Reply All - #12 Back End Trouble

Episode Date: February 1, 2015

The entire internet decides to look at one famous butt at the same time. One man has to ensure that the website hosting Kardashian butt pictures doesn't crash. The sheer terror and joy of solving that problem. (Plus, a new Yes/Yes/No.)  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Every so often, everybody on the internet decides that they want to look at one website and that they all want to do it at the same time. Sometimes the site crashes, sometimes it survives. If it survives, it's usually because of a guy like Greg Gnoss. Greg keeps the servers running for a bunch of magazine websites. One of them is paper magazine. It's a little art magazine with a little over 100,000 subscribers. Recently, the higher-ups came to own with some news.

We have something that we think is going to generate 100 million page views. and we want to make sure, you know, will our server handle that? And the answer was no. No, it will not. The something was four photos. And I guarantee you that by this point, you've seen these photos. So is everybody. And I don't think I need to tell you what's been the biggest story on the internet for the past 24 hours.

No buts about it. Kim Kardashian's impossibly tiny waste accentuated by her most celebrated asset. Yes, that's Kim Kardashian bearing a backside. A photo of Kim Kardashian's bootie. This is Reply All, the show about the internet, and I'm PJ Vog. The Kardashian photos were published in November. If you have a very strange media diet in which you basically only listen to this podcast and somehow you've not seen these photos, I'll describe them for you.

It's a series of nude and semi-nude fashion photos of Kim Kardashian. In the most famous one, she's pouring a champagne bottle over her shoulder into a champagne glass, which is propped on her butt. These photos would not have been so ubiquitous if it were not for two people. One of them, obviously, is Kim Kardashian. The other is Greg Noss. I'm going to go out on a limb and say that Greg's story might be the less familiar of these two. When Paper Magazine first told Greg that they needed his help to prepare for a big traffic spike,

they didn't actually tell him what was going to bring all this traffic to the site. He had very little idea what he was in for. The only thing that they made absolutely clear to him was his deadline. Start now. because the launch date is Tuesday next week. And so how did you feel when they said that? Scared Shilless. There's not a lot of time in the grand scheme of things.

In theory, Greg actually could have just said no to this, but instead he said yes, immediately. It was Pavlovian. What do you mean? Somebody rang a bell and I started salivating because I expected I was going to get to design an infrastructure. So is it joyous? Like, is it like, yes, I get to start. solve this problem? Joy might be too strong word, but there is a profound and nerdy satisfaction in saying, this is a big problem, I know how to solve it, I can do it in a very short amount of time

by myself. And then 15 minutes later, you think, oh shit, what have I done? So Greg spent his first few days just like getting advice from friends, downloading open source software, adding extra servers, and setting up a backup plan so that even if one of those servers failed, the paper magazine site could still temporarily live on Amazon's cloud computers. Those, by the way, are all the technical details we're going to give you. Sorry, web backend development fetishists. You'll just have to get your sick thrills from some other podcast. If you do really want to get into the technical stuff of the story, you should go read

Paul Ford's medium piece about it. It's fantastic. It's where we learned about this. Anyway, by Sunday, two days out, Greg's built his contraption, but he's got a new problem, which is how do you test this thing? There are a lot of tools that allow this, not specifically to look at butts, or perhaps there are. I'm not familiar with every subculture on the internet. There are a whole bunch of tools that allow you to simulate traffic against a website.

The one I happen to like is called bees with machine guns. What it is is a piece of software that automatically brings up a whole bunch of tiny little machine, on the Amazon network, and then they aim their tiny little machine guns at your server and act like 10 or 50 or 100 or 250,000 people hitting the website at the same time. So Greg tells the bees to attack to see if the server could survive the load he expected. I'd done some math and calculated out what I thought the load should be, but bees wasn't able to reach it. And I finally figured out that the requests I was making was maxing out the maximum network capacity of the bees machine, that they simply couldn't send data fast enough

to simulate the load that was going to happen. In other words, hundreds of thousands of virtual bees with virtual machine guns were no match against the very real power of Kim Kardashian's naked butt. Greg decided he'd have to just trust his gut, that the preparations that he'd made were good enough. Greg told me that this week alternated between being one of the most stressful work weeks in his life and one of the most professionally satisfying. Because it might be strange to imagine this from the outside,

