SCOOP: on #WSocial's website, comment counts for posts by prominent users are incorrectly displayed, showing artificially elevated numbers.
An ATproto user came up with an interesting theory for it.
My article: "W Social, Fictional Metrics and the Beauty of Open Data"
π : https://blog.elenarossini.com/w-social-fictional-metrics-and-the-beauty-of-open-data/
#blog #BigTech #EUBigTech #TEP #TrustedEuropeanPlatforms #TrustYourFeed
Update: the #WSocial landing page STILL shows the wrong metrics under recent posts by prominent users - like European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen.
82 comments shown on W Social's homepage; 4 on ATproto.
I have multiple developer friends double-checking data for me - one is verifying things from INSIDE the W Social portal.
The comment count is inaccurate.
Update: an user on ATproto came up with an interesting explanation, so I have updated my article with his theory.
@_elena Being obsessed with metrics is exactly what's powering toxic social media 
Are you, as a creator, interesting to conference organizers or any kind of specialist networks? Easy: all defined by the number of followers 
Want to cover an event live? Show the number of interactions on your previous work 
The comparison is not clear for me.
Do you mean there is an anomaly in the fact that the number of answers to S.K. on Bluesky is one order of magnitude lower than the same number on W, considering that S.K. is registred on BlueSky ?
The WSocial home page features screenshots of posts from various users, mainly from Wsocial postings, and some from BlueSky.
@_elena has drawn attention to the fact that the number of replies/comments to the posts seem very inflated in this montage.
Is it a weird error or a case of inauthentic promotion?
Whichever it is, it applies to the Sadiq Khan post they feature, (which is not a WSocial post).
@preya ooooh it's the first time I receive such a complaint. I'm so sorry.
I use a Macbook Air from 2013 (!!!) to write articles and never had any issues with the website.
It's a premium theme I bought, not much tweaking I can do unfortunately. I recommend subscribing to the blog via RSS maybe?
Thanks for this article.
From my point of view, W acts as a startup : buzzing in media, exposing a steep adoption, brief a big public relation campaign.
I suspect it is actually waiting to be bought by a bigger group
@vanderbeeken precisely! And this is done very deliberately.
The number of likes and shares is accurate, it's the comments that are faked / artificially boosted.
@_elena I assume this is not similar to the issue we have on the fediverse. Where one server has different (lower) stats as it only sees a subset of the like, boosts, etc compared to the post's host server?
I don't know enough about the AT protocol
@daj no, these are fake numbers. the cards displayed on the landing page are made by their website developer, they aren't the real posts.
You can check on mu.social as well, there is a DISCONNECT only on the number of comments, but the likes and shares check out.
On atproto you don't have this kind of problem
You can easily check and double-check the engagement numbers across the whole network using community-made APIs to check what we call "backlinks"
Or check inside the microblog app itself, if it's set up correctly with the relay and app server, you have a correct number of engagement too (Bluesky's app has the correct number always)
Here is one example, the W Social landing page said it had 85 replies
ATProto infrastructure is different from here, there is no inconsistent engagement number across different servers, because the network there is not organized as multiple servers like here
Well, people can have their accounts hosted within different Personal Data Servers (PDS), but the PDS doesn't hold engagement data, the count is done by the app fetching the backlinks (you check across the network for data records that are referencing the post you are checking the engagement, every like, repost and reply will reference the post URI, inside each person's PDS, and all PDS should be publicly available to fetch data)
@siwek I poked around because that looks to be the case initially, but those numbers only line up in one screenshot. Also going to the actual #wsocial website I don't see any of their own examples matching that pattern (though they come close). Some kind of plausible deniability?
I really do not like these w VC creeps and their poor man's Elon Twitter (in the interest of full disclosure)...
Not even that, check this example I replied to another person, the numbers are totally fake
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