Editor’s Note: This article is part of Know Your Meme’s annual Top Ten Review series looking back at some of the most memorable and popular memes, events and people that defined the Internet culture in 2015 as we know it.
T
he year 2015 saw the unveiling of quite a few new websites, revamping of many more and even demise of some:
- In social mediascape, 4chan, the long-running imageboard community that played a vital role in building the foundation of the internet meme culture as we know it, was acquired by Hiroyuki Nishimura, the founder of the Japanese text board community 2channel in September. Meanwhile, Reddit became a battleground for free speech and anti-censorship this year after repeated clashes between some of the moderators and users over the removal of controversial subreddits, prompting a series of boycott protests that eventually became known as the "Reddit Exodus."
- In online news, Vox came in strong as a new player in the game with a particular focus on explaining current events like everyone's five years old, Reddit's /r/outoftheloop and Tumblr's Meme Documentation project played a vital role in bringing the latetst, up-and-coming memes on the horizon, while Sunlight Foundation's politically-focused social media watchdog site Politwoops ended its three year run after Twitter revoked its access to the microblogging platform's API.
- In e-commerce, Etsy kicked off the year with a successful IPO, Dollar Shave Club continued to make its ambitions come true by expanding into other men's grooming products, while Amazon surpassed Walmart as the most valuable retailer in the United States by market capitalization.
- In the world of mobile photography and videography, live video streaming app Periscope made a successful debut at this year's SXSW under the new ownership of Twitter, building a 10-million user base within the first four months and being named Apple Store's iPhone App of the Year; Snapchat also upped its game to a new level by introducing several a new large batch of emojis and filters, while Instagram began venturing into GIF making with the introduction of a new spin-off app Boomerang. Giphy reaffirmed its stature as a powerhouse of the GIF culture with the unveiling of Giphy Cam, a mobile video-recording app that allows its users to create original GIFs using their own pictures, and the GIF Maker, a web-based service that allows Giphy users to turn any video clip into ready-to-share GIFs.
- A number of custom avatar builder apps made viral splashes this year, from French Girls, a social drawing game named after the well-known Titanic quote Draw Me Like One of Your French Girls that combines the arts of selfie photography and anonymous portrait drawing, to My Idol, an app that converts selfies into cartoonified avatars.
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Type: Digital Image Processor
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Profile: A web-based application powered by a content filter made of machine learning algorithms that can analyze the visual and textual content within any user-submitted image to determine whether it is pornography, more specifically, the degree of its likelihood in percentage.
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Notability: Like many other early applications of machine learning algorithms, the website gained a lot of online notoriety for its poor performance in accuracy, initially on 4chan's /v/ (video games) board, and subsequently other memetic hub-sites like Tumblr, Twitter and Reddit.
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Stats: As of December, the website has analyzed more than 308,000 posts.
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Type: Novelty Postal Prank Service
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Profile: An online merchandise service that facilitates the postal delivery of an enveloped glitter bomb to a recipient as specified by each customer.
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Notability: Upon its launch in January, the website went viral after an intensive week of news media coverage, forcing the founder of the site to shut down the service due to an unexpectedly high volume of purchase requests. The website also inspired a series of spin-off sites based on the same postal delivery model, including RuinDays, Ship Your Enemy Confetti, Poop Senders and Participation Awards.
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Stats: During the first 24 hours, the website reportedly received "over 1.3 million visits" and "about 300,000 [mentions] on Facebook and Twitter. Following the closure of the service, the company was purchased by a Georgia resident for $85,000.
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Type: Social Networking & Rating App
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Profile: A social networking and personal rating application that allows its users to post public reviews and ratings for people they know in real life.
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Notability: The app has been called a "Yelp for people" and widely criticized for its omission of an "opt-out" feature for those who do not wish to participate. By late October, the planned app had been redesigned as "opt-in" to allow only registered users to rate and to be rated, as well as adding an option to "veto" reviews they disliked.
