Forums / Discussion / General

Here's a video. Enjoy.

I'm going to keep this handy the next time someone on facebook tries to use a meme

@thread:

That was a thought-provoking video. I think he's got some very good points. It seems like lately memes have been existing and/or spreading for the sake of just being memes. It's stupid, and misses the bigger picture of what memes really are, which is really in many ways building blocks of culture. Eh, it's too late in the evening for a meaningful rant on the nature of memes, and I think few people care to follow me into a deep rant anyway.

@Fridge:

Aw, I'll miss you, but I suppose I haven't been really active lately myself anyway. In a way, it's not a big deal; I've been on KYM for nearly four years and have no idea what's going on in Internet culture, since it largely happens outside of this site. Hope to still catch you around from time to time!

One could also argue however, that all of this is a natural progression of internet culture.

Memes are still memes. The definition of such has not changed. The only thing that has changed is how far and wide memes will spread, that is, memes are reaching further and further across the web than they ever have in the past. And that's surely inevitable as the world becomes more connected and at more times

As meme's spread, they will also be warped and altered from their original state and usage the further they travel. This is a natural effect with all language and concepts. Some might refer to this as the Chinese Whisper effect. You've all played that game right?

Memes are doing exactly what they do: spread. And this unfortunate turnout of how memes are used could easily be part of that. Should we really be surprised? Let alone offended?

@Fridge

See you soon

@BSoD:

I'm assuming that what you refer to as "Chinese Whisper" is something akin to what we call "Telephone Game"? It seems to me that there is often in a group of people playing the game one or two people who miss the point of the game and think it's funny to pass on the wrong message on purpose, which defeats the real purpose of the game. The natural warping of the whispered message in the game is funny, as is the creation of new variations of a given meme. In contrast, witless parroting of a concept without context or a gross misuse of it is annoying. Yes, one can expect this to happen, but you can also expect people to form plurals with apostrophes; that doesn't make it less grating on the nerves.

Nowadays, the context of the meme itself never really matters. People assume just because they see a meme they think they automatically know what it means in actuality. It's not very identical in process as the "Telephone Game" or "Chinese Whisper", but it has somewhat of the basic concept of them. It really does grind my gears, honestly. Even if variations are made, I still lean over to what it should really stand for.

I guess we can make this thread on the topic of the usage and the context of memes?

And then there's the matter of this very site. Truth be told, I don't stray far from this site anymore. I used to be all over the meme-web, but I needed to cut back or risk allowing my life to suffer in the real world. So I've limited myself to this site, so that I could keep from being completely disconnected from Interweb culture. But that made me wonder, as the requirements for what constitutes a meme appeared to slacken, if we are not largely responsible for the wearing out of memes, before they have the chance to get very far off the ground. It's like the dissecting jokes is a lot like dissecting frogs analogy: dissecting it lets you understand it better, but kills it in the process. I come here because I love the Internet. I believe it to be mankind's most important invention, and the new cultures that develop through it to be a one in a million opportunity. I liked how it marched to the beat of its own drum. If wisdom is knowing that you know nothing, then the web appeared to me to be wiser than most. Its environment allowed for the reevaluation of everything social that the old world took for granted. For a brief time the world was less insular, cultures forming without regard for geography, people no longer limited to the culture they were born into. I thought if these cultures were given enough time, if they could go unnoticed or untouched long enough, maybe long enough for the Internet to have spread through the majority of the world, then these cultures could well up from underneath and engulf the cultures of the old world, and maybe they could make the world better. But then the meme-web got noticed, its gold-rush began, its cowboys and outlaws became too confident and began to feel invincible, and the red-coats started trickling in. The old world descended upon the web before it was strong enough to challenge it.

I'm not sure where I was going with this…oh yeah, the gold rush. The gold rush here is a metaphor for the "discovery" of Internet memes. Once people heard about what a meme "was", suddenly everyone wanted in on the action. People wanted to understand memes as a way of maintaining a sort of social capital, keeping up on what is considered "cool". People wanted to be able to "take credit" for "starting" memes as a way of acquiring even more social capital, everyone wants that video that goes viral. The main problem with memes today, is that people who are arriving as part of the "meme-rush", people who do not fully understand memes, or people from the old world who are just looking for a new way to acquire wealth or fame (egofaggotry, I swear…), are consciously or subconsciously attempting to change memes from objects of cultural identity into commodities of social or economic (heresy!) value. To these more ignorant, memes are not about belonging, but being trendy. The subtle, nigh unsee-able, survival of the fittest memes is slowly being repurposed to serve the survival of the most capital humans.

