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I Made a Self-Quoting Tweet

oisinmoran.com

11–20 of 145 posts

Re: I Made a Self-Quoting Tweet

#11

Interesting, I wondered if the same can be done on hn. Likely easier since the IDs appear to be sequential. But one can simply edit their post to point to the URL too if they wanted, so it defeats the fun of the exercise.

In a similar vein, Reddit's "self" posts were originally formed by users submitting posts linking to themselves, by guessing the URL for the next submitted post.

Re: I Made a Self-Quoting Tweet

#12
post #10
post #7

My personal fave. https://twitter.com/SarnatsPointer/status/253602578695344128

I think I'm missing a tweet of context. I get that they quoted their own url, like in the top article, but then the account replies "Ugh, busted :(" to someone who has their tweets protected.

As I recall, the trick is that you can post a tweet, grab the URL, then if you edit it quickly enough it won't show up as edited.

Re: I Made a Self-Quoting Tweet

#13
post #10
post #7

My personal fave. https://twitter.com/SarnatsPointer/status/253602578695344128

I think I'm missing a tweet of context. I get that they quoted their own url, like in the top article, but then the account replies "Ugh, busted :(" to someone who has their tweets protected.

It's just Twitter engineers goofing.

Re: I Made a Self-Quoting Tweet

#15
post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think I'm missing a tweet of context. I get that they quoted their own url, like in the top article, but then the account replies "Ugh, busted :(" to someone who has their tweets protected.

As I recall, the trick is that you can post a tweet, grab the URL, then if you edit it quickly enough it won't show up as edited.

But you can't edit tweets. Any apps that offer "editing" either just impose delays, or easy ways to delete-and-tweet-again in one step, no?

Re: I Made a Self-Quoting Tweet

#17
To save people some time, here’s the tweet:

https://twitter.com/quinetweet/status/1309951041321013248

In essence, the approach was:

* Find out what the tweet id is of a recent tweet * Find out what a tweet is shortly after * Estimate the rate of new tweets appearing * Publish a tweet with a reference to a tweet with a now+guess id

The write up is well done and interesting but a little long winded.

Re: I Made a Self-Quoting Tweet

#19
post #5

> And for anyone at Twitter who was depending on the network of tweets being a Directed Acyclic Graph, I'm so terribly sorry. I love the idea that there's someone out there with code that resolves retweet chains recursively, who's about to be in for a great head scratcher of a bug.

Recursion isn't the problem. Not keeping track of seen tweets is the problem. Recursion can be used to detect cycles and traverse a cyclic graph in a way that doesn't blow up.
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