Since Dec 2017, Twitter has not allowed you to pick your username during the signup process. Usernames like "jsmith12345678" don't indicate you're a bot. They just indicate you're not very social media savvy. My new writeup with UI screenshots here:
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When we dismiss an account as a bot or troll based SOLELY on the account having 8 digits in it (a VERY common rule of thumb in interviews I've done with Twitter users), we are necessarily going to blanket dismiss a lot people for not being super technical or savvy.
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Ooh yeah that's an interesting one - same approach as the reconstructing firehose document for tweets but for users would definitely work!
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Great point! This approach should be valid for discovering users -- especially users that were created but never had any activity on Twitter.
Yeah - the active ones are included in the Directory which is also crawlable twitter.com/i/directory/pr but maybe not as useful as the snowflake id enumeration (you could definitely save API calls by excluding known Tweet IDs from your User ID generator, or vice versa)
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The big question I have to research is what server ids are responsible for handling user creation and also take a look at the sequence ids to see if most of them are sequence ids of 0 and 1 (which I believe is the case).
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