Only Cowards Don’t Get Ratioed

Instead, they now startle awake at night fearing that the tweet they sent before going to bed will be “ratioed” by the morning. The term ratio will puzzle anyone who does not spend an inordinate share of their time on social media, and any attempt at an explanation is rendered difficult by the fact that there is no general agreement about which tweets qualify as having suffered this fate. The other thing the non-initiated need to know is that, among the extremely online, getting ratioed is considered an unambiguous sign of moral and intellectual failure: Only somebody who has committed a grave factual or normative error, so the assumption goes, could compose a tweet that is collectively disowned by hundreds or even thousands of strangers on the internet.