Meme Life Cycle Charts

About

Meme Life Cycle Charts refer to images which explain the spread of memes usually through a hierarchy of websites which they appear upon. Typically, these charts will feature 4chan or Reddit as the genesis of memes, and as the memes spread to other sites they get progressively worse, bottoming out when they hit sites such as Facebook or 9gag.

Origin

A common image used in the charts is a parody of the chart from The Human Centipede in which a person has their mouth sewed to the person in front of them's anus, and so on. In the parody chart, original content goes in the first person's mouth, representing 4chan. Each person in the chart represents a different series of sites, and by the time the original content hits the last person, the meme is dead. A version of this chart was posted on April 21st, 2011 to /r/funny,^[2] though it is possible earlier posts featuring the chart existed (shown below).

Spread

On May 22nd, 2011, Cracked writer Dr. Gentleman posted a graphic^[1] explaining the life cycle of a meme, using the life cycle of The Cake Is A Lie to illustrate his point (shown below).

On December 18th of that year, a variation on The Human Centipede chart was posted to FunnyJunk. ^[3] The poster noted that it was a repost, and the image features an eBaum's World watermark (shown below).

The concept appeared in various iterations over the following several years with similar expressions of the website hierarchy. The concept gained new life in 2017 with the popularity of the Meme Economy. On February 5th, 2017, /r/MemeEconomy user Bogmire^[4] posted a chart of a meme's life cycle parodying that of a stock property, gaining over 2,600 points (shown below).

Various Examples

Search Interest

External References