What does Know Your Meme have to do with any of this? Remember I said that I come here to keep up to date on Internet culture. In fact, I link people to this site whenever they ask about memes in general or one meme or another in particular. But I realized that I can't be the only one, not the only member that uses the site for this purpose, and certainly not the only visitor to do so. There must be hundreds of thousands whose sole use of this site is to keep up to date on Internet trends so that they can maintain their social capital. In a way, it was better when no one had any idea where memes came from, because the only way to encounter and become familiar with them was to already identify with their origin culture at some core level enough that you'd seek them out on your own. Getting inside the joke wasn't easy; you had to want it, with no expectation of getting anything more out of it than something new to identify with and add to your own cultural identity, for no other reason than to feel like you were part of something that you could call yours. But Know Your Meme made them accessible to everyone. It sounds noble at first, until you realize how many will try to take advantage of this accessibility. This is literally why we (the meme-web) can't have nice things. The very sites that once were veritable meme-forges now cringe at the very memes they helped to create. Because their nice things were made available to everyone, they were warped into things they could not claim cultural ownership of anymore. That's why there's more "cancer" now than there has been before, why there arise collective feelings of "stolen memes", and why all the meme-web's oldfags are bitter for their stolen culture. The only ones with the creativity, the memeological mutability, to generate new, "fit" memes are also the ones that hate them the most. Our memes are on an inbred spiral, remixing only capable of sustaining them so much. And the best part of all of this, is that we helped make it possible. We wanted to be a service, a boon to Internet culture, but if we cannot find a way to change things, we will become our own worst enemy.

We need to take a step back in the way we do things, not rushing, and stricter in how we handle the forcing of memes. We shouldn't be rushing to make an entry at the slightest sign of a newborn meme, or we risk the meme being hated as a cancerous "forced meme" before it has the chance to be loved in its naturalborn environment. A lot of times, frontpaging a mere submission is enough to trigger this hostility, as it can be seen as the site attempting to promote a meme beyond its natural growth, depending on how far it has spread on its own and how long it has been since the potential meme first appeared. We really should be letting the Internet decide what is and isn't a meme before us; we are just a record. Our site's bias shows through too often for comfort, too eager, too…something. If we waited longer before creating full entries for things that may or may not become memes eventually, we'd have less of a submission purgatory, and less attempts at using this site to force a meme or artificially increase the appearance of spread of someone's "pet meme".

TL;DR: KYM needs to work on preventing itself from being accomplice to the aforementioned problem that is plaguing memes, and work toward reversing what damage we can, whilst still allowing for the natural evolution of memes unhindered by their ignorant consumption and usage.

THE MONITOR HAS MADE ITS THOUGHTS KNOWN.
Your move, TL;DR regulars.

Quantum Meme approves this.

It's all that I feel when one makes an erroneous meme-related joke but in video form. After all, It's always really irritating when a inside joke becomes popular, and this video reminds us of the reason, when usually many can't explain why so very well and then they are instantly called hipsters… Yes. They made a meme about popular meme haters, how irritating.

However, many who call people Hipsters do so because they believe that they think they are one of those irritating people who think that they are superior because they were 'first', but how often is that the case? Many are really just people who saw and understood the joke early on and are now complaining, for the many reasons stated in the video, and does that just make them a hipster then?

Unfortunately memes die before they get started these days. I hung around 4chan, and reddit for years and its evident that most people dont know what is going on and what memes mean.
They will always get reposted to imgur, reddit, 9gag and of course here.
These sites have mainstreamed the inside jokes and culture and making huge money out of it.
I agree with the video, however this guy seems like a little bit butt hurt that he never got credit for his memes and now websites like this one are profiting off all the hard work of the meme culture.
I am currently developing a site right now in relation to memes and funny shit (you are probably think, not another one) and i find myself reposting stuff because thats what people like to see, that if i want to get members thats the only way.
Unfortunately my community stands at 10 members so what ever is posted is 'an inside joke' that no body understands, which is the way i like it, but it gets a little boring.
So If you want to go back to the dark ages of memes and inside jokes then join my community roflburger.com
Theres fuck all going on at the moment as i am moving from another domain but i will have meme gens and rage comic gens up soon.
Dont mean to plug my own shit but hey personally i am sick of reddit and 4chan being the main sites that dictate the popularity of memes and basically telling you what you 'should' laugh at, "or we will down vote the fuck out of you", so i made my own site in an attempt to restore it, not only for myself but for others.
thats my .5 cents

People live too much in the past, that's what I think.

