so he released it to the world. The game refreshes each day with a new word for players to guess.
By January 1st 2022, the browser-based game had 300,000+ players.
Wordle, pre-Josh
As Wordle went viral, online audiences drew comparisons to similar concepts like Jotto (a pencil-and-paper game invented in 1955) and Lingo (a TV game show, first aired in the US in 1987), with varying degrees of nostalgic elation and generational gatekeeping. While some were happy that the word game had been adapted for modern times, others derided Wordle as a shameless rip-off. But the happy people were having too much fun to care.
Josh, pre-Wordle
During his tenure as a software engineer at Reddit, Wardle set the internet on fire twice — both times with April Fools’ Day experiments that turned into ephemeral cultural phenomena.
The first was The Button, which launched on April 1st 2015. It featured a simple button and a countdown timer which reset to 60 seconds every time the button was clicked. Users would get colors next to their usernames indicating how long they waited before pressing the button — purple for 60–52 seconds, blue for 51–42, etc. all the way down to red for 11–0 seconds. You were only given one chance to click. ‘Cults’ were ‘founded’ which only welcomed people with certain times, and light-hearted lore was written about each group. The purple group who clicked early were seen as open and friendly, while the red cult who dared to wait longest were viewed as mysterious and secretive.
The second was ‘r/place’, a one-million pixel (1000×1000) canvas which went live on the r/place subreddit on April 1st 2017. It invited users to place single pixels on the canvas in a color of their choosing. Within hours, countless communities — centered around countries, cities, bands, art, sports teams, TV shows, memes, etc. — rallied to collaboratively ‘paint’ sections of the chaotic canvas. 72 hours later, the experiment stopped, and the ‘piece’ was finished. Prominent spots include a retro Windows Start button and taskbar at the bottom, the Mona Lisa and ‘Rainbow Road’ in the middle, and the ‘Tragedy of Darth Plagueis the Wise’ copypasta towards the top.
(I proudly contributed four pixels to ‘Unregistered HyperCam’ in the top-right corner.)
Wardle led both of these projects with a team of engineers, but he built Wordle solo.
Wordle before Wordle
If the word ‘Wordle’ sounds familiar to you, you may recall it spending about a decade primarily referring to a form of tag cloud/word collage developed by senior IBM engineer Jonathan Feinberg. Feinberg created what would eventually become Wordle (the word cloud generator, not the game) back in 2004, and it grew into a Web 2.0 staple, appearing everywhere from blog sidebars to early web-based school homework portals.
Wordle blows up on Twitter
The majority of Twitter users learned about Wordle when their timelines started filling with green, yellow, and black square emoji. User @irihapeta is credited with first using these emoji to share their Wordle results (December 2nd 2021), spreading the idea through the #DailyWordleClub hashtag. Wardle noticed and, on December 16th 2021, he added a sharing function to the Wordle website which uses the emoji format. This feature being added just before everyone spent way more time on their phones during the holiday season blended up a perfect storm of virality.
Wordle’s success has been helped by how little time it requires from players each day, and the game has also been celebrated for its total lack of monetisation. At the time of writing, Wardle hasn’t placed any ads on the Wordle website, and as I write this (15th January 2022) it’s still free to play.
On January 11th 2022, Twitter user @zachshakked became one of the main antagonists of this story when he announced he’d “decided to make [his] own Wordle app, but with a twist!” Zach said the twist was that there were four-, six-, and seven-letter words in his iOS app ‘adaptation’ of the game.
The real twist was that Zach’s rip-off would, after a three-day free trial, charge players a yearly subscription of $29.99. Not long after his first tweet about his app, Zach posted another, boasting that nearly 1,000 people had started trials. “We’re going to the fucking moon,” he said.
A few days later, Apple had removed Zach’s Wordle clone (likely before any of the trial users got charged) and, after quadrupling down on his entitlement, Zach made his Twitter account private. I can’t currently see whether he’s deleted any of his tweets, so I’ll quote them as plaintext for longevity.
“Here were my calculations: a) Wordle is a rip-off of another game. b) ‘Wordle’ the word isn’t trademarked and there’s a bunch of unrelated word apps named the same thing. c) Wow, I’ll hack together something on the weekend and see if I can make a buck.”
“I used a similar UI because I made the app in a WEEKEND. I was already working on an update with a different UI. Twitter can be a fucking hellscape sometimes and you all need to calm down because this happens thousands of times per week with other apps.”
“This was the perfect storm to publicly crucify me for something that is common. In a week, my app would’ve looked totally different and had way more functionality beyond what [the] original dude did.”
“I don’t think people realize: I don’t need the app to be called Wordle for it to be successful. I can simply buy the Apple Search Ads slot for [the] ‘Wordle’ keyword and get cheap downloads and, eventually, the app, even with a [different] name, would rank for ‘Wordle’ since there is no app.”
