I seem to remember reading about an earlier attempt to do this that brought down twitter; The twitter server was attempting to follow the tweet chain and didn't have mitigations for this. Anyone have that link?

Object ID Prediction is a classic class of security attack, but thankfully with their data model it doesn't much matter.

A twitter employee talked about that in the thread: https://twitter.com/noradio/status/1333558513314922497

Yep, and here's the one I was thinking of: http://twitter.com/spoonhenge/status/2878871344

It does matter, as it could be used to figure out user growth. Tweets and users now use snowflake IDs which provide increasing but non-sequential IDs which also encode creation time.

I don't understand. What am I supposed to be seeing? This link just takes me to an empty screen.

The point is that the submission URL is the actual ID of the post. Similarly to if I'd post a link to this comment without having the ability to edit. I would need to know the ID of the post in advance.

Oh, it's working now. For some reason the page wasn't displaying anything when I tried earlier :shrug_emoji:

Seems like HN doesn't let you comment on those. At least I can't.

That post is dead, so by my understanding that will be why you can't comment on it.

Ah, I See. Thank you

Previous post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25244872

(2020)

And now I understand why it doesn't just read, "I tweeted something then edited the tweet to quote itself."

Is the actual tweet (https://twitter.com/quinetweet/status/1309951041321013248) supposed to say "This Tweet is unavailable."?

It's a link to itself

I thought that normally a retweet includes a little thumbnail of the retweeted tweet itself. It would be cool if it recursed forever.

That apparently broke twitter once

Very cool! If I remember correctly Reddit self-posts have a similar origin story.