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A post about fatigue from reposts on VKontakte received a record number of reposts

VKontakte user Zinaida Mishchenko complained about the low quality of content on the social network, noting that her friends began to share other people’s thoughts more often, rather than publish their own content. Within a week, her complaint was copied by several thousand users.

On October 1, Zinaida Mishchenko from Kiev wrote that she was disappointed in the low quality of the content generated by her friends: “they used to share good music, videos on VK... finally their thoughts. and now the news is just reposts of reposts. ugh".

It is worth noting that the VKontakte mechanics allow users to duplicate other people’s posts on their pages, leaving comments on them and attaching media files. In this case, another user can repost not only the original post, but also a post that already contains a comment on someone else’s. In this case, the counters of “likes” of previous posts no longer take into account the “achievements” of subsequent ones - this, for example, explains the relatively low indicators of Mishchenko’s post.

Alexander Kruglov, an employee of VKontakte, drew attention to the Ukrainian woman’s post. Kruglov decided to add absurdity to Zinaida’s post by publishing it on his page. And soon the chain of reposts reached the “Zuckerberg will call” community with an audience of 170 thousand users.

Community subscribers supported the idea. Soon, thousands of users posted entries on their pages that, along one “path” or another, led to Mishchenko’s entry.

Former VKontakte employee Denis Olshin created a tool on his website that tracks the number of reposts and their relationship with each other. According to Olshin's data, by the end of the day on October 7, a week after the original post appeared, it had been reposted more than 9,800 times. Some users performed this operation several times, but in total more than 9,300 people and communities took part in the “action”.

However, the greatest user activity was expectedly observed in the first days: by October 3, there were already 6,600 reposts, or two-thirds of the total for the week.

The longest chain at the time of writing contained 76 reposts. At the same time, large communities had a significant influence on the dissemination of Zinaida Mishchenko’s recording. In addition to “Zuckerberg Will Call,” the “Typical Programmer” community, in particular, made a significant contribution.

In terms of the total number of reposts, Mishchenko’s post is not a record holder - for example, the post by VKontakte founder Pavel Durov about Pussy Riot member Nadezhda Tolokonnikova received more. However, based on the length of the chain of those who decided to share the post, this post most likely holds the record.

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