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by londons_explore 2162 days ago
Meaning the API is leaking the number of deleted tweets?

Could you make a tool to find out how many tweets someone has deleted?

1 comments

No, my understanding is that Twitter has a "bucket" of the latest 3600 tweets you've posted / liked. This bucket is faster than their database to query, so once you empty the bucket, the API returns no result, and the bucket is never "refilled" from the database.

Those are not technical terms, sorry, but this is how I currently understand it so it might help you too?

Rather than “buckets”, I bet they just have a flag on each tweet in the database for whether it’s deleted. So if you delete the most recent 3600, next time they do a query to see recent tweets, it retrieves 3600, but they’re all deleted, so it filters them all out. Buckets are a little less likely implementation wise because you’d either sometimes see that the most recent bucket had very few tweets in it, or they’d have to be constantly shuffling tweets between buckets.