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Isn’t a hashtag just another kind of user account — an account from which anyone can post?

The data structures for the @BeefWellington timeline of tweets and the one for the #BeefWellington timeline of tweets could look roughly the same.

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Hashtags aren't like user accounts, no - they're strings that are part of a tweet. In theory, a separate data structure shouldn't be needed since you can just search the full text of tweets, but in practice, I don't know how that scales for the number of all-time tweets.

I think he was talking about how hashtags are implemented.

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