but Greg says there's a lot of art to being a system administrator. There are times when you're in flow, and it's like being a writer in flow, or like being an artist in flow, or like being anybody who can create something, it just comes and it feels awesome. It's a feeling that, I mean, I've been chasing for years. And then when it goes away,

it's incredibly frustrating. It's heartbreaking even where I'm doomed. I've committed to something that I'm incapable of doing that isn't going to work. And so like the tweet that I wrote at 6.45 a.m. on Thursday, which is sometimes a fun thing to do is have anxiety slowly tear you apart from the inside. That's how I felt then. By Monday, the new infrastructure Greg had built was actually up, and Greg was feeling cautiously optimistic. So much so that on Tuesday, the very day that the pictures were supposed to post, he was actually coaching his kids' little league team.

At the end of practice, I check my phone, and it says the images are now live. And I go, oh my God, I didn't realize it was so late. And so I go tearing home. I live just a couple of minutes from the field, and I bring up on my computer the load of each of the machines that's handling the front end record. And it doesn't seem like there's a lot of traffic. Certainly more than normal. There's a spike. But it doesn't seem like anything like we had talked about.

And what it turns out is Kim had posted the original two pictures, which were the champagne shot and the Buren shot, to Instagram. And so that's where people were going. She has like 25 million followers on Instagram. When you see the Instagram pictures on her site, you're just feeling relieved. You're feeling like, you know, we set something up for a horde of traffic, and instead we're getting a mini horde and we're fine. Relief mixed with disappointment. You know, it's like you build a race car and you want to see it race. Right.

And you're glad that it doesn't burst in flame. But it's also just kind of ticking down the track. You know, you're doing 35 miles an hour, and okay, great. Then paper published the second batch of photos. they came a day later and they took Greg by surprise the following two pictures were frontal nudes which Instagram does not allow

from their terms of service and so then Kim points to the paper magazine site and the the traffic spike is like the front of half dome it just goes straight up and straight up forever

and it was just it was like nothing I mean, I've been doing this for a long time, and it was like nothing I've ever seen before. The site held. The pictures were everywhere. My 15-year-old son is sports obsessed, and that's pretty much his entire, other than school and dog walking, he is entirely consumed by sports. And it comes up to me like the day afterwards, and he said, hey, dad, your Kim Kardashian thing was on the crawl on Sports Center. It's like even invaded his Kardashian-less world. Yeah, exactly.

Hey, son, that was your dad. Aren't you proud? I mean, did you feel kind of proud? I was proud that it worked. Yeah. That is pure technical nerd. I put together a machine that held together. There are people who do this every day.

Thousands of system administrators out there, tens of thousands, who handle sites like Facebook. and Gmail and they're chuckling at this because they see this kind of stuff on a slow day. They're the guys who keep the whole internet running. And sometimes it gets attention. And when it gets attention, it's like, wow, that's a lot going on. Everything is like that. For one week, you had to be in charge of one of those invisible, complicated, necessary infrastructures.

Did it change how you looked at? Did those systems seem more visible to you for a while? You know, I'm an old-time Twitter user, and I lived through the fail whale era. The fail-whale era was a time in Twitter's history where the service was just constantly crashing. When it didn't work, you'd get an error message that included a picture of a whale. And from the outside, it's annoying. Oh, the small amusement I wanted to give myself at the moment is unavailable. But from the inside, they invented.

new computer science to solve problems on a scale that had never been seen before. That's incredibly fascinating to me. It would bore the snot out of 99.9% of the population. You have to have pride in a job that if it works, nobody notices it. Like, you only really get noticed if you mess something up and everything breaks. Yeah, but that's, I'm a nerd. I think that the people who are drawn to these kind of jobs take the most satisfaction in the technical accomplishment of it working.

If they were interested in fame or if they were interested in large amounts of money, they would have very different personalities and have pursued very different careers. Occasionally, you can see nerds like Greg who have built something that made them so rich and so famous that they can't avoid the spotlight anymore. Mark Zuckerberg comes to mind, Bill Gates too.

