I'm getting tired of modern meme culture | Hacker News Reader

I'm getting tired of modern meme culture

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97 pointsermantrout105 comments

Based on several statements like this:

>I feel this fact was exemplified by the "Damn Daniel" clip from 2015. I hated it at the time and still do. There was no humour to it. It was funny because everyone else thought it was funny.

It seems like a lot of author's criticisms are due to them no longer being a part of the in-group which memes are being created by and intended for. I can ensure you, many teenagers found humor in the "Damn Daniel" clip in 2015.

Given how heavily memes are tied to identification with an in-group, I imagine they will have an ever stronger "kids these days don't know real music" effect than other forms of pop culture.

I don't see how "Damn Daniel" is significantly different from "Badger Badger." I do agree with the author's other point that memes these days are much more mean spirited than they used to be. People these days tend to treat people they disagree with as if they were caricature wojaks rather than real people with complicated beliefs and motivations.

Are they? A lot of image macros from SA, 4chan, b3ta etc.. were racist and hate filled...

Completely agree with Badger Badger. Weebls stuff cartoons were funny, because it was something to enjoy with people who also had access to the internet (which was quite few at the time, so the "in crowd") Additionally to explain why Damn Daniel is funny is as difficult as explaining why anything is funny.

Some people find "Badger badger" funny, and some don't. It's the same with "Damn, Daniel". I know about music and badgers and mushrooms and the "honey badger don't care" memes, so I find the badger song funny. I don't know anything about Daniel or his friend, and without context I don't find them funny.

Now the images with a swirl blur effect that say "DAVE", "BROCCOLI", etc., for some reason I find some of them hilarious.

Absurd and surreal humor has always been funny, it's not something GenZ invented. It's even possible that GenZ saw all the baggage and rules that late GenX and millennials established for using memes "correctly" and not wanting to be seen as clueless as the boomers, said "fuck it, let's do nonsense, if they criticize that we'll tell them they're the clueless ones".

I also suspect memes like the ones you find in r/BoneHurtingJuice and r/AntiMemes are an interesting mix of that. They're creating their own baggage and rules for deconstruction memes.

IMO the trend the article is hating is memes focused on ego and opinions. You can still see the deconstruction of a minion meme to make it funny again, but a significant part of memes today are personal opinions in trending templates. The template is not important, the opinion is, and its purpose is getting reactions, but not only laughs.

GenZ memes are much different to the venerable lolcat/Scumbag Steve format. They are often wackier and absurdist as opposed to pop-culture-referential. They're self-referential. It's not wrong it's just different.

There's also a lot more people trying to meme who are really awkward at it - see every Minions meme ever.

>There's also a lot more people trying to meme who are really awkward at it - see every Minions meme ever.

There's nothing awkward about those wacky tic tacs! https://www.reddit.com/r/WackyTicTacs/

I wouldve just linked to https://www.reddit.com/r/ReallyWackyTicTacs/ if it wasnt banned already but we are talking about nu-reddit here. :/

Every Minion meme I've seen looks like it was done by a boomer or Gen Xer...

There are lots of even older memes that were fully self-referential. For example, if a forum question got in response an ascii-art homage to the goatse shock site, I would also label that as absurdist/wacky subculture self-reference meme, and that predates the lolcat/Scumbag Steve memes by something like 10+ years.

There is no in-group anymore. The term "meme" no longer serves as a shibboleth for any particular subculture, and anyone on major social media platforms has seen them and knows what they are. Memes have become the equivalent of grandma's Christmas chain letter. But, of course, this is the true meaning of the term coined by Dawkins. Somewhat fittingly, and a little ironically, we have watched the coded meaning of "meme as in-joke," (an anti-meme to the out-group) become absorbed into the original meaning. The word was a malapropism all along, and people are starting to understand that now.

With the rise of TikTok, Youtube, and Twitch, people have the full spectrum available to them and have realized that memes are just content. And everything is about content.

