My #1 recommendation for anyone thinking about the convoluted OCR solution: use a cheap OCR API and save yourself months of time / hassle / upkeep. Google's OCR API is a good place to start, but AWS has one too and dozens of others out there.
Without this "convoluted OCR solution" it never would have been built. Mandatory would have easily had to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to OCR his meme collection alone, even without scraping other meme sites.
On the contrary, this sort of creative thinking is what's needed instead of automatically reaching for that shiny Cloud Toy. It's easy to get a proof-of-concept working, sure, but at scale, you start torching through cash.
Many places keep adding cloud services to their stacks until one day someone in the C-suite notices the AWS bill.
