this post was submitted on 31 Aug 2023
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chapotraphouse
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So I've been out of the meme game for a while now but to me it felt like there were a steady stream of meme formats that would come out and then in the past, say 3 or 4 years, the overall volume of new meme formats took a huge nosedive for some reason.
Has any other (old) person noticed this or is it just me?
I think I know what you mean. It was all motivational posters or impact font macros for a while. Then there were those endless Epic Fail Guy or rage guy comics. Then I don't even know, it was wild for a while after around 2012.
Now a meme is one of three things: a picture with a white box and black text, a wojack, or edits of webcomics from 15 years ago
the original editor-in-chief of The Onion back in the 1980s, when they actually printed satirical newspapers, had a philosophy, that there are only 11 types of joke (each one of the examples below is an Onion headline from back in the day, forgive me for they are corny)
Alcoholic Father Disappointed In Pothead Son
Mom Thinks You'd Enjoy Restaurant She Can't Remember Name Of Right Now
Day Chalked Up As Loss By 10:15 A.M. (this is most "normie memes")
Holy Shit, Man Walks On Fucking Moon
Al Gore Places Infant Son In Rocket To Escape Dying Planet
Magnanimous Boss, King Of Kings, Allows Employees To Watch World Cup In Office
Fritolaysia Cuts Off Chiplomatic Relations With Snakistan
Man Approaches Unfamiliar Shower Knobs Like He's Breaking A Wild Stallion
Wheelchair Basketball Players Stunned By Thunderous Slam Dunk
It Sadly Unclear Whether This Article Will Put Lives At Risk
Really Fun Toy Banned Because Of 3 Stupid Dead Kids
Yep. That's exactly it.
There was a period, at least a few years and probably more like 5 or so, where there was a short meme cycle to the point where sometimes a meme format would be stale within a month or two and there was a huge churn of new meme formats that would be constantly emerging.
Then it's like someone just turned the tap off and the culture died (I wonder if something shifted in 4chan maybe?) and now we're just stuck with wojacks.
Speaking of which...
There genuinely was a change in 4chan and I've often wondered if this had a profound effect on the rest of internet culture. It sounds silly, but I can't deny that something's really changed.
moot (previous 4chan admin) retired from the site in January of 2015. After he left there was a scramble for mod positions and a honest to goodness white supremacist plot to control the site. That's definitely when things started to feel weird. I don't really know how or why the wider internet was impacted, it was probably multiple things at once, but 2015 seems like a weird shift of a year
In the Star Trek community it's all screen caps with fake dialogue
I asked my nephew what memes were like now and he said, “memes are cringe, breh”
your nef (zoomer speak for nephew) is so wise
I knew I was old but I never thought that I'd feel this old until I read your comment.
The new 'meme format' is reminiscent of the sheer incomprehensibility of memes from 2005, where you could still easily stumble on just the most random stuff, and there were like four or five different videos players and they were all terrible, but the videos were occasionally funny
But now it's like that through mainstream apps and on purpose. People are just throwing whatever they can think of at the algorithm and seeing what sticks
The biggest 'trends' I see are stuff from TikTok, but still, even that is alot of nonsense, some of it comprehensible, some of it not.
couple possibilities:
the "productivity" of an online supercommunity (as in its creation of new concepts and ideas and jokes) explodes when it's new and growing. but at a certain point, usually due to corporate profit-seeking, the community stagnates and is mostly just recycled shit. you can kinda track this across the popular social media sites over the decades, like at one point 4chan was the source of a bunch of new memes, same with facebook, tumblr, twitter, reddit. as each of them aged out of their growth phase and became more stratified, more and more of their stuff was recycled shit or new stuff from other sites. now i think a lot of memes come from like tiktok, which doesn't translate super well to image and discussion board type media. if i were a data scientist maybe i'd do an analysis of knowyourmeme to prove/disprove this idea
or
we're getting old and losing touch with the high-paced culture as it evolves faster than we can understand.