Okay, so the other day, I got this idea stuck in my head. I wanted to dig up some of Kevin Durant’s really old tweets. You know, the stuff he posted way back before he became the superstar he is today. It just seemed like a fun little internet archaeology project.
Starting the Hunt
First thing I did was the obvious stuff. I just popped “Kevin Durant old tweets” into a search engine. That gave me a bunch of articles, blog posts, and videos talking about his famous old tweets, especially the controversial or funny ones. That was interesting, but it wasn’t what I was really after. I wanted to see the original stuff myself, kind of scroll through that period.
So, my next step was heading straight to Twitter. My initial thought was just to go to his profile, @KDTrey5, and start scrolling. Like, really scrolling. Down, down, down. Let me tell you, that got old real fast. The man tweets a lot! And Twitter isn’t exactly built for easily going back like ten years just by scrolling.
Getting Smarter with Search
I realized the scrolling method was a total bust. Had to be a better way. I started messing around with Twitter’s search functions. I remembered you could use specific commands to narrow things down.
This is what I tried:
- Using the `from:` operator: I typed `from:KDTrey5` into the search bar. This helped filter only his tweets, getting rid of all the noise.
- Adding date ranges: This was the key part. I started using `until:` and `since:`. For example, I’d search something like `from:KDTrey5 until:2012-01-01 since:2011-01-01` to try and capture tweets from 2011.
Finding the Goods (and some duds)
Playing with those date ranges was where I finally started hitting gold. It took some trial and error, adjusting the years, sometimes even months. Slowly but surely, tweets from his younger days started popping up on my screen.
It was pretty fascinating, honestly. You see a different side of him. Some of it was just mundane, everyday stuff. Some were thoughts on games, music, just random observations. Of course, some of the infamous ones people always talk about were there too. It felt like digging through a digital time capsule.
What I Learned
The whole process wasn’t super smooth. Twitter search can be a bit finicky sometimes. And you have to remember, people delete tweets, so you’re never going to get the complete picture from way back then. But it was still a cool exercise.
Mostly, it just reminded me how public everything is online, and how people change and grow over time. Seeing those old posts makes you realize these huge stars were once just young guys figuring things out, typing whatever popped into their heads, just like the rest of us. It was a fun way to spend an afternoon, just satisfying my own curiosity and doing a bit of digital digging.
