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Comment by whoisjuan | Hacker News Reader

Cringe humor is extremely popular within the meme culture and that's not surprising. Memes are so incredibly fascinating from whatever angle you want to analyze them. It is so bizarre that this concept of producing and composing images that capture/represent a feeling, a historic moment, a situation, a thought, etc, can create this massive meta-culture with its own rules and social implications.

Social media wouldn't be what it is if it wasn't for the meme culture. Just think about it. How many companies exist because of these memes that we share. Reddit, Imgur, Giphy, Gfycat, 9Gag, Kapwing, the hundreds of thousands of meme accounts on Instagram... All these companies and organized entities exist because of memes. That is so surreal.

What was the creative outlet of regular people before the meme culture? It feels so massive and unhinged that it almost makes me think that we didn't have anything equivalent before.

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> What was the creative outlet of regular people before the meme culture?

Still memes; albeit in the form of jokes, idioms, quotations, fables, etc. The novelty here is the tools that now allow us to create pictorial content and share it ad infinitum for virtually free.

There are many illustrations/postcards/woodcarvings from Victorian England/Edo japan/etc that are all but memes in names (they even had the same disproportionate representation of cats!), they just couldn’t be shared as broadly and instantaneously.

> What was the creative outlet of regular people before the meme culture? It feels so massive and unhinged that it almost makes me think that we didn't have anything equivalent before.

I was just thinking about this yesterday.

In the 80s and 90s it was popular to parrot moments from movies. Quoting them, mimicking them, or simply pointing at someone and drawing a parallel. In the early/mid 90s my friends and I used to make our own WAV files and we would even photoshop pictures every now and then.

Political memes are kind of like modern-day political cartoons in that they distill key points down into a very relatable and shareable form.

Human nature is human nature - I think it's always been around just using different tools and distribution methods. Kind of cool actually!

I think it's a way that people found in order to participate in a collective endeavor of creativity over the internet. Many people like brainstorming sessions, where everything is allowed and almost no idea is actively invalidated by others. It's a group experience that's usually rare (constrained to school projects and some company meetings), and socially awkward people might not enjoy them in a live setting. I think Memes are kinda like those brainstorming sessions, but they are async, introverts can enjoy them, and they go on ad finitum.

Memes are just comedy plus digital multimedia.

I think the rise of cringe and its encompassing genre of incidental humour is not due to the Internet / meme culture, but of recording generally. TV shows like "America's funniest home videos" and "You've been framed" feature a lot of cringe humour (much of it physical); film outtakes are cringe. Its existence depends on incidental recording. Social media produces so much cringe because it's always recording.

The most accurate way to model memes is as a form of life that inhabits the medium of human collective consciousness. They are born, spread, and mutate, but they also adapt their environment to serve them.

Meme's have existed as long as we have, but the internet is a like a mass-transit system for them. Memes are able to spread farther and faster than ever before and find their disparate niches to thrive in.

memes are interwoven with the language of the youth/modern internet so much so that brands even legacy designer fashion adopt memes/intentionally use promo that will get memed

i dont know if this is good as the trend goes on seeing how something cannot really exist on the internet unless its been shitposted to a considerable level. the discussions about tiktok on hn and the rate content is being consumed/shaping our brains and the ways we communicate.

Meme's are just inside jokes shared with a larger group (be it sub communities on the internet, or basically the entire internet). The creative outlet for regular people was the same, just on a smaller scale.

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