He logged trending Twitter topics for a year. Here's what he learned

Let's say you wanted to create a record of everything that happened in 2022, through the lens of social media. Where would you start?

Brian Feldman began and ended in the same place: the sidebar on the right-hand side of Twitter.com, which keeps a running list of trending topics in fields from sports to politics to entertainment.

The 31-year-old internet culture writer-turned-software engineer told NPR in a phone interview that he has long been fascinated by the sentences that attempt to describe the buzzy topics, as they either highlight seemingly insignificant things or try to boil incredibly complex topics down into just 280 characters. (That work was done by curators and according to an internal style guide).

"You can't sum up the political state of America in a tweet, for example," he says. "I both appreciated the effort and also could understand that, like, it's such a weird effort. And speaking in that sort of removed voice about anything from the White House to users debating which type of ginger ale is the best, it's inherently funny. It's the sort of thing where you don't have to write a joke, you can just sort of appreciate the oddness of it."

Feldman had taken screenshots of the sidebar whenever he logged into Twitter, both to document those efforts for himself and send the weirder ones to like-minded friends. But he thought it might be interesting to take a look at them in aggregate.

So this year, he went a step further by creating a website to publicly share the trending topics he had logged throughout 2022 — all 457 of them.

"What's Happening Online" organizes the descriptions both in a calendar view and a scrollable timeline that, as Feldman puts it, "you can read from start to finish if you have the patience and the stomach."

In a note explaining his motivation and methodology, Feldman says the project serves "both as a reminder of some of the b