I was working on my system for scoring hashtag activities, and I needed a guinea pig.

[paco@infosec.exchange]

I was working on my system for scoring hashtag activities, and I needed a guinea pig. I decided to do last night's #HashTagGames

Summary of #WhenTheStoryAnnoyedMe generated at Sat 7 Mar 2026 21:36 EST.

• We looked at 259 toots posted between Fri 6 Mar 2026 21:00 EST and Fri 6 Mar 2026 23:00 EST by 77 different participants across 45 different servers. mastodon.social contributed the most toots at 53
• Most toots were from 'Ray*mond Li*terally' (madbarrister@mastodon.social) who posted 27

Additional details are replies to this toot.

#WhenTheStoryAnnoyedMe
1/5

[paco@infosec.exchange]

The top 3 most-replied-to toots:

1. This toot from Amy Maybe (APBBlue@thepit.social) had 3 replies.
2. This toot from OhSnap!Dragon (DrOinFL@mstdn.party) had 3 replies.
3. This toot from GayDeceiver (GayDeceiver@mstdn.social) had 3 replies.

#WhenTheStoryAnnoyedMe 4/5

[paco@infosec.exchange]

The top 3 boosted toots:

1. This toot from 9 o'clock HashTag Games Online (hashtaggames@hashtaggames.online) had 27 boosts.
2. This toot from sezduck :clubtwit: (sezduck@twit.social) had 6 boosts.
3. This toot from Kierkethumbs up convincingly (Kierkegaanks@beige.party) had 6 boosts.

#WhenTheStoryAnnoyedMe 2/5

[paco@infosec.exchange]

The top 3 favourited toots:

1. This toot from Knut ️‍ 🧸 (praetor@mstdn.social) had 17 favourites.
2. This toot from Jenny (tiamat271@mastodon.online) had 15 favourites.
3. This toot from OhSnap!Dragon (DrOinFL@mstdn.party) had 14 favourites.

#WhenTheStoryAnnoyedMe 3/5

[paco@infosec.exchange]

A histogram showing posts per minute on Friday, 6 Mar 2026. Each bar represents one minute. The event was 120.0 minutes long. There were 239 posts during the event with an average of 1.99 posts per minute.

The busiest moment was at 13:00 from the start with 10 posts in that minute. The quietest moment was at 0:00 from the start with 0 posts in that minute. The yellow line is a 15-minute moving average.

#WhenTheStoryAnnoyedMe

[paco@infosec.exchange]

The word cloud for Friday, 6 Mar 2026. Words are larger the more frequently they appeared in posts. There were 1865 unique words posted, and the wordcloud shows the 200 most frequent. The top 10 most frequent words were: hashtaggames: 254, story: 19, every: 16, time: 12, character: 10, end: 9, first: 9, season: 8, way: 8, never: 8,
These words were excluded from the word cloud:
movie, movies, film, films, watch, now, one, guy, got, going, good, well, see, know, and the hashtag WhenTheStoryAnnoyedMe.

#WhenTheStoryAnnoyedMe

[cardboardrobot@mstdn.social]

@paco Hi Paco, I totally get the urge to quantify and categorize it. But for me there is something wonderful about the way #HashTagGames is not actually competitive or a “game” in that sense. I do worry this could change the social “no wrong answers” nature of the game. Just my thoughts and a data point. Others may love the idea.

#HashTagGames

[paco@infosec.exchange]

@CardboardRobot I’m definitely not gonna do it every night. This is the only one I’ve done. Sorry I didn’t think how it might be unwelcome.

[paco@infosec.exchange]

@whybird The code is available (such as it is) at https://mastoscore.johnmastodon.me/ You can run the analysis and look at the results using the backstage app. You don’t have to post the results.

@CardboardRobot

[cardboardrobot@mstdn.social]

@paco I don’t mean to discourage your or anyone’s work, just sharing my pov on it. It’s neat that you did it and put it up to share. Again, just my personal data point I don’t speak for anyone else playing #hashtaggames. Cheers.

[hashtaggames@oldfriends.live]

@CardboardRobot Seconded. My 9 o'clock #HashTagGames are not a competition. The purpose of my once daily game is so people can come together and solve the puzzle. There is not a winner or loser, or right or wrong way to interpret my game puzzle. It's why I don't boost game plays from the official account.

I was going to do "best of", each night at the ActivityPub enabled WordPress site that I setup a couple years ago, and where the games come out of now, but decided against it. I have the same stats and actually run scripts so I could pick "the best of" and have for 1300 of our +1500 games now but I get too many "I'm not smart enough to figure this game out so Don't feel bad if I don't play tonight" messages so I changed my mind and made it "there's no wrong way" because my intention was to just put out something for the community to cleanse the mind by putting it to use for something else other than bills, the news, politics, loud neighbors, etc.

I understand this was probably testing the scripts or for PR but I hope it doesn't become a regular published data clown show competition game for my 9pm game.

#WhenTheStoryAnnoyedMe

@paco