The absolute state of the memes on Lemmy.ml (hexbear.net)

submitted 1 year ago by Vampire@hexbear.net to c/chapotraphouse@hexbear.net

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This is the opposite of culture. This shrinks your brain instead of stimulating it. They are just so bland. They are just so old. Spiciness and humour are completely unknown to them. Here are the current top 4:

How come liberals are so bad at meming? I'm sure I've seen half of these already, years ago. It's like someone dredged the bottom of ifunny.co for the most milquetoast, blandest things possible.

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[-] ReadFanon@hexbear.net 21 points 1 year ago

So I've been out of the meme game for a while now but to me it felt like there were a steady stream of meme formats that would come out and then in the past, say 3 or 4 years, the overall volume of new meme formats took a huge nosedive for some reason.

Has any other (old) person noticed this or is it just me?

[-] axont@hexbear.net 15 points 1 year ago

I think I know what you mean. It was all motivational posters or impact font macros for a while. Then there were those endless Epic Fail Guy or rage guy comics. Then I don't even know, it was wild for a while after around 2012.

Now a meme is one of three things: a picture with a white box and black text, a wojack, or edits of webcomics from 15 years ago

[-] Tachanka@hexbear.net 21 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

the original editor-in-chief of The Onion back in the 1980s, when they actually printed satirical newspapers, had a philosophy, that there are only 11 types of joke (each one of the examples below is an Onion headline from back in the day, forgive me for they are corny)

Irony – Intended meaning is opposite of literal meaning

Alcoholic Father Disappointed In Pothead Son

Character – Comedic character acting on personality traits

Mom Thinks You'd Enjoy Restaurant She Can't Remember Name Of Right Now

Relatable – Common experiences that audiences can relate to

Day Chalked Up As Loss By 10:15 A.M. (this is most "normie memes")

Shock – Surprising jokes typically involving sex, drugs, gross-out humor, swearing

Holy Shit, Man Walks On Fucking Moon

Parody/Reference – Mimic a familiar character, trope or cliche in an unfamiliar way

Al Gore Places Infant Son In Rocket To Escape Dying Planet

Hyperbole – Exaggeration to absurd extremes

Magnanimous Boss, King Of Kings, Allows Employees To Watch World Cup In Office

Wordplay – Puns, rhymes, double entendres, etc.

Fritolaysia Cuts Off Chiplomatic Relations With Snakistan kelly

Analogy – Comparing two disparate things

Man Approaches Unfamiliar Shower Knobs Like He's Breaking A Wild Stallion

Madcap – Crazy, wacky, silly, nonsensical

Wheelchair Basketball Players Stunned By Thunderous Slam Dunk

Meta-humor – Jokes about jokes, or about the idea of comedy

It Sadly Unclear Whether This Article Will Put Lives At Risk

Misplaced Focus – Attention is focused on the wrong thing

Really Fun Toy Banned Because Of 3 Stupid Dead Kids

[-] ReadFanon@hexbear.net 12 points 1 year ago

Yep. That's exactly it.

There was a period, at least a few years and probably more like 5 or so, where there was a short meme cycle to the point where sometimes a meme format would be stale within a month or two and there was a huge churn of new meme formats that would be constantly emerging.

Then it's like someone just turned the tap off and the culture died (I wonder if something shifted in 4chan maybe?) and now we're just stuck with wojacks.

Speaking of which...

[-] axont@hexbear.net 9 points 1 year ago

There genuinely was a change in 4chan and I've often wondered if this had a profound effect on the rest of internet culture. It sounds silly, but I can't deny that something's really changed.

moot (previous 4chan admin) retired from the site in January of 2015. After he left there was a scramble for mod positions and a honest to goodness white supremacist plot to control the site. That's definitely when things started to feel weird. I don't really know how or why the wider internet was impacted, it was probably multiple things at once, but 2015 seems like a weird shift of a year

[-] proletarian_girlboss@lemmygrad.ml 3 points 1 year ago

I have thought of this a few times myself, and how much of the english speaking side of the internet's culture has been shaped by 4chan in some form or another. I have never been able to find an answer for why it seems like it is so influential, despite being relatively small compared to something like twitter or instagram.

[-] DroneRights@hexbear.net 8 points 1 year ago

In the Star Trek community it's all screen caps with fake dialogue

[-] ScrewdriverFactoryFactoryProvider@hexbear.net 12 points 1 year ago

I asked my nephew what memes were like now and he said, “memes are cringe, breh”

[-] HumanBehaviorByBjork@hexbear.net 9 points 1 year ago

your nef (zoomer speak for nephew) is so wise

[-] ReadFanon@hexbear.net 9 points 1 year ago

I knew I was old but I never thought that I'd feel this old until I read your comment.

[-] TreadOnMe@hexbear.net 5 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

The new 'meme format' is reminiscent of the sheer incomprehensibility of memes from 2005, where you could still easily stumble on just the most random stuff, and there were like four or five different videos players and they were all terrible, but the videos were occasionally funny

But now it's like that through mainstream apps and on purpose. People are just throwing whatever they can think of at the algorithm and seeing what sticks

The biggest 'trends' I see are stuff from TikTok, but still, even that is alot of nonsense, some of it comprehensible, some of it not.