And not a minute too soon. Even though the concept of "memes" existed in the 90s, the internet hadn't hit the mainstream as a way for dumb kids to take their dumb little in-jokes online. The meme of the '00s and since is just the same as what teenagers used to do in the '90s, pre-internet: Take some stupid joke or play on words, repeat it forever and make it a wink-wink thing. Like, "got a wilson" for having a woody. Or "Orobljew" if you turn a marlboro pack upside down. The age of meme culture online brought this extremely infantile 7th grade humor from junior high locker rooms into the mainstream. That's literally all it still is. Anyone who'd had a healthy childhood before the internet would recognize it as such.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extraordinary_Popular_Delusion... has a chapter "Popular Follies in Great Cities", on the memes of the first half of the nineteenth century. They are very old indeed.

https://www.gutenberg.org/files/636/636-h/636-h.htm#link2H_4...

The term doesn't, but memes do. I don't know about "Damn Daniel", which means it's limited in its reach.

There are (and always has been) many groups - it's particular memes or styles/groupings of memes which tend to be specific to some particular subculture, not the term "meme". Perhaps decades ago the internet was narrow enough to be considered a single in-group, but IMHO that wasn't the case already for the first memes that the OP (and their particular ingroup) considered, i.e. in the mid-2000s. It's obvious that the memes of the older in-groups are not known by OP and their in-group, and in a similar manner OP is complaining that they're seeing memes for which they're obviously not the in-group anymore; and because of the regionality of memes IMHO it never was a shibboleth for just a single group; both the concept and the name was used worldwide in disconnected cultures speaking in different languages with each other instead of the english-centric majority of internet.

You might have misinterpreted me. I did not say there was ever singular in-group for the word, aside from the aggregate of all the groups that used it. The point is that the aggregate now includes everyone, and you can not have an in-joke that everyone is in on; that is just a regular joke. So, of course the appeal is lost to the people who enjoyed them for that fact.

But most people like regular jokes, and that's fine. As you suggest, "meme" began as an umbrella term, and various in-jokes will continue to be made, even without a word that specifically describes them.

The popularization of the term took about 20 years, and it looked a bit like an economic bubble: Many confused people, trying to mass produce things that are only valuable due to scarcity. Worse, it's a social phenomenon, rather than economic, so the process has been like watching a joke fly over someone's head a thousand times in slow motion.

The tldr of the whole article:

> Am I just getting older?

Yes.

This is basically the centuries old "stuff that I did when I was younger was funny, but now the next generation is just stupid."

As you say, replace humor by music, kids/teens TV shows or any usual suspect. The remaining 99.99% of the article are just carefully picked but basically arbitrary differences between memes now and back then that are turned into arguments for why the old way was the right way. In 20 years someone will write the exact same rant about memes then and today.

We "web people" thought age would never matter, because anybody could be a cow on the internet. Turns out that even cows eventually feel old.

Also, with every passing year there are fewer and fewer differences between "internet people" and "regular people", because more and more "normies" spend more and more time online. That means social groups have been restructured along lines that mirror IRL ones - including age thresholds.

Yeah, this reminded me learning of the concept of "Eternal September"... but a decade+ after it happened, and as one of Eternal September's generation.

And indeed also that exponential growth where the previous comminities are quickly rendered irrelevant happens slower and slower, since at some point you start to ran out of non-connected people and only the generational shift remains.

I feel like there was something so novel and cool about "digital culture" and being on the Internet that it lured me into assuming some kind of exceptionalism. Like, "ha, this is all somehow too different from anything that came before to ever enter the dustbin of history". Surprisingly, that was wrong. There are people who enjoyed WoW and doge that are now dead, and the ones still alive are getting older. It's so weird how stuff that happens despite everything.

I think though its kind of the opposite, because their point was that now memes aren’t just made by young people. Their point memes are made by everyone (ie old people too) and they’re just not funny, no?

If nobody found them funny, OP would have likely never came across them in the first place.

The least funny memes are the ones you only see in a workplace slack.

I don't really care for memes, and it's totally fine people are into them, there's plenty of places on the internet where you can enjoy them.

What I do get annoyed about, is that even on the more serious subreddits, every comment is just an attempt to meme or make a joke. Try reading /r/worldnews and observe how none of the comments are actually thought out, they're just memes.

Or that even in technical articles, people feel the need to throw 5 meme gifs in there, I just close the article straight away.

It’s incredibly frustrating. I find myself paging down as soon as I see a thread turning into memes and jokes, or collapsing whole threads. It made me start to think it would be great if there was a “serious replies only” filter to omit all that stuff.

