Elena Rossini 🌈1d ago

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"

🔗 : https://blog.elenarossini.com/w-social-fictional-metrics-and-the-beauty-of-open-data/

#blog #BigTech #EUBigTech #TEP #TrustedEuropeanPlatforms #TrustYourFeed

W Social, Fictional Metrics and the Beauty of Open Data

W Social's tagline is "Trust Your Feed" but the company's landing page displays inflated engagement metrics - a misrepresentation that contradicts its own promise.

Elena Rossini
Show threadMoritz
@_elena Dear Elena, I'd love to read your post, but your website brings my Macbook nearly to a full halt. The background animation in the header completely kills my Macbook Pro 2021 with Firefox 153 (using an external 4k screen). Can barely scroll the website anymore. Using reader mode now, but maybe you should take a look into this.
Jun 25 at 8:17amElk (canary)
Show threadElena Rossini 🌈1d ago

@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?

Show threadAaron 🥞1d ago
@preya @_elena Thas really interesting. Your MacBook should be more powerful than that, despite its age yeah? Does it do the same thing if you run the site in Safari?
Show threadElena Rossini 🌈1d ago
@aaronmccollum @preya someone else complained about this, so I turned off the wave effect. I'm having a HUGE number of visitors these days, I wonder if it contributes to it? (the site has used this theme for 2 years and today is the first time I got two complaints about the wave effect)
Show threadMoritz1d ago
@_elena @aaronmccollum Thanks! It's much better now. It's definitely the theme, I can recreate this by visiting the Theme's example page (https://estudiopatagon.com/projects/wavy-for-ghost/). It also seems to only affect Firefox. Chrome and Safari are fine. Seems like the background svg animation performs very poorly in Firefox and on large screens.
Wavy Theme for Ghost - EstudioPatagon

Wavy - Unique Ghost theme with creative animations, high SEO scores & fast performance. Ideal for personal, tech and tutorial bloggers.

EstudioPatagon
Show threadAaron 🥞1d ago
@preya @_elena That’s very fascinating! Glad it’s been resolved.
Show threadMoritz1d ago
@_elena @aaronmccollum I've looked into the animation and it's done in a very performance-hungry way (huge SVG files, three layers on top of each other). Firefox handles this differently than Chrome. Would love to contribute a fix, but unfortunately the theme isn't open source :(
Show threadElena Rossini 🌈1d ago
@preya @aaronmccollum no worries! I never noticed because I'm on Vivaldi and have Safari as fallback... they render the site pretty well. I haven't used Firefox in years 🥲
Show threadAaron 🥞1d ago
@_elena @preya Vivaldi buddies! I use Vivaldi on desktop and Firefox focus on mobile mostly (with a little safari mobile). Vivaldi is fantastic.
Show threadElena Rossini 🌈1d ago
@aaronmccollum @preya Vivaldi is AMAZING! It's my default browser on my iOS phone and on GrapheneOS as well ❤️