it makes no sense that it's okay to signal what sports team you like and what beer you drink and what car logo Calvin should piss on, but signaling your DEEPLY HELD VALUES is cringe

had to use a crowbar to separate george bush from ted koppel

Dang one of you Cherbourgheads should update the wiki

spending trillions to invent a time machine only to discover zeus was just a fucked up carving of dyeus on a stone tablet, basically a bronze-age grink

there's a reason I qualified it as cultural impact on the internet!! I KNEW people like you would be in my mentions!!

And so ends my story! No real great takeaway other than unintended side effects of data ingestion can sometimes just be fun, and it taught me there is a musical called the Umbrellas of Cherbourg.

"Watch what happens when a dog is reunited with its former owners," "Watch what happens when this man eats 40 hot dogs," "Watch what happens when [fill in another clickbait title here]"

A bit of a pause and break here so you don't plow ahead and spoil yourself if you're trying to find it
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There's a song in the musical called "Watch what happens," which was the go-to for what felt like half of the clickbait of the time.

It took a bit, but the engineer got back to me (shoutout to Justin, wherever you are!)

Since Wikipedia was used to build our tags database and inform them, something in that wiki post was triggering it. (Feel free to take a look now and see if you can spot it! en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Umb... )

I asked an engineer to look into it because it was bothering the hell out of me. The theme of a collection of posts should be obvious, even if it's not a real world event. But there was no thread of continuity, it was the worst sort of 2010s post slop.

So yeah, it was a musical no one has ever heard of, has zero internet cultural impact, and isn't even available in English on DVD.

So why did I see it trending every day in the que? And why, when I clicked into the topic, was it a random collection of clickbait posts?

Every day, for weeks, for no discernable reason, the Umbrellas of Cherbourg would be trending. "What are the Umbrellas of Cherbourg?" you ask? What, you've never heard of that 1964 musical romance drama everyone was always posting about?

It had some filtering on it so it didn't suggest things like #lunch when everyone was posting at noon, and for the most part it was fairly decent! If it WAS a real world event, we'd look at what was going on, write a little blurb, and be on our way.

But then came the Umbrellas of Cherbourg.

So if the algorithm detected a lot of posts about a place or a hashtag, it'd suggest the topic to us for review and we'd click into it, take a look, and see if it was a real news event.

Posts were analyzed for a topic list that was based (either in part or entirely, not sure) on Wikipedia. What better way to help organize data from all over the world than a database of everything in the world?

They were always written by journalists and it later became a weird scandal even though it wasn't a scandal and then Zuck blew it up and made it worse but that's neither here nor there.

Here's how it worked:

So, it's 2015, maybe early 2016. Facebook Trending, for those who don't know because it was somehow over a decade ago, were little headlines and then, later, context blurbs about trending topics.