1. The rise and fall of a meme Jonathan Adler @skyetetra
Tweet Mashup
The rise and fall of a meme
Jonathan Adler
@skyetetra

2. Who am I? Director of Insights and Analytics at Lenati
BS & MS in Math from Worcester Polytechnic Institute
PhD in Industrial Engineering from Arizona State University
Data scientist but “not a real programmer”
Write code all day for my job
Never formally learned software development
Love functional programming, specifically F#
Like quick weekend programming projects (twitter bots)
Won season 3 of the reality TV show King of the Nerds
Who am I?

3. Twitter Bots @ADomain4U @KNUK_TATS @MachineHeather (6 followers)

4. Inspiration
“A website would be a much better idea for this than a twitter bot” –(Not machine) Heather

5. What is Tweet Mashup?
A website that lets you combine two twitter accounts tweets together
Use premade combinations or make your own
Surprisingly addictive

6. Tweet Mashup

7. Tweet Mashup

8. Tweet Mashup

9. Tweet Mashup

10. Tweet Mashup Coded entirely in F# Launched on November 20th, 2017
Went viral, got popular (1m sessions), crashed a lot, then stopped being used
Tweet Mashup

11. Tweet Mashup

12. Five lessons learned The algorithm isn’t important
The design is important
Be ready to scale
Hacks are fine
Memes fall hard
Five lessons learned

13. 1. The algorithm isn’t important
Republican health care plan has a big tax break for insurance execs' pay 🚽Tell Me How This Helps Sick,Poor,Old ns
Elmo is so excited! Elmo loves the Everyday Heroes Club! Elmo gave Abby a BIG HUG and earned his Giving Badge! Elmo loves hugs!
Republican health care plan has a BIG HUG and earned his Giving Badge! Elmo loves hugs!

14. 1. The algorithm isn’t important
For each user
Pull as many tweets as you can
Split tweets into individual words (exclude first and last words)
Create a dictionary where keys are words and values are arrays of tweets containing the word (and where in the tweet the word is)
Find the words that both users have tweeted, randomly select one
Remove any words that couldn’t make a valid tweet [combined tweet would be too long]
Randomly select a tweet from first user that contains the word
Randomly select a tweet from second user containing word (filter to ensure <=140 characters)
String concatenate
Cache a users tweets so you don’t have to pull from the API often
1. The algorithm isn’t important

15. 1. The algorithm isn’t important
Objectively this is a pretty bad algorithm
Not theoretically interesting, often generates garbage
However, ratio of garbage to gold is 👌
1. The algorithm isn’t important

16. 2. The design is important
Prototype Tweet Mashup
2. The design is important
Tech prototype had no design
Enlisted my to help with design
1 weekend to get mashing working, 3 months to get design sharp
Without the design, it wasn’t actually fun

17. 2. The design is important
Preset combos to show idea
Images of accounts give personality
Easy to share tweet button

18. Launched on a Sunday night (November 20th, 2016), shared with my friends and spend $10 on Twitter ads
Put on an Amazon EC2 instance
My friends -> Supernatural Fandom -> Anime Fandom -> 4 chan -> Alt-right
Went to work on Monday and site was exploding in popularity
Was very hard to work
Site was crashing repeatedly on first few days
3. Be ready to scale

19. 3. Be ready to scale Unrealistic assumptions:
I could use the app credentials and pull 900 twitter user profiles / 15 minutes
Needed to quickly figure out how to add authentication
Memory wouldn’t be an issue
Needed to purchase progressively larger ec2 instances
Money wouldn’t be an issue
Wanted to figure out some way to monetize
Only would be used by people in the US
Traffic coming from Turkey, Brazil, Spain
Fixing this issues while people were using the site was emotionally burdensome
3. Be ready to scale

20. “By early February, the weight of everything – the scrutiny, the relentless criticism and accusations – felt crushing. [Dong Nguyen] couldn't sleep, couldn't focus, didn't want to go outdoors.”
This happened (to a smaller extent) to me
By the end of the first week I regretted launching it
3. Be ready to scale

21. “database” was storing json files on the server hard drive
To avoid caching issues, didn’t allow mashups with private Twitter accounts
To fix issue with the server crashing, set a script to restart it once an hour
No analytics or record keeping whatsoever beyond Google analytics
Tweet Mashup now running in my house on an old desktop over Wi-Fi
4. Hacks are fine

22. Original design
4. Hacks are fine
Updated design

23. Sessions
per hour
5. Memes fall hard
Launched Sunday, peaked Wednesday, declined forever after
Still had stability issues on Tuesday and Wednesday, dramatically decreased growth spread
Peak day had ~200k sessions, now at ~1k sessions per day (totaled over 1m sessions)
After initial excitement peak, further Twitter ads didn’t help

24. 5. Memes fall hard EC2 costs - $97.68
Donations – 29 donations $ (1 donation of $100, 3 donations of $0.01)
Of ~300k views in time with link, 0.01% conversion rate
Couldn’t put ads because (1) not approved in time (2) no actual content
“Please donate” business model didn’t work

25. If you make something people will like, it will spread fast
The things I would have guessed to have mattered (good algorithm, database backend) didn’t, but other things (design, scalability) really did
Hacking stuff together to get it to work fast went better than I expected
It takes a lot of dubious ideas before you get to the one that lands
Be ready for the emotional burden of success
Conclusions