Virality is a funny thing. Two weeks ago, the mad hackers at creative studio Nelson Cash cobbled together the single-purpose site makeitstranger.com as a way of capitalizing on Stranger Things' newfound popularity. The show is deeply influenced by the horror aesthetic of the 1970s and ‘80s, right down to the font. So the group gave people a way of writing anything they wanted in the style of the now-iconic title card. Naturally, people went crazy for it:
#makeitstranger app not allowing me to download for some reason but yesssssssss pic.twitter.com/defnBnuQEb
— HoeforPoe (@narenium) August 19, 2016
Which is to say, people were about as creative as they were very, very blue. The team found that, in addition to obvious fare like "Star Wars" and "Twin Peaks," people just loved creating title cards for "Fuck You," "Butt Stuff," and "Dicks Out For Harambe."
Nelson Cash shares and analyzes that data in a blog post that provides a rich amount of detail about what goes into a viral hit, from the fluctuations in visitors to the spikes in CPU usage in the novelty’s cloud server. Of course the best data visualization captures how the internet, when given marker, will write dirty words on the bathroom wall. According to Cash, the word "fuck" was used more 26,700 times, while "dick" was written over 11,900 times. Oh and:
— M.G. Siegler (@mgsiegler) August 31, 2016
"https://t.co/YPiGcuozU3 by the numbers" by Nelson Cash https://t.co/ZWdtmxZxca pic.twitter.com/9fP1LmGCMh
Something to think about.