Instagram And The Curious Case Of Meme Identity

Editor's Note: This article first appeared in the October 2020 issue of Meme Insider, a magazine covering memes and other internet phenomena. You can subscribe here.

Imagine a Twitter meme. If you use the site regularly, you likely have an image in mind. Maybe it’s a phrasal template that people alter with their own image punchlines, such as “This Is The Ideal Male Body.” Maybe it’s a reaction GIF that keeps popping up under tweets, like the eternally relevant Blinking White Guy.

Now try Reddit. Maybe you’re imagining a screenshot from a movie that’s been given multiple contexts, such as the “Our Battle Will Be Legendary” meme. Perhaps you’re thinking of one of the myriad Doge and Cheems edits on the site, or the onslaught of Wojak and Chad edits which have grown popular in recent months.

Now try Instagram. A little more difficult, isn’t it? Ask a stranger for what they think a typical Instagram meme looks like, and the answer will be vastly different depending on who you ask. Some might think of garish stock images with messages about depression written in Word Art, popularized by accounts like GayVapeShark. Others might think of broad reaction images with text photoshopped on top, a typical template of the platform’s most popular humor accounts like FuckJerry. Some people might even give the same answer as they’d give for Twitter and Reddit, given how typical it is to find reposts from those sites copied onto Instagram. Of the major social media platforms, Instagram has the most nebulous identity when it comes to its meme culture. Arguably, that’s by design.

Though it initially grew popular as a photo-sharing platform, Instagram has evolved to stand out from other social media sites by offering users a highly-curated content feed one can’t be guaranteed to find on sites like Tumblr, Twitter and Reddit. Unlike Reddit, Instagram doesn’t have hubs like subreddits in which users can foster communities of individuals based around a certain topic; unlike Tumblr and Twitter, Instagram doesn’t have a built-in feature which can allow users to repost other people’s content onto their own feed.

Both features are essential to the spread of memes on those platforms. The core of Reddit, for instance, is exploration. It’s easy to peek into and join any community or fandom that strikes a user’s fancy. Through the process, a meme literacy grows. Every community has its own memes, and to understand a community’s discourse, understanding their meme language is inevitable. On Twitter and Tumblr, the repost functions make avoiding memes impossible. If one person you follow reposts a meme so that you see it on your feed, you’ve picked up a sense of what “Twitter” is memeing about, even if you weren’t expressly looking for that knowledge.

Instagram takes a very different approach when it comes to social media. Whereas Twitter can feel like a bustling public square where everyone has a voice (albeit some louder than others), the Instagram experience is much more personal. Instagram is less about interacting with a community than it is building a monument to the self. Instagram users grow a curated selection of photos meaningful to how they want to be seen by others, creating an imperfect but much more beautiful digital reflection of their real-life selves. If they want to post memes at all, many throw memes onto the Stories function, so that the meme will be available to their followers for 24 hours before it disappears from their page. Even then, there’s no easy way to repost the meme, no button to share others’ posts easily on the platform.

The result is a much more passive scrolling experience than those offered by other major social media sites. Instagram allows users to like and comment, but that’s it. To share a meme on the platform and thus help its template grow more popular, a user has to either download an app or screenshot the post and edit it themselves, and that’s simply too much work for the average person to do for the promise of a like.

The “Explore” tab offers a variety of different content, but even that is highly-curated based on an algorithmic guess as to what the user wants to see. If you’re not following any meme-specific pages on Instagram, any memes you’re going to see on the platform are likely here, and once you engage with one, that’s the only sort of meme the explore tab will offer you. Curiously, unlike other hubs, the images in the Explore tab are not organized by likes or popularity. Rather, they’re simply there in a wash of squares and rectangles, begging for your attention, while the algorithm tracks your clicks and likes to give you an even-more highly curated explore tab next time. Though every social media platform offers curation to a degree, Instagram’s main appeal is curation. This is why so many meme and influencer pages load their posts with what seems like fifty hashtags a piece: to get known on Instagram isn’t simply a matter of good luck and people liking your content. Getting popular on Instagram takes work.

This doesn’t lend itself to the growth of an Instagram-specific meme culture. With highly-curated feeds, Instagram acts as an amalgamation of the rest of social media. It presents the type of posts that are already popular on Reddit, Twitter, and Tumblr, delivered as a choice buffet whose menu is catered more to your tastes each time. Popular humor accounts have learned this lesson. Innovative content is not the key to success on Instagram. It’s about creating an oasis away from those other sites, showing a user the best of what they can offer without the user having to seek the content out themselves.

This isn’t necessarily a negative thing. Though Instagram lacks a readily-identifiable meme identity, it instead fosters an almost soothing experience by curating the internet for the user. You’re not looking at the memes everyone else likes on the platform. You’re looking at memes you (will probably) like. You don’t need to go find the kind of content you want to engage with. It’s all in your feed already. As such, it stands as a complement to other platforms, showing users the best of what they have to offer and, perhaps inadvertently, encouraging users to explore elsewhere for more of what they want. There may be no stereotypical “Instagram Meme,” but the Instagram meme experience can’t be found anywhere else.