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Comment by greatwave1 | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

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.

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.

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