In 2017, writer David Roth gave a name to a phenomenon that had existed for some time. When someone sent a tweet that some critical mass of users decided was bad, the damning statistics would appear underneath: a very small number of retweets, a bigger but still-small number of favorites (now “likes”) indicating passive approval, and a huge number of replies informing the poster that their post sucked. The Ratio, as Roth coined it, meant someone had biffed their tweet badly enough to generate a solid Major League Baseball stat line. A tweet with 34 retweets, 83 faves, and 198...