Assignment 1: Going Viral

Make A Meme

This kickoff assignment is an exercise in the challenges of designing something that spreads online. Your challenge is simple: create something that goes viral.

You can create any content you want: memes, videos, opinion essays, collective action activism, photoshops, a collective fiction writing effort, and so on. It needs to be spreadable online. Common platforms might include Fizz, Twitter/Mastodon, Facebook, YouTube, Medium, TikTok, Reddit, or blogs/news outlets.

You do not necessarily need to try and go viral across the whole internet. You can target a more focused community that you belong to. Make sure you can explain to the staff in your writeup what that community is, and why the piece is designed to go viral in that community. However, think carefully about the norms of the community you're posting to before submitting. For those of you who are not active on social media, here are a few platforms you can join without using your real identity: Reddit, TikTok, and Instagram. Stanford Fizz also promises anonymity.

Upworthy recommends that you try writing out 25 different versions of the main text or headline before posting—that the first ones will feel awkward and ridiculous, but you need to push through the awkwardness and keep going to find the best way to phrase your idea.

Before you post your meme, call your shot: write down what you think the result will be—how viral do you think it will go, and why? Post it, write down what happened, and then iterate. Do not expect that your first attempt will go viral or gain much traction. Reflect on what's working and what's not — the Going Viral lecture concepts may help diagnose here — and try something else. Your written reflection will tell us about what you learned through this iteration process. While we won't grade you down if you iterate and nothing goes viral, we will consider whether your meme is a fit for the communities where you post it, and whether it can reasonably spread there: for example, don't push your meme to a WhatsApp group that has only seven people.

The rules:

• No negativity: create joy, not pain. Follow the Social Computing Fundamental Standard, and use reasonable judgment as to what content is off-limits for a course, including targeting groups that other community members belong to, personal attacks, libel, slander, harassment, pornography, and bullying; check your idea with the staff if you're not sure.
• No CS 278 meta-memes. This means no memes about the course and specifically, memes that say "my professor wants me to go viral, help me go viral.”
• You must create the content, not share someone else's content. However, you may remix someone else's content (with attribution/permission as appropriate) to create yours if desired.
• This meme must be new content created for this class: you cannot reuse something that you previously created or shared.

Helpful hints based on what worked (and didn't work) for students in the past:

• Be mindful of the platform you are posting in. If you are posting on a Stanford meme forum, for example, make sure it’s relevant and particularly resonant for those at Stanford. Some of the most viral submissions from last year were in non-Stanford communities. Create several pieces of content and iterate on failed viral attempts, even trying similar things on different platforms. (Something could bomb on Facebook but see success on Reddit).
• The best write-ups showed an attention to learning from failure and iterating, despite initial attempts that did not go viral.
• Timing matters. People are less likely to share or upvote something that becomes less original as a type of joke becomes saturated. So get creative!

FAQ:

• Does it matter how viral my meme actually went?
  You are not graded directly on how viral your content went, but instead on your reflections on the experience. (Actual virality will be extra credit.)
• Can I pay for popularity?
  No. Just no. Don't pay for post boosting.
• Not fair, my friend knows an influencer!
  It's OK. You're not graded on actual popularity. They will probably have a different sort of reflection than you, but it doesn't make your experience trying to make something go viral any less valid.

Remember to capture your prediction of how viral each iteration will go before you post it, then collect evidence of the content's virality afterwards. In some cases this is easy, such as retweet, view, or upvote counts; in other cases it might require more creativity, such as analytics trackers (e.g., Google Analytics) if you created a web page or asking around to find out where your emails got forwarded to.

When you submit your assignment, you will also need to submit your meme to our class server for voting. When doing so, include alt text for your meme: a few sentences that can describe your meme for a visually impaired user. You may find this blog post helpful in writing effective alt text.

Examples

Here are some top-voted examples to inspire you:

Reflections

Finally, write a brief submission of no more than 600 words containing (1) a copy of your meme (or a staff-accessible link to your meme) and alt text, (2) your evidence of virality, and (3) a reflection on your experiences, including what you learned from your iteration (if you iterated). Include the predictions you made before each iteration, and then what actually happened. Your reflection should summarize the decision making process: why choose that platform/medium? In what larger context (e.g., current events, online subcultures) was the content created? Who was the intended audience? Then, the reflection should diagnose what happened: if it went viral, why? If everything you tried failed to go viral, why? Do you think this outcome would repeat in another parallel world, or not? This analysis is important: even if you don’t have a lot of social media access, you can still analyze your design and performance.

Your writing reflection should explicitly integrate concepts discussed in class. Topics might include our discussion in the first lecture of where cultural innovation comes from (and how your meme does and doesn't map onto that idea), the nondeterminism of virality, social proof in influencing viral sharing behavior, or other topics from lecture.

You may include an appendix if you'd like in your submission. The staff will look at it as time allows.

Submission

First, submit your actual meme as an image, gif, embeddable video, or any other HTML that you can embed in a web page, to the Assignment 1 meme submission page. We will embed whatever you send us in the crowdsourced voting interface below for the next phase of the assignment.

Make sure your submission crops out any evidence of how viral it actually went (e.g., the number of retweets), since we don't want that information to influence the crowdsourced voting. For example, if you create a TikTok, don't submit the direct link. Instead, download the video, upload it to YouTube, set the video as unlisted, and then submit that embedded link. Generally, try your best to remove any additional context about virality.

Please also submit your alt text to this website as well, but you must also have it included in your reflection (it can be in a separate section at the end).

Separately, submit your document with meme, reflection, and evidence of virality as a PDF on Gradescope.

Crowdsourced voting

As we discussed in class, virality is not fully a deterministic function of content quality. So, our class will be doing our own judgment of quality! This is a very nonstandard process, so please read carefully.

The CS 278 staff will launch a site that allows class members to judge each others' submissions via a series of paired comparisons. The decision criteria for each comparison will be, "Which of these two pieces of content do you think someone would be more likely to share?" We will then aggregate everyone's binary comparisons into composite scores via the TrueSkill algorithm.

The comparison interface will look something like this, except not with Professor Bernstein's, ahem, depictions. It will have one student's submission on the left, and another student's submission on the right. It will probably be a much harder decision than above.

Vote on 50 pairs of submissions. I am trusting you to take this voting seriously — you are determining who deserves to walk away from this assignment and class with a badge saying they are experts at making viral content! In addition, I will insist on participation: if you do not participate in the crowdsourced voting, your assignment will be docked 10%. It's important to hear everyone's voice!

Grading

Extra credit: win the internet

A small number of submissions (1-2%) that the staff deems went most viral, and a small number of submissions (1-2%) that won the class vote, will earn 10% extra credit on this assignment. Go for it!

Grading rubric