The recent United Airlines "re-accommodation" was a perfect illustration for how not to handle everything, from how police interact with citizens, to how corporations treat paying customers, to dealing with a PR crisis. United took to Twitter to on Monday to explain the situation, but it only made matters worse.
Scroll through the replies to the tweet, a virtual tsunami of anger, and the statement's utter failure quickly becomes apparent. The evidence is right there in cold, hard math: 61,000 replies, 6,700 likes. The multi-day controversy has been a veritable goldmine of such demonstrations.
Twitter is a much-maligned, ever-burning furnace of existential dread. At its best, it's an efficient tool for communication, even if that only means telling people to go fuck themselves. But unlike on other forms of social media, where the success of a post might be measured in terms of the discussion it generates—a busy comment section under a blog post, or thousands of comments on a Facebook page—on Twitter, provoking a significant response is actually evidence of the opposite. The lengthier the conversation, the surer it is that someone royally messed up. It's a phenomenon known as The Ratio.
While opinions on the exact numerical specifications of The Ratio vary, in short, it goes something like this: If the number of replies to a tweet vastly outpaces its engagement in terms of likes and retweets, then something has gone horribly wrong.
Consider this gem from last week by Matt Lewis, a columnist at The Daily Beast and a contributor on CNN. Whereas a simple ratio of 2:1 replies to likes means a tweet is on shaky ground, this one thudded out into the world at 10:1.
It's possible, you might be thinking, that a tweet could inspire a significant amount of replies that express agreement, or positive reinforcement. While there are certain exceptions—5,000 choke me daddy's under a celebrity's every post—by and large, the way Twitter works is that to reply means to disagree. When a tweet is good, there are simple, elegant tools for expressing your appreciation via the like and retweet buttons. There are junkier workarounds like quote-tweeting and manual retweeting. A perfect tweet is a pure thing, and ideally, is shared off into the world without commentary, letting its engagement numbers bloom unmolested. In fact, there's nothing worse than replying to an expertly executed tweet, particularly when it comes to trying to riff off of a joke, or even worse, improve on it. On the other hand, when a tweet has pissed someone off, the user is more inclined to let the author know directly how much they suck. "Delete your account" and "Retire bitch" being two of the better known refrains.
"I would say any time you have more replies than favs, you fucked up in some capacity," says Twitter investigative reporter Ashley Feinberg of Gizmodo. "People on this site are extremely lazy and also idiots, like myself. If you've pissed off enough people that they're a) too embarrassed to engage and b) feel compelled to actually write words, you did a bad tweet."
This, from CNN's Chris Cillizza, whose Twitter bio quotes the president as calling him "One of the dumber and least respected of the political pundits," is a nice solid example of The Ratio at work, Feinberg says. Not astronomical numbers, but solidly in the sweet spot of just over 2:1.
"What impresses me most about it is how reliable it is," says David Roth, of Vice Sports. Roth is also the author of one of the finest Trump-related Twitter gags ever. "For all the examples of how markets don't work, and Twitter's particularly ridiculous scrambling hustle for attention, it really does seem like a bad enough tweet by a high-profile enough person is going to wind up with that like 500-to-75 ratio that Matt Lewis had going. They get discovered."
"The invisible hand of Twitter finds some verified oaf talking about how inspiring it was when Trump said the word 'God,' and then it's just a question of gravity," Roth says.
But, as he points out, the people who are subject to the cruel grinding wheels of The Ratio tend to be both the most in need of being taught a lesson, and also the least likely to realize it, as in this tweet from Learned and Serious Biblical Scholar Erick Erickson, which may be the pinnacle of the form.
Some do pay attention, though. Parker Molloy of Upworthy says it's something she actually tries to learn from.
"If you've got 300 responses to a tweet with only a dozen retweets, you can pretty quickly gather whether the opinion is either really crappy or just worded poorly," Molloy says. "It can actually be a helpful experience. There are countless times I've seen feedback to something I've tweeted, given it some thought, and found my own opinion on one matter or another had changed, even slightly. That's when it happens to you, of course."
When it happens to someone else, it's a different story.
"Sometimes it's just kind of cathartic to see that other people feel the same way you do about someone else's opinion [as in the Erickson tweet] seeing just how few people were willing to co-sign his statement with a retweet or a like," Molloy says. "It's kind of like Facebook Live videos with the little floating reactions. You can be watching it and see, 'Oh, this video is making others feel the same way as me' when you watch a speech with a steady stream of angry response emojis floating across the screen."
For all the talk of the problems of abuse on Twitter—and there certainly is an overabundance of that—the ability to drop a hand grenade in someone's mentions is a different sort of thing. There's a certain honor to it. With such a dizzying pace of news these days, we're all subject at one point or another to firing off a truly terrible one. Eventually, the mob comes for us all, and there's only one thing that can be done, one of the only other truly reliable maxims of Twitter: Keep tweeting through it.
