Notes on W Social, pt. 2

@elenarossini.com posted a new blog post in her exceptional series on W Social, this time regarding the potentially inflated numbers of replies to the posts featured on their promotional website.

W Social, Fictional Metrics and the Beauty of Open Data

June 26, 12:10 AM: The post above has been updated with a more precise explanation. I’ve also added an update below.

I first saw this mentioned here:

View post on Bluesky

I also spot-checked another post (that’s neither in the image above nor in @elenarossini.com’s post) in my previous entry.

All of them are characterized by a ridiculously high number of replies, but the reposts and likes are slightly lower than the “real life” numbers they’re compared with. I assume they’re lower because the numbers are based on what they were at a specific point in time, and do not reflect current numbers in real time.

So, what’s with the inflated numbers? I had a completely uninformed shot-in-the-dark guess of my own (that I only explained out loud because I was specifically asked to), but I think this explanation seems likely to be onto something:

siwek (@siwek@social.tooinconsistent.com)

@_elena It seems they are calculating "engagement" which I'm assuming is likes + reposts + comments and then show it as number of comments.

siwek (@siwek@social.tooinconsistent.com)

@vicwalker @_elena Oh yeah, not sure how real the source numbers are, but the JSON data blobs that they use to then render the post tiles on page have those fields: `"likes":205, "reposts":26, "engagement":239`. The engagement field is what's rendered next to the comments icon, which in of itself is disingenuous.

—siwek (@siwek@social.tooinconsistent.com)

Credit goes to @vicwalker.dev.br for adding Siwek’s post to @ronentk.me ’s Semble collection , because I’m not following the discussions on Mastodon.

Again, these numbers do not appear to be updated in real time, so we should be looking at the numbers on the posts as they appear on the website to see whether this holds up, although we have no choice but to use the current numbers for the number of replies as a stand-in.

TL;DR: It appears to work for most of the posts, but doesn’t always match up exactly. I’m guessing that the truth is likely close to Siwek’s theory but maybe with another factor?

UPDATE: @elenarossini.com has updated her blog post with a fuller explanation from the thread starting with this post, by @opfuchs.gay:

View post on Bluesky

See the section quoted in @elenarossini.com’s post for an explanation of how exactly this is happening. Looks like Siwek was indeed basically right.

(As an aside, Mayor Khan STILL isn’t actually on W Social. I feel like this is potentially an even bigger issue. Maybe there is indeed an agreement that his account will be moved onto W Social, but it feels like a lie to feature his account—so prominently, even—before the move has been made.)

Here are the posts that currently appear for me on wsocial.news:

Mayor Sadiq Khan, 2w ago

As of 11:08 PM on June 25 in Japan, the real post currently has 154 replies, 828 reposts (including 99 quotes), and 4,859 likes. We don’t know how many replies there were when they got the numbers above, but substituting the real number of replies, 154 + 784 + 4,600 = 5,538.

Mayor Sadiq Khan, 7h ago

The real post currently has 41 replies, 356 reposts (including 52 quotes), and 1,329 likes. Again, substituting the current number of replies, 41 + 336 + 1,300 = 1,677.

Ursula von der Leyen, 5h ago

The real post currently has 22 replies, 179 reposts (including 11 quotes), and 727 likes. 179 + 175 + 716 = 1,070. —Okay, so the theory appears to fail here, since 873 - 175 - 716 = -18 and a negative number of replies doesn’t work.

Anne Applebaum, 1w ago

The real post currently has 16 replies, 82 reposts, and 376 likes. 16 + 75 + 356 = 447. Siwek’s theory holds up if the post had 12 replies at the time.

Ursula von der Leyen, 6h ago

The real post currently has 10 replies, 33 reposts (including 2 quotes), and 227 likes. 10 + 31 + 223 = 264. 255 - 31 - 223 = 1, so Siwek’s theory holds up if the post had 1 reply when they retrieved these numbers.

Ursula von der Leyen, 2h ago

The real post currently has 1 reply, 36 reposts, and 155 likes. 1 + 32 + 143 = 176. But you probably already noticed that 143 - 32 - 143 = -32, so the theory doesn’t work here, either.

Mayor Sadiq Khan, 6h ago

The real post currently has 3 replies, 15 reposts, and 78 likes. 3 + 13 + 73 = 89.

Anna Zeiter, 4d ago (not currently on website*)

*for me just now, anyway, if they’re randomized

The post I spot-checked before was shown as having 69 replies, 4 reposts, and 65 likes. When I checked, the real post had 3 replies, 6 reposts (including 1 quote post), and 71 likes. Siwek’s theory holds up if the post had 0 replies when they retrieved the metrics.