"I may have just found my new favourite content discovery mechanism"

December 3, 2020 8:46 AM

Oisín Moran explains how he made his self-quoting tweet
posted by Stark (5 comments total)

Apparently not the first time this has been done.

https://twitter.com/noradio/status/1333558513314922497
posted by Chrysopoeia at 9:28 AM on December 3, 2020 [2 favorites]

in the "shit gets weird" section:

it seems like Twitter doesn't actually care about the username and just resolves URLs based on the tweet ID.

This seems ... not great? in that it lets you build URLs that look like they're from one account but resolve to another, as his "from the Pope" example illustrates.
posted by We had a deal, Kyle at 9:44 AM on December 3, 2020 [3 favorites]

Well, lots of sites work similarly, including MeFi: https://www.metafilter.com/189587/my-hovercraft-is-full-of-eels

As was mentioned in the Elliot Page thread the other day, Twitter allows people to change their username at any time, and the most straightforward way to make that change without breaking every existing link to their tweets is to simply ignore whether the username in the link matches the current one.

Anybody can link to any URL they want on Twitter, but if you actually load the page for a given ID, it either shows the true account name or tells you that the tweet doesn't exist.
posted by teraflop at 12:14 PM on December 3, 2020 [5 favorites]

I just attempted to quote tweet something from the last second of 2020. I suspect it won't actually work. But I figure there will be a lot of traffic around then so I may well hit upon a tweet.

I guess I'll find out in a month if it worked.
posted by Just this guy, y'know at 5:16 PM on December 3, 2020 [3 favorites]

You can sort of fake this in a silly way, with enough patience.
posted by yankeefog at 4:28 AM on December 4, 2020