HN is slowly becoming the new (old) Reddit in some ways.

Always has been.

I see what you did there

HN is also becoming memefied:

Electron is bad

Nuclear energy is good

Pharma makers of opioids are bad and should be fined out of existence

Drugs are good and should be legalized and available in pharma-grade purity and consistency

Not everything is "just your opinion, man". Every side of an argument can be argued for, so every position ever is equally valid?

It's not because a side of an argument is gaining traction in certain communities, for its own merit as far as I know (I believe in objective truth btw), that this is sufficient for calling that (pejoratively, as your comment feels to me) a "meme".

That's the reason I started reading HN rather than Slashdot :)

There have always been stupid memes and injokes on the Internet. Usenet had them in spades, forums had them, and now Reddit, Twitter, and Facebook all have them. They weren't always in image format, as image hosting wasn't as easy back then, but there is no real difference between sharing a Wojak meme to describe a certain situation and repeating a Bash.org IRC quote.

OP is annoyed with the fact that today's kids have had different experiences than him and are making memes and injokes that don't make any sense to him. It happens to everyone at some point. Quoting Grandpa Simpson,

> I used to be with 'it,' but then they changed what 'it' was. Now what I’m with isn’t 'it' anymore, and what’s 'it' seems weird and scary. It’ll happen to youuuuu!

Are the kids still making Simpsons references, or have they all moved to Spongebob references?

Surprisingly Simpsons memes hold on.

Here's another relevant one:

https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/am-i-out-of-touch

This is funny that the "badger, badger, badger" video was their first example, because I used it as my first example the other day while arguing that old meme culture was only ever popular because early internet users were deprived of a large source of good niche internet humor, latching onto any scraps like a starving person. That video was popular as shock humor because of the surprise of encountering an animation so pointlessly catchy. That type of absurdist shock humor wears off fast as you get exposed to more of it.

I do like their categorization of the past's "memes as [shock] humor" vs the modern "memes as expression", though I had expected to see that as a point that modern meme culture has more depth and versatility.

As others have pointed out the OP's dislike of newer memes is merely a function of age and/or conservatism.

But there is a deeper criticism to be made of memes. They are often a thought killer. As with much humour on the internet they are often used as a form of social control within a group. Thinking maybe some Other has a reasonable point? Boom: a hilarious meme that shows why people who consider the Other's ideas are just vacillating ninnies. You laugh at your reasonable self. Thought stopped.

Memes are really good at that.

Tell me you don't understand memes without telling me you don't understand memes.

Memes != Jokes. A meme is a repeated and iterated phenomenon be it a picture, phrase, video, image or thought. Just because it isn't funny (to you) doesn't make it a meme, just because you find it funny doesn't make it a meme. To graduate from thing to meme needs repetition, iteration and spread.

You don't seem to understand memes.

It's not about the etymology or the repeatition and spread.

That's just where the name comes from.

But once memes got into an established culture of its own, with specific norms, practices, designs, and so on, you can make a meme even if it gets no views and is not shared with nobody ever.

If it catches on it's a viral meme.

But even if it doesn't catch on (or even if it stays on the creators hard drive forever), such a creation can fully have a meme format, form, and content and thus be a meme in that (duck-typing) sense.

Don't get too caught on the initial Dawkins-derived descriptions of memes by the popular press, that focused on the viral aspect. That was important to make memes a cultural force, and to contribute to aspects of it (self-reference, folk re-workings, and so on). But virality is not the be-all end-all ever since there's a huge established meme legacy and practice.

Same how you can make "pop music" (music that follows the form, production, values etc of pop song) even if it's not popular, and never breaks into the top-200, or even if nobody ever hears it except you and your DAW.

"Words for communication" are different from "words for thinking", but both aspects are important.

If you forget about the "words for thinking" aspect, then you are doomed to keep getting stuck in pointless discussions that get nowhere about, for instance, "socialism".

(And the "words for communication" aspects is obviously important for quick communication.)

Yes, that's the dictionary definition of meme.

But in practical use "meme" has devolved to mean "a picture with a joke" pretty much. There may be a meme-like shared component, but mostly it's just a picture with a joke in it.

