Yes, 2017's biggest tech story was probably about the ways in which social media forced us to rehash old culture wars and question who was guiding our political discourse. Rather than seeing technology facilitate greater communication, economic opportunity, and leisure, it seemed that it was exacerbating our differences, concentrating wealth, and threatening all livelihoods. But there was some good stuff too!

What a year, huh? While Facebook snooped on your family secrets, Trump tweeted us deeper into disaster, and various foreign objects were being pulled out of unsuspecting people's heads, there was some joyous things to behold too. Like a hand-squeezed Juicero bag, or a flat Earther trying to go to space to prove a point. The new iPhone also happened! Take a journey into a time you're going to miss next year. These are the 100 most popular Gizmodo posts from 2017 according to Google Analytics.

It's time to gaze into our crystal ball and see what the coming year has in store for science. From powerful new rockets and asteroid-sampling spacecraft to groundbreaking particle physics, there's plenty to look forward to in 2018.

Compiling the best and worst gadgets list this year I took note of a very sad fact: Google was on both lists. In its second year thoroughly devoted to the hardware game, Google managed to create earbuds so bad that storing them in their charging case requires a video explanation, and a laptop so fantastic I spend a lot of time on forums plotting ways to load a more useful operating system onto it. In the wide chasm between these two gadgets lies everything else Google announced this year, and together, the hardware paints a confusing picture. Google what the hell are you doing?

Astronomers spend their days looking at the sky. Maybe some crazy complex new telescope is helping, or some form of AI is teasing the complexities out of vast piles of data. It's still just the sky. The sky isn't immutable, though. Some of the most interesting science happens when brief blips pass into and out of existence. These dots send their light in the form of radio waves, microwaves, visible light and gamma rays into measuring apparatuses and tell us something new about the universe. They might even send space itself rippling with gravitational waves.

99.9 per cent of the time, I'm sure every Gizmodo writer is just like you: thoughtfully researching what products to buy, carefully anticipating how each purchase might turn out, and smartly considering our budgets, before handing over our hard-earned cash. But despite what you may think, we aren't perfect, people! Sometimes we make mistakes. Other times we fall for stupid, misleading Instagram ads. Sometimes awful shit just happens. So here's a list of our biggest purchase regrets of 2017.

Did you agree with every single entry and ranking on our best films and TV series of the year lists? We doubt it. After all, even we didn't agree on everything in there, so why would you? To give these aggrieved souls a chance to speak their mind, here are some of the shows and movies we wished we'd managed to sneak in there.

This year's genre fiction can be defined by many things, but weirdly enough, 2017 has been very big for Captains. Not majors, nor generals, not even sergeants or admirals or petty officers, or any other rank you can think of - just Captains, and here are how they all ranked this year.

Mercifully, 2017 has begun fading in the distance. It can be easy to look back at the last 355 days or so and see only the bad stuff - super easy, actually - but 2017 wasn't without its good days, too. We have huddled together to assemble lists of the past year's happy surprises and disappointments, so pull up a seat and get a big helping of what went down over the last 12 months.

This was a bad year, and these gadgets made it worse. Some were epic disappointments. Others were just ill conceived from the very beginning. These are the worst.

It's been a wild year for comics - full of swirling, grand relaunches and controversial events, but more importantly, some damn good books. As ever, it's tough to whittle down the multitude of stories and characters we've read about this year into a list of the best, but here are 15 of our absolute favourite comics of this year.

It's really not that hard to write a science news story, I promise. Some new scientific results come out, you talk to a scientist on the phone and ask them what they did, then you ask a few other people who know about the research if the results made sense. It's a lot like, well, any other reporting.

It's that time of year again when we look back at the photos and GIFs that went viral over the past 12 months. We did similar year-end round-ups in 2014, 2015, 2016 and I must say that 2017 was even weirder than usual. How so? There were so many fake images swirling around the internet that it was difficult to decide which ones to debunk.

It was a big year for the building blocks of life. Here are the most significant breakthroughs in genetics research of 2017.

Another hellish year on this mortal plane is about to come to a conclusion. Soon, hopefully, the abject mediocrity will fade and we'll forget everything that was boring or bland. Instead, we'll remember only the very best and the very worst. Being that this is a blog ostensibly about gadgets we felt it was important to remind you of the twenty very best gadgets from this year. Hopefully you'll remember some of them with fondness as the world grinds on.

If 2016 was the year of "Uber for X," 2017 was the year of Silicon Valley "inventing" things.

People like to believe that Apple is a company that never makes mistakes. Never has that logic been so obviously flawed as it was in 2017. This year, it seemed like Apple couldn't make it through a single week without some big, embarrassing screw up. So, for the sheer joy of it, we made a list.

Let's face it, even though phones continue to get faster and companies continue to cram even more tech into people's pocket computers, you wouldn't be wrong if you said smartphones have gotten a little boring to the casual consumer. Much of the time, it seems people are much more concerned with making sure there's a little fruit logo on the back of their handset or a small green robot man running things on the inside.

As 2017 comes to a close, it's as good a time as any to reflect on how the year went for some of the most attention-grabbing tech companies, ordered here conveniently from most screwed to least screwed.