The second recursive Tweet in the history of the universe

I remember signing up for a Twitter account shortly after it hit the mainstream market with a sweet redesign in 2011 (it was actually started in 2006), and have found it to be a pretty unengaging platform since. I see the appeal, and even check on a few specific accounts, but it's never really clicked for me bcz typin lik dis is nt ok. But I get that brevity it's also the entire point of the platform.

Right now, Twitter has 145 million daily users, with 10% writing 80% of Tweets (pretty typical for social media). That's still a lot of people working really hard to say the important things that we need to read. Taylor Swift is apparently the most influential Twitteress, followed by Donald Trump (did you know he has a Twitter?). The most interesting part of Twitter to me is the non-human posters.

Twitter estimates that they have about 23 million active bots on the site, which isn't necessarily a bad thing. One bot that I thought was interesting was made by a guy who got it to create the world's second recursive Tweet (there is no edit function, so you have to quote your future self before your future post exists):

It's exactly the kind of useless endeavour that I love to see. He spent a lot of hard hours trying to get a post to quote a nearly identical post from the future. Totally useless, totally awesome.

How he did it

He broke down the unique part of a Twitter URL into 41 bits for timestamp (easy enough to guess at if you send a lot of Tweets really fast), a 10-bit machine ID (tough to guess, but should fall within a certain range), and a 12-bit sequence number (apparently, it's usually just 0). In decimal human numbers your average tweet is broken up into something like 312146657912, 375, 0, so it's really about guessing that second number.

He got it eventually (as you can see above), and opened the challenge to the bored masses of the internet, so I'm sure we'll see more recursive Tweets done in more creative ways throughout the week.

More thoughts

Two more fun things he brings up are that:

1. It's possible to quote someone from the future's Tweets. Could be sort of cool to setup some quotes for the distant future and freak out some kid in 2120 by having a dead guy immediately Retweet them.
2. There's definitely someone on the IT end that depends on the network of Tweets being a Directed Acyclic Graph that'll probably have a good scratch of the head when/if this anomaly shows up.

Who was the first recursive Tweet?

This post generated some discussion, and a Twitter Engineer showed up to comment:

It seems that 7 years ago the very thing the author speculated about had already happened, except it crashed some of their systems last time, hence why the current recursive Tweet stands strong and stable.

Also, "Quine," like from the bot's name, @quinetweet, means "a computer program which takes no input and produces a copy of its own source code as its only output." This led me to discover Quine's paradox:

"Yields falsehood when preceded by its quotation" yields falsehood when preceded by its quotation.

Here's the original post.