“One thing people don’t realize is, I spoke on the phone with the creator of Wordle and, for 30 minutes, tried to convince him to a) let me pay a huge licensing fee ($100,000+), b) partner with me to develop the [official] Wordle app, or c) send him a percentage of the proceeds.”
“When he informed me that he wasn’t interested in that, I told him I would consider changing the name and was looking at other options when Apple removed the app and was fully prepared to do so.”
“Had I received a notice of dispute for Apple and had Josh shown me his legal basis for why he alone was entitled to use Wordle, which was being [used] by five other apps for years, I would’ve changed and was already considering due to his messages to me.”
When well-known developer, UI designer, and writer @gruber tweeted the following to Zach:
“Here you are the day after you trashed your personal reputation, still arguing that you’d only do what is obviously the right thing if you received a dispute notice from Apple or a legal one from Wordle’s creator, Why should he have to do anything at all to defend his creation?”
Zach replied: “Welcome to the world of business.”
Twitter quickly dug up some of Zach’s past tweets for a couple of “this you?” moments. The first is from 21st November 2020, in which Zach is airing his gripes about an app called Hashtag Planner copying the paywall design of his app, Hashtag Expert. “We reached out to Apple, had [Hashtag Planner] change it completely, and resolved the issue. I check their app again and now they are copying my NEW paywall! Are you freaking kidding me?”
The second was tweeted on June 21st 2022, in which Zach wrote: “I absolutely despise copycats. Shameless copying is so dumb. Take inspiration from others. Why are they doing that? Why is this a good feature for users? How can we build on top of that? Shameless copy/pasting ideas/features will get you nowhere.”
When screenshots of these tweets began circulating, Zach made his Twitter account private and updated his bio to say: “I got cancelled for making a Wordle clone.”
Meanwhile, another word game app named Wordle with completely different mechanics went similarly viral — five years since its creator, @StevenCravotta, published and last updated it! Steven tweeted that, after half a decade of one or two installs per day, he was shocked to see his download dashboard leap to nearly 200,000 as Wardle’s Wordle took off. Steven reached out to Wardle to discuss how they could donate the proceeds from the mountain of installs his app received overnight. The funds comprised thousands of dollars.
They chose Boost!, an organisation who provide free mentoring and tutoring to young people in disadvantaged areas of Oakland, California.
Those are the main heroes and villains of the Wordle story, but here’s an important epilogue: the green, yellow, and gray square emoji aren’t very accessible for people using screen readers, which read text out to them. @antagonistapp hacked together a translator of sorts in five hours. You paste in your jumble of emoji and it turns them into plaintext that’s easier for screen readers to comprehend. Learn more about accessibility on social media from @HashtagHeyAlexa.
I’ll round out this entry with some creative ways people have celebrated Wordle, including cross-stitching, a 3D render, a music sequencer, and a New Yorker cartoon.
January 1st
Mere hours before 2021 bid us adieu, @MNateShyamalan was informed by @PhilJamesson that jazz music is known as ‘jizz’ in the Star Wars universe. Discourse around the discovery spilled over into January 1st, with further research highlighting that people who play jizz music are called ‘jizz wailers’, and that one of the sci-fi universe’s most famous jizz wailers is named Droopy McCool.
January 3rd
On the first working day of the year, American beer brand @PabstBlueRibbon posted a now-deleted tweet that read:
Not drinking this January? Try eating ass!
The first wave of reactions pointed out that it wasn’t even 9am on the first Monday of 2022 — it was far too early to talk about eating ass.
Then came the hotter takes, with people taking aim at Pabst for making light of Dry January and opining that ‘Brand Twitter’ had fallen from Wendy’s-era highs to a ‘frat bro’ rock bottom.
Particular derision was cast on Pabst’s replies under their tweet, which doubled down with messages like “you need to get your ass ate,” which some users cited as nigh-on sexual harassment.
A couple of hours later, the tweet was deleted, and Pabst issued the following statement to Ad Age:
“We apologize about the language and content of our recent tweets. The tweets in question were written in poor judgment by one of our associates. In no way does the content of these tweets reflect the values of Pabst and our Associates. We’re handling the matter internally and have removed the tweets from our social platforms.”
January 4th
On January 3rd, user @TheFigen tweeted a video of a cuirass (breastplate) that was worn by 23-year-old cuirassier François-Antoine Fauveau during the June 1815 Battle of Waterloo. Fauveau was wearing the armor — which is currently on display in the Musée de l’Armée in Paris — when he was struck and killed by a cannonball.
A day later, @TheFigen’s video had been viewed millions of times, and people were making much ado about their choice of wording. User @PatMarion14’s reply — “Wounded????” — got thousands of likes from others who also bemusedly believed the completely pierced armor was clearly indicative of something more fatal than a ‘wound’.
Others argued that ‘mortal wound’ is very much a valid phrase; that ‘wound’ doesn’t necessarily downplay the lethalness of the strike.
