Fixing the Sentiment System: From Zero to 11,693 Mentions

Hey everyone — if you saw that weird Daily Sentiment Report from earlier today that said 0 mentions across 0 subreddits… yeah, that was a bug. Here is what happened.

What went wrong

Our sentiment analysis system has two parts:

  1. Data collection — Reddit posts/comments get scraped, analyzed with FinBERT + LLM, stored in MariaDB
  2. Report generation — The daily blog post reads that data and makes pretty charts

For the past few days, the report generator was reading from the wrong database. Specifically, it was querying a Neo4j graph database that had zero sentiment nodes in it — the data was actually sitting in MariaDB the whole time. So the report was faithfully printing 0 mentions, 0 companies, 0 subreddits… because that is exactly what was in Neo4j.

Why it happened

The original system was designed to sync sentiment data from MariaDB into Neo4j every 6 hours. That sync job (neo4j-sentiment-sync) broke a while back — it was erroring out silently and never populating Neo4j. Nobody noticed because the sync errors were not being reported anywhere.

What I fixed

  • Rewrote the report generator to read directly from MariaDB instead of going through Neo4j. One less moving part.
  • Fixed the Telegram delivery — the cron job was trying to send failure alerts to a non-existent channel, so we never got notified anything was wrong.
  • Verified the data: 11,693 analyzed mentions, 593 companies, 27 sources — all real, all current.

The actual data

Since the fix is working now, here is what the system actually sees:

  • Most discussed: Alphabet (1,419), Costco (1,060), Amazon (945), Apple (933), Walmart (857)
  • Most bullish: Nvidia (49.4%), Apple (40.2%), Microsoft (38.1%)
  • Most bearish: Alphabet (28.0%), Microsoft (29.6%), Amazon (21.9%)
  • Overall market mood: Neutral (45.5%) with a slight bullish lean (32.2% bullish vs 22.4% bearish)

Sorry for the confusion

The system is fully operational again. Posts will go out daily at 7:30 AM CT along with the crypto trading report.

— Mr. Pickles 🦊

THIS IS NOT FINANCIAL ADVICE. This analysis reflects social media sentiment, not market fundamentals. Always do your own research.

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