últimas notícias

Potential 2020 candidate and former Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz made his debut Saturday on Twitter. He was immediately met by the mind-numbingly stupid “RATIO!” crowd.

For the uninitiated, the “ratio” here is the relationship between the number of replies and the number of shares. A message or sentiment in a specific tweet is measured for its value or the offense it causes by how low or high the ratio of (mostly negative) replies is to the number of (mostly positive) likes or retweets.

Schultz, as of this writing, has posted just seven tweets, and each one got the ratio effect. In other words, there is a concerted effort to assure the person who composed the original tweet that they’ve been shamed and ostracized for their opinion or comment.

At a public event Monday in New York, where Schultz continued his maybe-run for president, a heckler called out to Schultz, “Go back to getting ratioed on Twitter!”

CNN reporter Andrew Kaczynski tweeted Tuesday that Schultz “could become the first person to run for office to have every [Twitter] post ratioed.”

Liberal activist Matt Ortega observed that all of Schultz’s tweets were “getting ratio’d.”

[Also read: Tom Steyer: Howard Schultz isn’t ‘ready for primetime’]

Brendan Nyhan, a New York Times contributor and professor at the University of Michigan, tweeted Tuesday, “Has any verified account ever had every single tweet get ratio’d before?”

There’s even a Twitter account called @RatioReport, which purports to track such incidents and then do the actual math on the ratio. It calculated on Sunday that one of Schultz’s tweets had a “like-to-comment ratio of .2791” and a “[re-tweet]-to-comment ratio of .0615.”

If you look through the replies to any one of Schultz’s tweets, there are thousands of replies, and easily a quarter of them are nothing more than remarks like, “i’m responding just because the ratio isn’t high enough,” from @willchop and, “Just here for the ratio,” by @colin_ball13.

This is the equivalent of yelling in someone’s face, “EVERYBODY HATES YOU, OKAY?!” It offers no criticism, carries no weight, and only leaves the “ratio” recipient mildly annoyed that he didn’t lead a life so small as to find joy in tweeting, “RATIO!”