It's pretty common outside of rails too, like https://facebook.com/4

Some main weaknesses, if I recall correctly, is that's incremental ids make scraping pretty easy, or guessing content outside of a URL given explicitly by the service (like here).

They also leak metrics (#of registered users)

I think this is the only downside.

ALTER SEQUENCE "seq_user_id" RESTART WITH 5000000000

Wheres my billion dollars

Also, competitors can analyze your growth more easily.

Yep, you're correct. Panera had an issue where folks could scrap every user profile due to sequential profile ids. The bigger part of the exploit was they just openly exposed user data but making the profiles ids sequential made it really easy to scrap

https://krebsonsecurity.com/2018/04/panerabread-com-leaks-mi...

It's "good" if you're enumerating a potential target!

Otherwise, you typically either want to make your URLs intuitively discoverable or not discoverable at all. An incrementing ID like this is neither, so it sits in a weird middle ground that probably satisfies nobody (except those trying to get things done who don't care, I guess).

Incrementing a URL can (and has) get you prison time.

https://www.wired.com/2012/11/att-hacker-found-guilty/

In the same way that squeezing on a hunk of metal that some may call a "trigger" can get you convicted for murder.

The incrementing itself wasn't the issue! It's all the other stuff around their scraping and apparently their provable desire to harm AT&T that got them convicted.

Definitely not going to argue with you on that. But it did all start with the simple addition to the URL.

Odd they didn't use his handle. I figured it was weev but never knew his real name.

I believe this convention was used widely outside of Rails too so it's less a Rails convention and more a late 90s early 2000s convention. Even now I suspect many articles with good SEO will give table creation SQL using auto increment instead of uuid so maybe just software convention.