I watched the Brazil-Germany game today with one eye on the TV and one eye on my phone, which in hindsight was a mistake, because somewhere around minute 29 my Twitter timeline basically stopped being useful.
If you missed it (how, I dont know, it was on every screen in every bar in this country by kickoff): Germany beat Brazil 7-1 in the World Cup semifinal at Estádio Mineirão this afternoon. Kickoff was around noon Eastern. By the 29th minute Germany had scored four goals in six minutes, on the 23rd, 24th, 26th, and 29th, and the game was functionally over before most people had finished their lunch. Brazil, the host nation, playing without Neymar and without their captain Thiago Silva, just fell apart. Its the kind of scoreline that doesnt really happen at this level, and I say that as someone who does not normally follow soccer closely enough to have opinions about formations.
What Im actually here to write about is what happened to Twitter.
I had the app open the whole match, mostly to see what friends who actually know soccer were saying, and by the third German goal the timeline was refreshing so fast it was basically unreadable. Not "slow servers" unreadable, more like the tweets were arriving faster than I could physically read them, which is a different problem and a more interesting one. I gave up trying to read individual reactions around goal five and just watched the numbers, retweet counts, favorite counts, tick up on a few posts in real time, which I dont think Id ever actually sat and watched happen before.
Ive seen social media get busy during big sports moments plenty of times. The Super Bowl blackout a couple years back, various Oscars mishaps, election nights. But this felt different in scale, and not just because I was paying closer attention than usual. People online were already saying it might be the single biggest sports moment in the platforms history, tweet-volume-wise, and honestly I believe it. My own replies section, for a throwaway joke tweet with maybe forty followers watching, got more activity in ten minutes than anything Ive posted in months.
There's something a little funny about a 7-1 humiliation being a landmark moment for a tech company's traffic graphs, but thats sort of how these things go now. The event and the record of the event happen at the same time, on the same screen, and Im not totally sure anymore which one Im actually watching. I caught myself glancing at the phone during an actual goal, which is objectively a stupid thing to do, and I know Im not the only one who did it because three different people posted screenshots of themselves doing exactly that.
Small complaint while Im here: my mom texted me the score before I saw the fifth goal live because she was watching a recap on the news, and it completely ruined the last twenty minutes for me. If youre going to text someone a soccer score, at minimum ask if theyre already watching first. This is not a hard rule to follow. Live TV plus social media plus a family group chat is a genuinely bad combination and I dont think weve figured out etiquette for it yet, five-plus years into everyone having a smartphone in their pocket during a game.
Brazil plays the third-place match on Saturday, and the final is Sunday, and I have to assume neither one generates a fraction of todays numbers, if only because the shock value cant repeat itself. You cant be stunned by the same thing twice. But it was a genuinely strange thing to watch happen in real time, the sports collapse and the internet collapse running in parallel, each one making the other more intense. I dont think Ill remember the exact score of the final. Im fairly sure Ill remember trying and failing to read my own timeline during the semifinal.
Anyway. Go outside, or dont, but maybe put the phone down for at least the actual goals.