Twitter Moments

» see twitter.com/moments as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

moments showed up in the twitter app on 6 october 2015 with a little lightning-bolt tab next to the home timeline. the idea was that the twitter editorial desk would pick big public events, an olympics opening ceremony, a debate, a hurricane, a season finale, and stitch the best public tweets about it into a swipeable story. you would open the tab, scroll a curated wall of context, and feel like you had caught up on whatever everyone was watching. it was the only place on twitter where a human at twitter itself was visibly making editorial choices.

regular users could also make their own moments. very few did. the friction was high (pick tweets one at a time, drag them into order, write a cover), and the reward was thin (a single moments page nobody had a habit of visiting). the feature lived in a separate tab on your profile and people forgot it was there. in march 2022 twitter quietly removed the ability to embed moments anywhere outside the app. in november 2022 musk's first wave of layoffs cleaned out most of the curation desk. by 8 december 2022 the create button was gone for everyone.

i had a twitter account through the moments years and never made one. i opened the curated tab during the 2016 us election and during the 2018 world cup and that was about the extent of it. for a turkish-language user the moments desk's editorial choices skewed heavily anglophone, which made the tab a window into what the new york twitter office thought was happening rather than a real local feed. the tab disappeared in app redesigns somewhere around 2017 and i stopped looking for it.

~ the chronicle ~

~ what it tried to be ~

moments was twitter's attempt to solve a real problem the platform had. for a non-user, a logged-out visit to twitter.com was incomprehensible: a wall of context-free replies and quote tweets about events you had not been following. moments was the onboarding answer. you could land on a moment page about the debate, see the ten or twelve tweets that captured the room, and leave with the sense that twitter had been worth opening. it was a curation product trying to fix a feed product.

the bet was that this would lift signups and time-spent for the casual visitor tier. it did not. casual visitors mostly did not come back, and the people who were already on twitter wanted the chaotic feed, not the curated digest. so moments became a thing the curation desk used during big public events and nobody else really touched. an editorial product without an audience is expensive to staff.

~ the actual end ~

musk closed the twitter acquisition on 27 october 2022 and started cutting roles within days. the curation desk was an obvious target: it was a clearly editorial team at a company being rebranded around algorithmic feeds and engagement, and most of its visible output was moments, an already-deprecated surface. by early november the desk was gone. on 7 december 2022 the platform pulled the create button for "most users" with the standard "as we focus on improving other experiences" language. existing moments stayed online as a museum, which is roughly the state they are still in.

the editorial-twitter idea did not get replaced. community notes, which musk leaned into in 2023, is crowdsourced moderation, not curated context. the long arc here is a platform giving up on having an editorial voice and committing fully to the algorithm. moments is the part of twitter that died first inside that decision.

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