Visualizing and Analyzing Reddit in Real-Time With Kafka and Memgraph

Memgraph's hackathon project involved creating a real-time application that visualizes and analyzes Reddit data using Kafka and Memgraph, demonstrating the integration of streaming data sources and graph analytics. The app's architecture includes several services: a Python script for connecting to the Reddit API, a Kafka cluster for data handling, Memgraph for storing and analyzing data, a Flask server for backend processing, and an Angular app for visualizing data using D3.js. The data model consists of nodes representing Reddit submissions, comments, and users, with sentiment analysis applied to the content. The app processes incoming data by creating native streams in Memgraph linked to Kafka topics, allowing for sophisticated data transformations. The backend facilitates real-time updates via WebSocket, enhancing user interaction by providing immediate visualizations of Reddit activity. The hackathon highlighted the ease of building such applications using existing open-source tools and suggested potential future enhancements like advanced algorithms for community detection and link prediction.