About

Twitter .txt Accounts are novelty accounts on the social networking web site Twitter which tweet out-of-context quotes from other web sites with large quantities of user-made content. These quotes are typically chosen for their bizarre or cringeworthy content.

Origin

Tweeting out-of-context snippets for novelty Twitter profiles was originated by Horse_ebooks in 2009. One of the first Twitter accounts to quote a user-made source while using the "txt" name was @wwwtxt, which uses the source material of Usenet conversations between 1980 and 1994. The Twitter account, which has been running since October 2010, has made over 3,700 tweets and is followed by over 23,800 people.^[1]

Spread

In February of 2012, the Twitter account @Fanfiction_txt was created, which compiles various out-of-context quotes from the fanfiction website FanFiction.net. This account is one of the most popular "txt" accounts, with over 64,000 followers as of June 2015.^[2] In July of the same year, the account @TumblrTXT was created, which archived quotes from the social networking site Tumblr; at its peak, the account had over 30,000 followers, though in 2015 it was deleted and revived.^[3][4] In December 2012, an account for quotes from the question-and-answer site Yahoo! Answers was created; it has over 34,000 followers as of June 2015.^[5] Various other "txt" accounts were created in the following years, including those for Reddit, /r9k, PewDiePie, and creepypasta stories.^[6][7][8][9]

In May of 2013, humor website CollegeHumor published a list of "txt" accounts which it considered the best.^[10] In December of the same year, Internet news site the Daily Dot published an article about the @bitcoin_txt account, which uses quotes about the Bitcoin form of cryptocurrency.^[11]

Example Tweets

Search Interest

External References