January 5th
“Gorgeous gorgeous girls love soup” is a trending phrase that leapt from TikTok to Twitter in October 2021 and simmered under the surface for a few months before reaching fever pitch on January 5th 2022 with widespread usage by mortals and blue ticks alike.
The ancestral TikTok was posted by @fishdress on 23rd October 2021, and features its creator eating soup and chanting the words that would go on to define SoupTok and unite the ‘soup girl’ subculture.
In the months since, a couple of mildly viral tweets using the phrase as a framing device for endorsing something — spending NYE in bed, the color green, and, well… soup — spread the locution to distant corners of the bird app.
I’m placing this under January 5th because it’s the day brands began jumping aboard the bandwagon, signalling the trend’s saturation.
A few of them are featured under the originating TikTok below.
On January 3rd 2022, user @wumbooty tweeted this 35-second clip of Episode 4,077 of Sesame Street from May 3rd 2004, titled Elmo Feels He’s Treated Unfairly by Rocco:
In the clip, Elmo gets ready to throw hands at Zoe because she wants to give a cookie to her non-sentient mouthless pet rock Rocco instead of sharing it with Elmo, who is, of course, a real living creature.
The tweet blew up, getting tens of thousands of retweets and hundreds of thousands of likes. A couple days later, on January 5th, Elmo started dropping subtweets at Rocco, and Twitter loved it.
January 6th
You might expect the bird app’s ‘main character’ on the first anniversary of the January 6th 2021 attack on the US Capitol to snatch that badge by tweeting something controversial about the insurrection, but before the US woke up, UK Twitter had already been busy criticising 22-year-old reality-TV-star-turned-social-media-influencer-turned-creative-director Molly-Mae Hague for some tactless remarks that went viral before lunchtime.
Molly-Mae entered the British spotlight in 2019 when she participated and scored second place in dating game show Love Island, thus launching the social media stardom that led to her becoming creative director of UK fashion brand Pretty Little Thing — a subsidiary of Boohoo Group — in August 2021.
The now-viral snippet, tweeted by @tsrbys, comes from Molly-Mae’s appearance on former Social Chain co-founder Steven Bartlett’s ‘Diary of a CEO’ podcast.
A transcription:
“I just think you’re given one life and it’s down to you what you do with it. You can literally go in any direction. When I’ve spoken in the past, I’ve been slammed a little bit, with people saying: “It’s easy for you to say that; you’ve not grown up in poverty, you’ve not grown up with major money struggles. So for you to sit there and say we all have the same 24 hours in a day is not correct.” And I’m like: “but technically what I’m saying is correct – we do.” So I understand we all have different backgrounds and we’re raised in different ways and have different financial situations, but if you want something enough you can achieve it and it just depends to what lengths you want to go to get to where you want to be in the future. And I’ll go to any length. I’ve worked my absolute arse off to get where I am now.”
Reactions were predominantly negative, and largely focused on Molly-Mae’s lack of self-awareness about her own privilege as a white physically-independent individual born in a first-world nation. Some users highlighted the irony of her statements, given she’s the face of a brand whose owner paid factory workers less than minimum wage.
Others compared her celebration of ‘hard work’ and individualism to Thatcherism, and nodded to survivorship bias as one of the inherent risks of wider influencer culture. @Vvfabs wrote a thread about how such ‘bootstrapping to riches’ stories can cause young fans to internalise dangerous ‘anyone can achieve anything’ expectations.
The main counter-argument on Twitter wasn’t so much a defence of Molly-Mae as a posing of the question: if a man had said this, would he have been as widely-derided? And why hasn’t Steven Bartlett caught as much flack for platforming Molly-Mae’s views, especially considering the worker exploitation of Boohoo/Pretty Little Thing?
January 9th
The Golden Globes, a film and television awards ceremony voted on by the Hollywood Foreign Press Association, took place on Sunday 9th January in 2022. Back in 2021, the Awards rounded out years of fading relevancy with a sweeping snub of all the Black-led contenders. In 2022, their voice in the public’s stream of consciousness was even more of a whimper, with most attention being directed towards how strange their live Twitter coverage of the award announcements were. As @kylebuchanan noted, most announcement tweets didn’t even mention the winning projects.
When announcing that West Side Story had won the Best Picture award in the ‘Musical/Comedy’ category, @goldenglobes initially said (in a now-deleted tweet):
“If laughter is the best medicine @WestSideMovie is the cure for what ails you.”
Many found this strange, as West Side Story is quite a tragic story. It’s a modern take on Romeo and Juliet, after all. A replacement tweet soon followed:
While some came to the social media manager’s defence, most mocked the rewritten tweet by replying with a screenshot of the original or pointing out that ‘laughter is the best medicine’ is a known proverb, but ‘music is the best medicine’ is not.
Others opined that musicals and comedies shouldn’t be lumped into the same category, and that the Golden Globe Awards had become more reductive, not more inclusive or commemorative.
Have I missed something? Tweet me: @jeeveswilliams