The Ratio is a term that entered the Twittersphere last year. It has been credited to a couple of Twitter users, @85mf, and @Brilligerent who first coined the phrase in March 2017.
About a month later, writer Luke O’Neil posted an article in Esquire, “How To Know If You’ve Sent A Horrible Tweet” that explained the theory behind the Ratio. It quickly became part of the social media vernacular. In August, David Roth, a writer and editor at Deadspin first made the connection between the Ratio and baseball stats in his article, The Ratio Is The Triple Crown Of Bad Tweets. By December of the same year, there was a Ratio calculator online connecting tweets to the three Triple Crown stats of Major League Baseball players.
Simply, the way to determine the ratio of a tweet is to compare the number of @replies versus the number of likes. The higher the number of replies in comparison to the number of likes decides how bad the tweet is because people reply when they disagree with a tweet, but they don’t hit the like icon (heart.) Retweets can sometimes factor in, but in the case of high profile individuals, like the President, users will retweet ironically, to mock.
Some examples of bad tweets include a beauty from Laura Ingraham that insulted Parkland shooting student David Hogg, which was taken down. It was followed by this insincere (and bad "ratio'd") apology. She had a ratio of 13k likes to 43k replies. Her sponsors ran to other programs.
This week, sadly for Paul Ryan, the Ratio seems to indicate that the American people, on both sides of the aisle, will be glad to see the back of him.
The Ratio can also be used to measure good tweets, more approval than disapproval.
I ran some of my tweets through The Twitter Triple Crown Ratio Calculator which analyzes any tweet and links it to the most comparable stats on MLB players.
Try it yourself and see how you and your friends (or enemies) stack up.
