The Greatest Meme Template | Hacker News Reader

The Greatest Meme Template

readtrung.com

31 pointsyeesian9 comments

This meme never gets old.

Aside from that, I wish there existed a MemeGPT to automatically create a meme given a script of course, us humans would manually "fine-tune" it ;-)

From the description, I thought it might the "disregard females / acquire currency" guy [0], but I've never seen this meme before.

0: https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/joseph-ducreux-archaic-rap

I think KEKW on Twitch is what cemented his online persona as the "laughing face". RIP

Was surprised to learn it's not even a real twitch emote, it's a frankerfacez emote. Although, most emotes used on twitch are FFZ as well, since you can use them without subscribing to a streamer and the restrictions on a streamer adding them are far less.

It's pretty similar to the Downfall parodies. Just goes to show how a good performance can transcend language I guess.

I wonder about the demographic breakdown for these memes. "Downfall" due to the nature of its original subject matter largely seemed to attract memes targeting "boomers" (or more specifically Gen X and beyond) and "gamers" (or more specifically young men leaning on average to the political right). Given the way the Gemini version of this meme frames the issue (too much DEI, woke, etc rather than Google hamfistedly overcorrecting for its history of racist algorithms in a way that hilariously backfires) and that it was reposted by Elon Musk and that the "template" works best when you aren't fluent in Spanish, I'd not be surprised if this one is similar.

It's especially interesting that the author refers to it as "the greatest meme" when the general consensus among Millenials and below is that memes are already dead by the time they become popular outside their original circles and this meme template is ancient by Internet standards (which isn't surprising given Elon Musk is known to share memes he finds - which means the meme had to be popular enough to fall into his lap in the first place). I was honestly surprised it's about this specific template given that I remember it first appearing on Twitter about 3 years ago.

It's also odd to survey the reactions based on a post by Elon Musk on Twitter when even before the buyout the responses were known to suffer more from an overrepresentation of bots, sockpuppets and spam than other celebrity accounts and things have only gotten worse since the buyout (if only because he's literally the person to appeal to if you want to influence Twitter's direction). In other words it's measuring popularity by looking at a room full of yes men who will cry laugh on the floor as soon as they think he said something intended to be funny - not exactly empirical science is it.

As a benign Internet phenomenon, I personally don't get memes. At all. I see how some people might like them, I understand the jokes, but they just don't entertain me and the lack of originality (inherent to the format) irks me. Whenever someone puts up an otherwise excellent piece of writing on some topic and includes memes to 'lighten it up', I struggle to fight the automatic impulse to disqualify the author.

I severely dislike the way a lot of memes use images or videos of people caught on camera doing something odd or stupid, who in the worst case end up being ridiculed for years by millions of strangers just because they looked silly.

But the concept of memes is exploited in an explicitly malign manner too. Anyone who has come across that type of meme knows what I mean; the thought terminating clichés which push one or another form of hate by means of seemingly innocent ridicule and jocularity. Anti-Semitic, trans-hate, gay-hate, political mudslinging, dehumanizing of refugees. Often you can't even tell which are the output of genuine troll factories like the one in Saint Petersburg, or just edgy teenage shrieking. These hitch a ride along in the broader meme culture, and for enabling that type of discourse alone I personally hate the whole concept of memes.

I think the damage they do and have done as a delivery vehicle for hate to society worldwide is severely underestimated, and we lack defence mechanism against this phenomenon.

(The fact that this jest will accurately identify one specific image to 95% of the readers is in itself testament to the effectiveness of memes as a viral vector for societal diseases (i.e., hate) as well.)

I think there's a significant distinction, at least among younger generations: memes like "old man yells at cloud" (or "surprised pikachu") aren't used to make you laugh. It may produce a short smile sometimes or it may have made you chuckle the first time you saw it but it's so widely known at this point that it acts more like a shorthand for a shared cultural context. The "KEKW" emote the article mentions falls into this category: yes, it's used as a reaction but like an emoji it's neither to be understand literally (you're not literally cry laughing like a dolphin) nor is it meant to be hilarious, it represents that specific reaction - and more likely than not in an ironic way.

I've seen older people (elder Gen X and beyond) belly laugh at "stale" memes and even multiple iterations of the same meme template but not so much for younger people (young Millenials and below), the same way you wouldn't laugh at a Shakespearean metaphor that has become a regular turn of phrase. I think on the whole, thanks to the evolution of memes on social media (e.g. the entire iterations of "deep frying" that went through various forms of maximalism, minimalism, absurdism and deconstruction, e.g. "Steamed Hams but ordered by phonemes") many younger people don't think of memes as "jokes" as much as "toys" to experiment with as a form of self-expression. I think there may be another generational divide between Millenials and Gen Z where Millenials will more readily use memes and "GIFs" as a form of canned reply but I'm too out of touch to analyze that further.

> I'm too out of touch to analyze that further

You're not out of touch, it's the kids that are wrong!

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