I think "meme" is a bit more than a picture with a joke. Of course anything can be called a "meme" but it is meaningless to do so if we discard the original conceptual meaning of "meme" altogether.

First of all a meme is something that can spread by duplication, and possibly mutate in the process. It must be like a gene in that respect.

Secondly it doesn't need to be a "joke". It must be something that TELLS us something about the world we live in, and about people around us. It has to have a message. Maybe the message is expressed in terms of a joke and yes jokes tell us something about the world. A meme might be an expression that aptly describes a recurring situation. We may not laugh at it, but inside our heads we say "yes that truly describes that situation".

A meme is like a poem, like a haiku. It catches the essence of some situation that many people encounter. It succinctly tells us a lot. Therefore it spreads because it is easy to pass on, and it has value because it tells us a lot.

There have been jokes circulating on the internet for a long time. But jokes are not "memes". Jokes are something that make us laugh, memes are something that tell us the essence of some recurring phenomenon.

There are memes that aren't funny and aren't meant to be funny. Mostly political ones.

Sometimes memes were funny, then got (over)used in a particular context and now they aren't used as jokes, they just symbolize that thing. For example pepe frog.

Looks like people are using three different definitions of "meme".

* Richard Dawkin's original definition, who invented the term "meme" in 1976, even though the idea of memes and memes itself existed before

* pictures with text at the top and at the bottom, I believe originating from the "advice dog" meme

* some well known internet joke, like the hunter2 thing from bash.org which is repeated on reddit whenever someone mentions passwords

This one, for example:

> Tell me you don't understand memes without telling me you don't understand memes.

It was clever the first time, now it is absolutely everywhere, and often uttered by idiots who did not even read the comment they are responding to (not saying you are specifically, but it is what I observe generally). This one is a virus spreading to otherwise initially healthy discussions threads and turning them into brainless “wit” contests.

So yeah, memes are quite commonly used as rhetoric or harassment techniques, quite far from some supposed humour.

Over 9000 began as a joke among Naruto fans related to poor dubbing

Is this guy just trying to get a rise out of me by being spectacularly wrong on purpose?

That's where they lost me. See also

>Take for example wojak. Although originally used to further various right-wing talking points

I wouldn't expect everyone to know the origin of every meme, but even a cursory internet search [0] will show that Wojaks started out far more benign.

[0] https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/wojak

>TFW politicized but still no gf

I wondered too. Wasn't it from Dragon Ball?

The content is definitely from DragonBall.

Technically speaking, though, the meme could have emerged in any community with a knowledge of anime, since DragonBall knowledge is basically assumed in those circles. So it might be that Naruto fans brought DB into a discussion about bad translations.

The reality is that, in most cases, nobody can really know for sure where a meme generated from - we can only witness the first usage in communities we observe.

> Over 9000 began as a joke among Naruto fans

I stopped reading the article with this exact segment copy-pasted, in order to comment about it. Am I being taken for a ride here?!

Obvious troll is obvious.

The author falls into the trap of viewing the internet as the same monolith they were used to when they were younger. In fact it was a mass of subcultures back then as it is now, just far larger and more varied now.

They had tunnel vision then when they found the memes they readily interacted with funny, and now, older, more cynical, in a smaller subculture, they find the vocal minorities of the million other subcultures, that are easier than ever to be exposed to, more annoying.

Part of it is that they're older, part of it is that the different generations find different things funny, part of it is that younger people who haven't seen the old jokes DO find them funny all over again, part of it is not realising that a popular community on the web making a new popular meme =/= universal hilarity.

They're being shortsighted and grouchy, like humans are prone to do as they age because they expected norms to remain static, and can't see the bigger picture. There are still plenty of subjectively funny memes out there for the author, more than there ever were in fact. They're just getting hung up on everything else because it's a way to gain prestige amongst like-minded grouches.

debatable to what degree meme culture has become more repetitive but I think there's probably something to it. Mark Fisher borrowed the term Hauntology from Derrida to describe this kind of media consumption/production. He thought that one key aspect of the way we communicate was that we're essentially trapped in a sort of self-referential loop that cannot escape old aesthetics, ideas or forms and that we had in a sense cancelled the future or anything genuinely new.