I mean, you can't tell for sure, but when you watch them, it always seems like they don't want to be. there. They'd rather be back in the basement, banging on the pipes with a wrench. We're doing another installment of a segment that you might remember from a few weeks ago called Yes Yes No. Here to explain that segment is my co-host, Alex Goldman. As you may know, our boss, Alex Bloomberg, is a very busy man, so busy in fact that he rarely has time to even look at the internet, much less try and understand the dark, dark corridors that me and PJ

spend our days walking down. So Yes Yes, Yes No is a segment where we try and explain to him one internet phenomenon and hope that by the end he gets it. All right, so I have this tweet. It's from a person named Libby Watson. It says, Ugh. I agree with almost all of this, but why does he always have to say stuff like,

quote, weird Twitter will hoot. And then there's a link to a website, fredericdebore.com, and the article linked to has the headline, I don't know what to do you guys. And then it seems to be an article

mocking a writer named Jonathan Chate. Do you understand what this tweet means? Yes. Alex Goldman, do you understand what this tweet means? Yes. Alex Bloomberg.

I hate to ask. Do you understand what this tweet means? No. All right, let's get into it. This one is different than the last one. The last one had a lot more words that I didn't understand. But this one has all.

words that I understand, but they're used in a way that seems to have a significance that I don't quite get. It's referencing some sort of conversation online that I'm definitely not a part of. Somebody named Frederick Dabour is always saying things that other people are noticing and annoyed by. So that I don't know what that is. But then there's this thing, weird Twitter. And weird Twitter is capitalized. And so I know what Twitter is, and I know what weird is. But I don't know what the proper noun weird Twitter is.

All right. Well, let me just set this up. So last week, Jonathan Chate, who writes for New York Magazine, wrote an article called Not a Very PC thing to say, which was about language policing, political correctness. And the headline is how the language police are perverting liberalism. And the reaction on the internet was really bad because they were like, oh, the old white man says that things are. too hard out there for old white men. So we have this Jonathan Chate article that seems cranky and a little bit anachronistic that a lot of people disagreed with on the internet.

Right. All right. I'm with you so far. But then who's this guy, Frederick DeBore? He's done, he's written our opinion pieces for the New York Times. He writes a lot of articles that are about this sort of thing. He writes this thing saying like, I get that everyone disagreed with Jonathan Chate saying this. He's like, allow me to make the point that I think someone else could have made.

if he hadn't made it so poorly. And within that article, he said, I know writing these words exactly how this will go down. I know Weird Twitter will hoot and the same pack of self-absorbed media liberals will hurt to derp about it. There's a lot to them better. So what's Weird Twitter?

Alex. Weird Twitter is a loose collective of people on Twitter who are constantly ridiculing everyone and everything. It was named by someone else and they constantly are making fun of the fact that they're called weird Twitter. They don't use their real names and they mostly make jokes.

Like a lot of times they'll intentionally misspell things or things will be all lowercase. If you just looked at one of their tweets, it looks like it's written by a person who it's like their first day on a computer maybe. Oh, the other thing that's worth saying is these people have like 20, 40, 60,000 followers. And the followers are like journalists

and like comedians with big followings within this one stupid narrow media landscape, these people are actually pretty influential. So do join Weird Twitter? No, you can't join Weird Twitter. Anybody who would try to join Weird Twitter would not be had as a member. And nobody in Weird Twitter would admit

that they are a member of Weird Twitter. Let me ask you this. Are you guys in Weird Twitter? No. Alex wants to be. I think I'm aspirationally in Weird Twitter, but they'd never have me. And how do you know?

You know, I think, based on the people who are following you. Like, they would never admit to being weird Twitter. They don't even like the name. They make fun of it constantly. All right. So how many people are in Weird Twitter? BuzzFeed did, like, an oral history of Weird Twitter.

And they profiled, like, maybe 10 to 20 people. And they had, like, a graph. And literally, like, John Herman, who did it was, like, I know I'm going to get yelled at. I know everyone's going to have a problem with this. And even he did his interviews with them were just, like, filled with crazy trolling. God, weird Twitter is like the internet teamsters.

Yeah. Oh, that's really good analogy. Yeah. Weird Twitter is like the internet teamsters. And one of the things I like about weird Twitter is sometimes they will find a way to embarrass somebody who's like a public figure and a jerk in public. And this is not a weird Twitter person, but there's a person employing weird Twitter tactics. Richard Dawkins tweeted, most doesn't mean all. Most Muslims are not terrorists.

is fully compatible with most terrorists or Muslims. Obvious but. So I don't know. He was making some like racist academic point. And somebody said, Bofa has supplied this evidence. Have you read it? And he said, sorry, who or what is Bofa?