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Stats: The release date for the app has been repeatedly postponed; as of December, Peeple for iPhone OS is set for release in January 2016, followed by Peeple for Android sometime in early 2016.
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Type: Facial Recognition & Analysis Service
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Profile: A web-based application that uses facial-recognition technology to predict the age and sex of people pictured in photographs submitted to the site.
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Notability: The site was created to promote the Azure Machine Learning Gallery collection of machine learning projects analyzing speech, facial recognition, vision and text, but as we've mentioned before, the software instantly gained notoriety for its inaccurate predictions.
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Stats: On April 30th, #HowOldRobot broke out into a trending topic on Twitter with over 46,000 mentions per day. According to its creators, the website was initially sent out to only a few hundred people via e-mail but had reached over 35,000 users within three hours of launch.
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Type: Technology Conglomerate
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Profile: An American multinational conglomerate best known as the parent company of Google and several other companies previously owned by or tied to Google.
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Notability: Google, the ultimate household name in information technology reached a new milestone this year with a sweeping structural reorganization under the newly-branded parent company Alphabet Inc.
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Type: Online Dating Service
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Profile: An online matchmaking and social networking website for people in committed relationships who are seeking extramarital or polyamorous affairs.
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Notability: Aside from the obvious reason that sets the site apart from other online dating sites, AshleyMadison made the headlines this summer after a group of hackers known as The Impact Team infiltrated the database and stole sensitive information of its users, most famously Josh Duggar of TLC reality TV show_19 Kids and Counting_.
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Stats: The breach resulted in a massive leak (an estimated 32GB of data) containing personally identifiable information of over 32 million site users.
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Type: Content-Filtering Browser Extension
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Profile: A content filtering extension for web browsers that blocks and prevents the display of online advertisements.
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Notability: The maker of the popular ad-blocking extension for web browsers continued to grow its already 40 million-strong user base this year by expanding into mobile web and enabling EyeO’s acceptable advertising, which allows advertisers to buy their way onto the whitelist. In October, the browser extension departed from its honor-ware model and began operationg under the ownership of an anonymous buyer.
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Type: News Aggregator
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Profile: A social news aggregation website where community members can submit and vote on a variety of online news and media content using a similar functionality utilized by other popular news aggregators like Reddit and Digg.
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Notability: What began as a Reddit-esque hobby project by two University of Zurich students in 2014 suddenly became a haven of free speech for tens of thousands of Redditors following this year's mass exodus in protest against some of the site moderators' unwarranted acts of censorship, including the removal of several controversial subreddits in June.
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Type: On-Demand Transportation Service
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Profile: A mobile application that allows its users to request rides from car drivers in major cities across the globe.
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Notability: While Uber has enjoyed success for many years, as encapsulated in the neologism "Uberification," and continued to do so by expanding internationally and raising tens of billions of dollars in fundings, 2015 proved be one of the most challenging years for the San Francisco-based company since its foundation, at least legally. In June, Uber executives were arrested in France and the global expansion of the on-demand taxi service prompted intense protests in more than 10 cities around the world, including in Germany, India, Spain, Colombia, France, Italy, Denmark, Canada, China and England.
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Stats: By May, the service was available in 58 countries and 300 cities worldwide. By December, Uber was estimated to be worth $62.5B, according to Bloomberg News.
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Type: Anonymous Imageboard Community
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Profile: A discussion forum dedicated to anonymous sharing of personal anecdotes on the image board site 4chan, most well-known for its greentext stories that antagonize social norms and celebrate singledom.
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Notability: Originally introduced as a repost-free forum on 4chan, /r9k/ is most well-known for its heavy patronage by the NEETs (Not in Education, Employment, or Training) and their commiseration of various woes in social and sexual life, often through some of the most hilarious greentext stories on the entire site. In October, the board made the headlines in the news with unverified rumors that the shooter behind the mass shooting at Umpqua Community College had left a vague warning on 4chan’s /r9k/ board the previous day.
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Other Notable Sites & Apps
e-Commerce Services
Online Dating Sites
Social Networking Sites
Online Communities
Internet News Sites
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