How I Made a Self-Quoting Tweet

The author describes building a Twitter account, @quinetweet, that tries to quote-tweet itself by guessing the ID Twitter will assign to its next tweet. Twitter's Snowflake IDs combine a timestamp, a machine ID and a sequence number, so the approach predicts the timestamp from request timing, adjusts the machine ID by hand, and assumes the sequence number is usually 0. Some guessed IDs instead linked to tweets from other accounts, including @gzhdigital, showing that Twitter resolves tweet URLs by ID regardless of the username. The post reports that timestamps were sometimes matched to the millisecond, though the sequence number was not always zero.