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
@_elena are you sure it's fake, not due to some comments/reactions from other servers not being displayed correctly? IDK and I'm not defending W in any way, just a purely technical question.

@kalisz79 @_elena

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)



RE: https://app.wafrn.net/fediverse/post/c78ccde1-db34-4251-982c-748a4f9fb62f