-1. With hindsight it's easy to make a comment like yours, but many clients rely on the status_id to be monotonic.
You would be changing behavior in a way that breaks apps. Twitter doesn't want to do that.
You would be changing behavior in a way that breaks apps. Twitter doesn't want to do that.
Look at e.g. YouTube and many other sites around the same time. They knew what they were doing; Twitter didn't.
I _have_ actually designed such a system in 1999, that used 48 bits, and it worked perfectly well. (Only had 28 bits for the user-id, which would have been broken at the 250M users -- alas the system never had more than than 5M; This was in the years 1999-2003).
The only way you can shard absolutely monotonic is (effectively) randomly, which is an option however you assign ids; but other assignments let you build a much cheaper, much more robust system.
Twitter is an API. Even if they have the knowledge of how to fix past mistakes, they need to ask for feedback, give plenty of notice, and set a deadline of when the old version is cut off.
Maybe they didn't do everything perfect day one, but I don't think there are any APIs the size of Twitter. Cut them some slack, they're not morons.
There do exist independent youtube clients (though not as many as Twitters's), but using the encoding they did, youtube has made it so that it is never going to be an issue, whereas for twitter it has already been a significant issue twice (that I'm aware of).
It's very easy to dismiss sound engineering in retrospect as luck or as "how could anyone have known".