I'm the original creator of the "Still waiting on OP" meme from The Shining and have a mildly interesting story behind its creation if anyone would care to hear.
In 2010 I was working at a video rental store (RIP) and got access to new movies before they were available to the public. Every day I'd grab one, and every night I'd stream them online for 4channers on /tv and /r9k. There was a chat built into the stream and we had a lot of fun for months and months, hanging out watching movies and chatting. It built a pretty big following. Think Twitch before Twitch existed.
One night there were no new movies so I grabbed The Shining. We watched through it, and when that scene came on the screen I paused it to take a closer look. We joked and carried on about it in chat, and I screenshotted it and opened Photoshop and made the meme then and there. Everyone loved it. Several folks posted it on 4chan boards and it took off in a big way. We finished the movie and had a great night.
I think they were still lingering around somewhat. I just cleared off my old laptop last night and found advice animal memes from 2014 on it. I'll probably drop a few of the better ones in 196 on Monday, maybe I'll spread the love to antique memes roadshow.
If my memory serves me right (it usually doesn't lol), it was mostly by 2015 that they were on their death throes, having been mostly usurped by the MLG era; I remember being upset that things like advice animals and rage comics were suddenly considered "things only clueless old people on facebook post nowadays" circa 2015. But they were still around in a smaller scale around 2014, so I think it still counts?
But I'm looking forward to seeing you share more old memes! I love 'em.
Advice Animals were much earlier, in the late 2000s. I remember seeing them on gaming forums before Reddit was even a thing, when SA and Digg still reigned supreme.
It centralized control to a few large corporations and lowered the barrier to entry for users such that everything became a popularity contest for eyeballs. TikTok, reddit, facebook, youtube, instagram, OF, its all a brainless race for engagement
The word meme is misused & I hate it. Ppl should know what memetics are.
This comment up till now isn't really (ok, the I hate it bit a little), but if I add 'you know that feeling of joy when you pet a cat' it would have a considerably stronger memetic effect on a lot (most?) humans. But its not funny as I didn't introduce a joke (sorry that I didn't introduce myself).
Before this even. We went wrong when dumb people took macro images and decided ideas needed packages that way for thought transmission to count as a meme.
But whether we called them memes or not, by definition they were. The Selfish Gene came out in 1976, where Dawkins coined it as "a unit of cultural transmission, or a unit of imitation".
Memes live in our head and propagate throughout society which is just an emergent phenomena of memes...I loved the selfish gene it's a great book and Dawkins is the man.
One trick was to post memes that don't have jokes, like the one about when I caught the ferry over to Caturday. I needed a new lol for my cat, so, I decided to go to digg, which is what they called fark in those days. So I tied a cheezburger to my belt, which was the style at the time. Now, to take the ferry cost a bitcoin, and in those days, bitcoins had pictures of doges on 'em. "Give me five doges for a bitcoin," you'd say. Now, where were we? Oh yeah, the important thing was I had a cheezburger on my belt, which was the style at the time. They didn't have white castle because of the war. The only thing you could get was those big macs.
game critics take payola and thats bad but its especially bad when bad websites i dont pay any attention to publish positive reviews of works by women because women bad
in theory critics being bribed or coerced into positive reviews is a good thing to be against, but in reality the campaign was coopted within about 2 minutes of coming into existence by right wing agenda pushers who think a pride flag cosmetic or a woman who doesn't solely exist to have rule 34 made of her means a game is leftist propanda or some insane nonsense like that.
Modern memes are incomprehensible, just take a random picture and slap some completely unrelated text on top of it.
Or maybe I'm just too old to get it. 🤷
Because they're not memes. I had a heck of a time explaining to my partner that a picture with text on it does not constitute a meme - the same picture used repeatedly with different text captions? Meme.
I used to frequent imgur's user-sub back then. I never made a front-page post, but I did get top comment of the day once. I nearly earned the green giraffe token. Over time the community grew more cringey by the week, and devolved into selfies and sob stories. I made the switch to reddit and never cared about karma again. What a time.
The irony is that Imgur was originally created as a an image hosting service specifically for Reddit, then became its own society and culture. Only to have you return right back where it came from
I remember the exact moment the enshittification started, Imgur used to have a "(source)" link right below the post title, it was great that you could visit the reddit thread something that went viral on Imgur, basically using Imgur to browse subreddit images, once that got removed and they started hiding reddit posts as Imgur community posts it kinda went downhill
Probably Caramel Dansen. I remember it from when I was a kid, and I still see it every once in a while.
Edit: There's this video from 2008, but it's probably not the original. And there's this video which is a re-upload from 2008, which I think was originally a flash animation.
According to Know Your Meme, the song originates from 2001, the animations started around 2008, and there was a semi-revival during 2020. So it depends on when you choose to start counting, but the arguments are there.
Exploitables where you change or add text in a picture is quite old and now one of the most common memes. It's a huge category, so maybe not what you meant, but it looks like it started in 2006 according to https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/exploitables
Those are just "advice animals" (a longtime nexus being reddit's /r/adviceanimals). Yes, people are animals too. Memes in general have never been constrained by this clunky format though.