As far as I can tell, that's because you're blocked by the commenter or the commenter is a private account.

People who find this a shocking and objectionable sign of bugs are generally people who have not build software at such large scales.

This leaves such a poor taste in my mouth. Perhaps the proper UX is to then _not display comment counts_ if your performance/cost tradeoff has determined that you can't display comment counts accurately. For higher comment counts it might be fine where a user isn't expected to read all 5000 replies(ignoring the edge case where its 5000 private/blocked accounts replying), but if a tweet has 2 replies then the user who clicks it expects to see those.

Other large platforms have been able to solve this issue either in UX or implementation, so "web scale" isn't a good excuse.

I understand the idea but it feels a little too online for my taste. I'm probably not the target audience. Just feels like someone decided the tea leaves falling a certain way MUST indicate something.

Also I feel like I should add that "ratio" is a confusing term, because it can refer to the above example `reply-count / likes`, but can also be when a reply gets more likes than the tweet it's replying to: `reply-likes / OP-likes`.

Yes.

If you have proof that other platforms have solved this problem at scale, I would be very interested to see it. Fundamentally, those totals are never going to be perfectly correct because a) people will be adding and removing tweets continuously, and b) even if continuously updating the numbers were worth the resources, people would hate having the numbers changing frequently.

What if everyone could see full edit history of each twitt?