True, seeing something you helped build up being exploited by parties who don't know what they're talking about is annoying, but that doesn't mean yet it's the end. They don't understand the joke, but you do, as does your community.

Internet culture is ever changing, it doesn't stay the same. Old communities die, new ones rise, content gets made, events happen, memes come and go. But instead of going with the times, people prefer to feed their hipster boner, running on old jokes. People complain how nowadays memes are exploited by all types of communities you don't want to see them make, as their quantity "kills" the meme. While in the meanwhile people still make the same old jokes that were funny years ago but not so much anymore.

Memes that used to represent 4chan's core community are now used by all types of internet culture communities. And I don't mean this like Facebook, 9gag or Reddit. Just the "interwebs", the same people who post here claiming meme culture is getting killed, people who hardly were even part of the 4chan core culture that made those phrases and memes. Who's exploiting the memes again? Like Facebook kills new stuff, the old stuff is still getting killed constantly by the same people here complaining about Facebook. No party is better, the only difference is the numbers, but that doesn't mean you're less guilty.

But let's stick with 4chan. Remember "forcing a meme"? The spamming of dumb content on 4chan? 4chan users were just as guilty of attempting to force memes back in the day (and even now) than Reddit is nowadays.

And if you watched the video, at the end the dude says that things don't really have to change. While sites like Facebook and Reddit exploit stuff to death, the communities that made that content known are constantly coming up with new jokes again. They don't care what happens to the joke, they want to have fun with it and move to the next when it's no longer funny.

And that's what it's about. Why do you like a community again? For its members and the atmosphere, or for the "le funny maymays"? Things are always changing, which is good, because if people always kept stuck with the old stuff we'd have no creativity left and everything would be dull and boring. Look into the future, don't stick in the past and become a cynical asshole.

Supreme Lurking Monitor wrote:

We shouldn’t be rushing to make an entry at the slightest sign of a newborn meme, or we risk the meme being hated as a cancerous “forced meme” before it has the chance to be loved in its naturalborn environment. A lot of times, frontpaging a mere submission is enough to trigger this hostility, as it can be seen as the site attempting to promote a meme beyond its natural growth, depending on how far it has spread on its own and how long it has been since the potential meme first appeared. We really should be letting the Internet decide what is and isn’t a meme before us; we are just a record.

Wow, that wasn't me or Verbose; can we handle another member like that? Anyway, I wanted to respond to this point in particular, i.e. the role that KYM plays in the "meme web", as SLM put it.

As a site that's supposed to exist for the purpose of documenting memes, I don't think that the things that he points out are the real problems; I think the problems are the way people respond. As has been said many times in the past, we aren't here to make memes. I'd like to add to that sentiment: Whether or not a meme is "Confirmed" on KYM means pretty much zilch in the grand scheme of things. As I wrote on somebody's wall a while back (I don't recall whose it was) we don't choose memes, they choose us. People who worry that someone may be using KYM to force a meme, or that a possibly legit meme is being suffocated by early exposure on KYM are missing something, IMO. Ideas that get out on the Internet will eventually become memes or not based on how they strike something in the human psyche, not based on whether they are "forced". All the "+1 deadpool/confirm" comments are not just meaningless to KYM mods and staff, they're just plain meaningless.

If you see a meme, understand it, and use it, then you're promoting the meme's spread. If not, then you're not. I think KYM's role in the life-cycle of memes creates "cancer" only insofar as people misuse and misunderstand the site and the (potential) memes it documents. I think it's sort of cool if an entry I've put a lot of work into gets confirmed, but if it doesn't? No butthurt here. The fact is that every entry on KYM is a meme; some are just failed, minor, and/or dead memes.

If you care too much about memes, you either become "cancer" or you become some sort of Internet hipster. I don't know that I care to be at either of those positions. I hope that made some sort of sense.