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Comment by haberman | Hacker News Reader

I think it's interesting to compare this to Rebecca Black. "Friday" became viral mostly as a mockery, but she seemed to take it all in stride and make the most of it. I was actually really impressed with that. In her case, the shares/retweets/etc. weren't hurtful to her in the end.

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I always thought Friday was a fantastic deconstruction of the genre, whether intentional or not. The banality of the lyrics are in truth not significantly worse than the lyrics of the average pop song. How many song lyrics boil down to the same lame refrain "we went to a club, got so drunk, danced so much, and had so much fun, yeah, partying! whoo!"? Most, but not all, songs of that genre dress up their banality in slightly more interesting turns of phrase but ultimately it's the same thing. Compare "Friday" to "Like a G6", for example.

Yea, it's the same shit, just wrapped with the money of major label marketing. Funny thing is, some of these "artists" actually take their music seriously.

I've been hearing about the video, but I'd never seen it.

I just looked it up.

It's not bad at all. It's entirely pedestrian. I don't see any difference between this and, say, a Bieber track, except production values.

The girl from the creepy ex-girlfriend meme actively capitalized on her stardom. It seems that the sociological phenomenon of involuntarily going viral is becoming more well-understood.

Yes totally. Though didn't that girl intentionally create the creepy ex-girlfriend persona? It's a little bit different than Rebecca Black who created something in earnest but then made the best of having it taken as a mockery.

I disagree.

It's hard to predict the path a particular meme will take once it has gone viral. Compare say "creepy girlfriend" to "scumbag Steve".

If you can predict with good to absolute confidence where a particular meme would go, then you have something extremely valuable that any marketing dept would go for.

Remember, most of these things happened unexpectedly to the people involved. I think you would be hard pressed to find anyone that a) knew in advance what would happen and b) wanted it to do so deliberately.

Making the best of a bad situation is not understanding this sociological phenomenon.

If you mean Overly Attached Girlfriend [1], she framed the joke intentionally, in terms of its visual look and its connotations, in exactly the form that took hold as a meme.

Contrast this with memes where a picture caught the eye of a photoshopper who then decided what joke to write on top.

It was her own sense of humor from the start. Good on her :)

[1] http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/overly-attached-girlfriend

p.s.

http://youtu.be/y9zOeLRmGVA?t=8m

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