And they said, Bofa these nuts, you dick. And then there was like a video of Wario. Like engaging someone who's being an asshole in a really high-brow way in a very like sort of smartly juvenile way, that's like a weird Twitter thing. I'm not sure. I'm sure I would put it that way. How would you put it?

I would say they literally said Bofa has supplied the information about that and then when he wrote back saying what's Bofa, they said both of these nuts, you dick. And then you said that was smart. I think it's so smart.

I think it's so smart. That's my only point. I have to say that I pretty much only follow the weird Twitter crew. They're like all that they to me are meat of Twitter. They're the value of Twitter to me. The absurdist component

of weird Twitter is super funny to me. There's a Twitter username Kat Beltane, and he tweets, here's a couple of his tweets. This to me is like the purest distillation of the potential of Twitter as an art form. Are you ready?

Oh boy. I'm ready. Hilarious prank. Use millions of years of evolution to swell in ape's brain until it's capable of feeling disappointed in itself. I love you just laughing at the silence of a bomb joke So the quintessential weird twitterer is drill PJ hates drill

No, I like drill now, I changed my mind One of the drill ones I really like Another Day volunteering at the Betsy Ross Museum Everyone keeps asking me if they can fuck the flag Buddy, they won't even let me fuck it Oh, that's good. The weird thing about weird Twitter that I'm learning is like, I mean, for all it's like irony and like, these are just sort of like silly jokes. They have this ability to hone in on what is, like, I feel like a fear that I have in my heart is that I'm secretly ridiculous for reasons I don't understand.

And one day someone's going to figure it out and point it out and that's all anyone's ever going to see. sort of like what happened in high school or whatever and they're really good at that. And that's their power. I would say so, right, Alex? Yes. Is to find the one part of you that you haven't fully realized is full of shit.

And just stay on it forever. Yeah. That is a valuable service. No, but I think I've arrived at understanding. Really? Yeah. Okay, so the tweet, we started with this tweet. I agree with almost all of this,

but why does he always have to say stuff like weird Twitter will Hout and it linked to a fredrickdebore.com article. And what I now know, Frederick Dabur is an online commentator of some kind. He was taking issue with another article that had been written online by Jonathan Chate. And in the article, in the Frederick Daboor article, he used the line, weird Twitter will hoot. And that brought us deep into an explanation of what exactly is weird Twitter.

And what is we did? Twitter. And weird Twitter seems to be a collection of 20 to 40 mostly real people, many of whom use online pseudonyms, who are united by a passion for absurdist and slightly juvenile humor. It's sort of like if Holden Caldfield had watched a bunch of mystery science theater and then Yeah. And then opened a fake Twitter account.

Yeah. That's weird Twitter. Holy crap. Yeah. We're at yes, yes, yes in a big way. Yeah. Reply all is me, PJ Vote, with Alex Goldman. We're also Chris Neri,

Shruthy Penhaminani, and Alex Bloomberg. Matt Lieber is like a memory of summer in a winter that seems to go on forever. Our show is mixed by Gimlet's technical director, the Reverend John DeLore. Our theme song is by the Mysteries, is Breakmaster's Cylinder and our ad music is from Build Building. We're online at replyall.l.Limow.

If you like the show, you can help us by reviewing us in the iTunes store or just by listening. Thanks for listening and we'll see you next week. So Alex, you made something else besides a podcast this week. I did indeed. As of Friday, January 30th, I am a father. My wife gave birth to a baby boy named Harvey at 725. in the morning. I fainted and had to be taken to the ER, but I'm all right, baby's all right, so it's really, really exciting. And so you're going to take a month to raise your child,

and then you'll be back making the podcast, and you'll probably be dropping in over the month, right? That's right. I have a microphone in my basement, so every once in a while I'll drop in to say, hey, but PJ's going to be steering the ship for a while, which is terrifying. Yeah, it should be. Well, if you want, you could run the podcast and I could raise your child. that's slightly more terrifying. It is crazy. I don't know. I'm proud of you.

Thanks.