We broke Twitter with #brands

Taking responsibility for the worst Magic Rec ever

by Casey Newton

Source Matthew_OG (Twitter)

Aug 18, 2014, 7:47 PM UTC

Part Of

Verge Hack Week 2014

see all updates

Casey Newton is the editor of the Platformer newsletter and cohost of the Hard Fork podcast.

Welcome to the first annual Verge Hack Week. We're totally blowing up our site: we've given our reporters and editors the entire week to play with new tools and experiment with new storytelling ideas, while members of our amazing product team have gathered in New York to help build all sorts of interesting new things. Learn more.

Earlier today The Verge wrote about Tumblr’s decision to let one of its partners start scanning all image uploads for brands, a move so momentous I was prompted to upload an easy one to get them started:

caseynewton

This somehow triggered Twitter’s Magic Recs algorithm, which is meant to alert Twitter users of important conversations taking place in the global town square. Immediately, anyone smart enough to follow me and executive editor Dieter Bohn were alerted that we were, well ...

This was actually more informative than I expected @CaseyNewton @backlon https://t.co/e5UsKkTxx6 pic.twitter.com/TzUfzsbHqI
— Matthew O-G (@matthew_og) August 18, 2014

To our knowledge, this is the worst Magic Rec that has ever been rec’d. It offers an important lesson that when you tweet about #brands, you are playing with dark magic, and should proceed with extreme caution. (My colleague Nathan Ingraham ignored this advice and created this spoken-word nightmare remix of me saying “brands” in various intonations; it is a weaponized form of audio that may disrupt your central nervous system.)

Anyway, our own Chris Ziegler may have said it best:

╭━━╮╱╱╱╱╱╱╱╱╱╱╭╮ ┃╭╮┃╱╱╱╱╱╱╱╱╱╱┃┃ ┃╰╯╰┳━┳━━┳━╮╭━╯┣━━╮ ┃╭━╮┃╭┫╭╮┃╭╮┫╭╮┃━━┫ ┃╰━╯┃┃┃╭╮┃┃┃┃╰╯┣━━┃ ╰━━━┻╯╰╯╰┻╯╰┻━━┻━━╯
— Chris Ziegler (@zpower) August 18, 2014