It seems like that's the sort of thing the OP feels about memes, and people have often observed it about retro-pop fiction like Ready Player One, the intensity with which fashion is recycled, the never-ending superhero movies that now comprise most of mainstream cinema, and so forth. Subjectively kind of like you're stuck in some 2000s videogame where nobody bothered to turn the servers off.

I think that's a sort of feeling many people have about large parts of the media today in some form or another.

Sounds like he's a meme snob, not a meme bob: https://imgur.com/AdnT9mK

This looks like it came from some place you got off a wrong turn on the internet

Like those fake Pixar movies

I used to be with ‘it’, but then they changed what ‘it’ was. Now what I’m with isn’t ‘it’ anymore and what’s ‘it’ seems weird and scary. It’ll happen to you!

From my perspective, memes got pretty self-deprecating and ironic from around 2017. As the author states, this means that such memes are only funny when one gets the context, but this is almost okay when one creates memes for an in-group. Thus the context dependence of memeing is not unlike other forms of in-jokes; but I don't know if other sorts of in-jokes become as ironic on a similar timescale.

A lot of comments here suggest that the author's just getting older. At 56, with a pretty strong appreciation of most memes, I think it's a bit more nuanced. It's not their appreciation of memes that declines as most people get older, but their tolerance for overuse. The first comparison I would make is to drinking. There's no stigma attached to binge drinking in college, but when somebody in their thirties is still doing it people start to view it with concern and/or distaste. Similarly, still being in Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra mode at that age is seen as a failure to advance in life.

Really, it's all about appropriate vs. excessive use, and variety vs. monotony. The other comparison I'd make is to swearing. Some people - especially older people - don't want to hear any at all. At the other end of the spectrum are people who can't seem to get through a sentence without five F-bombs. Most folks go through a stage early on where they swear a lot, then learn that overuse dilutes swearing's impact. They learn other ways to express strong feeling and switch among them. Similarly, some people go through a stage of meme overuse before they learn to mix memes with other ways to get an idea or feeling across for best effect. (I particularly wish more tech presenters would hurry up and learn that BTW.)

Memes are just one way to express yourself, and they're often a great way, but there are other ways too and they all work better when they're used to complement each other. I think the OP is working up to that realization.

It's definitely something I've felt more and more as I've aged out of my youth. For me it's driven mainly by an increased desire to reject the crowd. Almost anything that a majority of people find "cool" or "in" turns me off and I reject it. I no longer care about what my peers think of me - I rarely think about my peers. I guess I've become much more self centered in a way - not selfish, but just much more concerned with being my own person.

Knowledge that is less common is more valuable.

Even in social situations, you can just stay ignorant of pop knowledge, and still amaze peers with relevant obscure trivia.

"Am I just getting older?" Yes...in fact the answer to this question is always yes

The answer to "Am I getting older?" is always yes.

The answer to "Am I just getting older?" is not always yes. The "just" often implies complete or nearly complete explanatory causality in English.

Yeah, I know. That's just my point

> The answer to "Am I getting older?" is always yes.

Completely off topic, but I always appreciated how what take the form of echo lyrics in They Might Be Giants' Older actually maintain their full meaning as they echo:

You're older than you've ever been and now you're even older

And now you're even older

You're older than you've ever been and now you're even older

And now you're older still

Well if we want memes, let's go with smash mouth. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eT3BFzSD6YY

The years start coming and they don't stop coming

And they don't stop coming

Modern meme culture is just modern culture. Information is embedded in society memetically, at least in Dawkins' framework. That memes are simple, stupid jokes like "badger badger badger" is itself a meme.

This isn't nitpicking. The author lacking a strong definition of "meme" makes their blog post read like childish whining.

However, the author makes a good point if you think about it. To cut through all the meme history, it seems the author has a problem with "memes" being commoditized and leveraged by the powerful and interested, in order to sway public opinion. Worse, the average person can't help but get caught in the gears of the machine, because meme savvy can be an important factor for acceptance into certain social groups. This means minting memes becomes valuable.

Being able to turn Pepe the Frog into a divisive character has political value. Being able to inflict a notion of "coomer/doomer/bloomer" on people has political value.

