this post was submitted on 18 Apr 2024
997 points (98.3% liked)
Antique Memes Roadshow
7815 readers
375 users here now
Giving you the backstory and appraisals of vintage memes!
Submissions should be vintage memes or commentary about vintage memes. Commenters are advised to appraise the internet value and provenance meme antiquities.
Rules:
- Posts should be old memes or about old memes.
- Don’t be a jerk. Be excellent to each other.
- Keep it safe for work.
- Follow global .world instance rules outlined here
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Modern memes are not nearly as good imo.
Edit: these
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.
It did not compute.
This was actually peak comedy in 2018 though
Absurdist memes were/are peak
Who decides what a meme is? Consensus? The creator? A random moderator? This comment is a meme if we decide it is. Every one of these “memes “ were just random pictures with text until they went viral? Were they not memes until then?
From the dictionary:
Its exactly the part where it is copied and spread. It's just an image macro until then.
A arbitrary comment or image isn't a meme if nobody copies it and spreads it
It annoys me that they specify humorous and internet, even if neither of them is required for something to be a meme. Any idea is a meme if it proves successful in spreading among other people.
"I like Ike" was a meme from the election where Eisenhower became president.
That could be covered by the 2nd definition, I just didn't think it was relevant here:
Either everything can be a meme, or memes don’t exist.
If nothing is a meme until it is, then all original content is, by definition, not a meme. They only become “memes” when spread and repeated.
So, any original picture with text is thus, not a meme, or potentially a meme. If it is not a meme at conception, then it shouldn’t be proliferated in meme communities, because it’s not a meme.
If everything is a meme, then there is no novelty or uniqueness to the content, thus making “memes” superfluous and ubiquitous to the point of nonexistence.
So, the qualifications are arbitrary.
ok boomer
Not a meme /s
Your last two sentences is how I would describe it.
It's text on pictures until it ascends to meme-hood.
Those are just image macros. Not every image macro becomes a meme
And not every meme is in the form of an image macro
It's the poorly drawn black/white dudes that bother me the most.
The rage comics?
No, I like those. I mean the newer ones-