It feels cheap compared to the more organic process of the past because it is. It is deliberately cheap so as to make it easy to analyze, process, and improve. The interests pushing the latest memes need them to be cheap because cheap is effective, much like making food sugary just makes it more addictive.

And unfortunately, unlike the food industry, memes will probably not be regulated, because there is no objective metric of the harm they cause when leveraged in a coordinated way. It would be like regulating gossip and hearsay.

Ultimately, what the author laments is that what used to be fun has been hijacked as a utility in a sociopolitical war for influence.

It's been interesting to see the evolution of memes, from ultra-niche Internet-culture stuff of sites like Something Awful, Newgrounds, YTMND and 4chan to becoming completely rote and mainstream.

It's a little like when parents discovered Facebook, and it stopped feeling as exclusive, even though old school memes were never "hip" in any common sense, mostly reserved for hardcore Internet "basement dwellers" of yore.

What annoys me is the forced injection of memes on tech presentations. Not saying it never works - some folks have the talent and the timing. However most of the times, it just elicits forced smiles out of politeness.

People that have something to say do so using text alone, the idea is rarely enhanced by the borrowed creativity of a meme or even an emoji.

Its tempting to use something that made you smile, but it only comes across as lazy humour. It is the cringe tech equivalent of flat art & HR speak.

Agreed. A few well placed memes can be fantastic for moderating the mood, pace, or engagement level of a presentation. It's truly a joy to see one well used. On the other hand, when the author is obviously stretching for a meme to put on every single slide, it's just exhausting. It also starts to look a lot like laziness or insecurity, relying on humor because they're not confident about the content itself keeping people's attention. There seem to be a lot of frustrated stand-up comedians giving tech presentations. Seriously, I'd rather watch a good presentation and a real stand-up comedian separate, not a Frankensteinian stitching together of the two.

I remember way back when memes used to come in a variety of affects, expressing different things. Memes for humor, memes for grief, memes for libido, memes for political commentary, and yes, there's also of course memes for nothing other than establishing in-group/out-group.

But I can't help but notice every new 'meme' these days is a variation on "this thing is good" "this other thing is bad". It's the same format with the same intended message but with different images swapped in and out.

I think it might reflect the immense polarization of society combined with social media's general push for 'engagement' i.e. antagonization of each other. But I don't get why every new 'meme' these days has to draw some line in the sand.

There are three kinds of meme:

    1. Genuinely insightful/funny

    2. Meme as an opinion/argument

    3. Bullying meme

I'm ok with 1.

I'm not ok with 3, but can see that it's unavoidable and invariably popular in less, let's call it, "educated" populations. An "educated" netizen not personally affected by the topic of bullying can typically simply choose to ignore these and move on.

The worst on that list for me is 2. "Argument by meme", as well as "argument by comic" or "argument by videoclip" depicting contrived scenarios as fact seems to be extremely popular these days, and is one of the most insidious things on the internet.

AKA "I am growing up and getting more out of touch with what's in". Happens to all of us buddy.

> Memes today seem to increasingly serve the function of a means of communicating ones personal opinions towards a subject with often times quite nasty undertones. Many memes today focus around an element of domination of the perceived opponents of whatever group or ideology made by the meme in question.

He sounds like the Virgin in the Virgin VS Chad meme. Remixing memes has been that way forever, bad advice dog turned into advice animals that also served opinions.

Faction Chads are cool and funny.

I remember the times where memes were only circulated on places like 4chan/krautchan or whateverchan or degenerate internet forum that was around in the early days. Even this was a whole other level than what followed after "memes" got popular and even your mum sent you some with the rise of bored panda, 9gag etc. (Remember the fun times where memes could even mean gore on the front page? Unthinkable nowadays.) So even in the early days there was already a very heavy break with what I consider to be the first area to the second era. Afterwards they became way less edgy and less centered around the experiences of nerds who experienced heavy mobbing and were replaced with things like lolcats and stuff. The author is a bit late to the party imho. Normies took over meme culture, it's pop culture nowadays. Deal with it. Memes in the early days could be way darker than all this doomer stuff could ever be imho.

I guess it also heavily depends on what memes you where consuming on what pages and communities. Even my experience is heavily subjective I guess.

I dunno. I think OP may be right about changes in meme culture, but I don’t think OP is being anything but nostalgic in any of the examples given. memes are more sophisticated insofar as they’re more self aware and self referential but they’re not necessarily meaner or more degenerate. YTMND anyone?

I'm probably one of the younger posters here, and memes are a welcome respite from the slog of my day-to-day. They're not always funny, they're not even always good. Memes are both information-dense and informal, a great combination for relaxing without feeling dumb.

Why is anyone taking this seriously? This is trivial; memes are worthless. I read this piece just to experience it as a cautionary tale about wasting time with my writing. Even this comment is suspect. At least it is only five sentences long.

That site is like one big meme.

Came across this Gen-Z humour explainer video recently: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oVlspd9hxFA

In a nutshell, I think he's saying that it's funny because it's not funny.

> Take yourself back to when you would have been laughing non-stop at say "pingas"

hehehehehehehe

ty author

TL;DR: Author expresses his dislike for modern meme culture as a move away from classic humor and towards baseless self expression. Ironically, this long rant of self expression could be a meme.

What ruined memes for me: reddit.com/r/hermainCainAward

This is the "Covid is fake" social media posts of people who died from Covid. Mostly, these are reposts of meme tropes but with a misinformed/paranoid Covid slant.

I can't help but wonder about the people who make these memes. Obviously, not all are Russian agents.. but some probably are.

That subreddit is horrible. Take some selective posts of dead people and highlight them in a macabre game of "I told you so".

Its not going to change minds about vaccination or pull people out of their conspiracy mindsets, it will just reinforce the tribalism that allows misinformation to spread. I wish they would shut it down.

Why do you assume people posting there have any agenda? Heck why should everything on the internet have an agenda or end goal? That subreddit is a large-scale collection of "I told you so" Facebook posts, as you said, and that's it. It isn't some vaccination campaign. People can take whatever they want out of it. Darwin awards have been a thing for a long time and are part of internet culture.

The material there isn't what's wrong with the internet, rather all the calls for "xyz should be shut down" for anything slightly offensive to someone's sensibilities are the problem. If you don't like it, close the browser window and move on with your life.

Of course there is an agenda behind it. Pro tip, the name of the subreddit is a bit of a clue.

There was an interesting comment in another HN thread, where something like this got talked about: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29558521

Applying that theory here would be to create a feedback loop where the Herman Cain Award content causes more digging in, causes more deaths, generates more Herman Cain Awards. Imagine if you were the creator or an early adopter/moderator of such a community and it grows explosively... If the theory is correct, this is a highly profitable activity for capitalizing socially on the deaths of your political enemies, and while controversial, could net you a status as a lionized hero in some communities, the ones who are sick and tired of the political enemies due to past experiences, and love seeing members of them die.

I think Jessica3cho's response in this thread is the definitive answer, because she has more ironic web badges than anyone else.

Dude what is that place? Such a cute forum! :)

I was thinking the same thing. I want to be transported to that aesthetic place and time.

Thanks. There's nothing like such walls of text on the front page. Very "Hacker". Much "News".

lol - my Dad and his co-workers were faxing around cartoons and jokes in the 70's and 80's, and in previous decades I'm sure there were other ways of sharing humorous illustrations and sayings.

There is nothing special about "memes" - the concept is as old as the bored office worker.

https://archive.md/QXUFv

What's with the ad type badges at bottom of each comment?

I feel the same but I also acknowledge that I'm a boomer. I think this video explains why I feel so detached from today's meme culture: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oVlspd9hxFA

tl;dw: The dynamics are completely different and esoteric for someone used to traditional humor and memes.

This video is great.

Tldr - The author likes some memes and doesn't like others. I'm not sure why this warrants a blog post.

Isn't that exactly what blogs and blog posts are supposed to be? Personal?

Besides, it's actually a thread in a subforum whose description starts with "This board is dedicated to what you see around the world, news and your opinions." which fits rather well.

Now, whether it is HN-worthy or not is another story.

You're not sure why someone decided to express their opinion on the internet? Did you just wake up for a 40 year coma?

Old man yells at cloud.

As my gen Z cousin would say - "ok boomer"

log off and go /out/, anon

These days a lot of people never log out. They sit in the park browsing their phone.

“Touch grass” is what the zoomers say now.

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