KYM Review: Sites and Apps of 2018

Editor’s Note: This article is part of Know Your Meme’s annual review series looking back at some of the most memorable and popular memes, events and people that defined internet culture in 2018 as we know it.

s the 2018 comes to an end, it’s important to take stock in the various websites, apps and technology that helped make life a little more bearable--and, in some cases, more miserable--over the past year. Our understanding and manipulation of online content, both new and old, led us down some dark corridors 2018, punctuated by brief flashes of light, sometimes at the time. Social networks continued to tumble (no pun intended) towards the inevitable Orwellian nightmare that we signed up for in the terms and services. Facebook's robot-in-chief Mark Zuckerberg hemmed and hawed his way through a year-long apology tour, while other apps picked up the slack. Many were left to wonder "Should we just join Generation Z on TikTok and call it day?"

Things weren't much better outside of social media. Deepfakes opened Pandora’s Box in terms of making Fake News and fake celebrity porn more believable. Meanwhile, 23andMe sold their users' DNA to a pharmaceutical and used its vast database to catch the Golden State Killer. So that’s both good and scary.

But when it comes to the Internet, you have to take the good with the bad. After all, who knows how long we’re going to have such a free reign. Net Neutrality was repealed earlier this year in the United States, and in Europe, a similar type of apocalyptic legislation in the form of the European Union Copyright Directive could spell the end of meme-ing in the E.U. as we know it.

Through it all, however, it was still business as usual online in 2018. Things got worse, and things got better. Based on the updates and addition to our database, we picked ten of the most noteworthy apps and sites of year, So in no particular order, here the sites and apps that helped guide conversations about memes, privacy and ethics, because, in the end, we live in a society.

TikTok

The lip-syncing app TikTok, which on the surface looked a whole lot like last year’s Musical.ly, revealed itself to be a short-form video behemoth, allowing users to interact with each other’s videos in ways that excited users and annoyed just about everyone else. The little earworm "I’m Already Tracer," became TikTok's first bona fide hit in the last few months of 2018, highlighting the possibilities of TikTok Duets simply and efficiently. It’s not everyone’s cup of tea, as the throngs of anti-TikTok memes and message board posts can attest, but for a generation searching for the new Vine, they may have found it in TikTok.

Fuck you and fuck this game pic.twitter.com/d0GMygHluY

— Ironic Tik Toks (@IronicTikTok) October 14, 2018

MoviePass

Perhaps nothing sums up the wonderful, horrible life of MoviePass better than a tweet by @juliaraneyj, who wrote, "with moviepass i once saw 11 movies in a single month and now because of that some rich assholes are about to lose a ton of money, what an all around great experience." For nearly a year, MoviePass users saw an ungodly amount of movies as investors and executives struggled to make the service, which basically gave movie tickets away for free, profitable. They didn’t. Most good deals on the Internet are too good to be true, but for about six glorious months, this one wasn’t. Well, at least until there’s some sort of data breach and all their former user’s information is leaked to the dark web or something. Until then, we hold our MoviePass experience near and dear to our hearts.

Trump Dating Sites

After two years of making America great again, that gameshow-host-turned-president Donald Trump has had a hard time getting his supporters laid. Apparently, no one except the biggest Limp Bizkit fans finds a red baseball cap attractive. So it’s unsurprising that over the past year, a series of conservative-branded dating sites have begun to pop up to entice you with a bottle of red, a bottle of white and some light conversations about repealing and replacing Obamacare. Two of the most-memed, Trump.Dating and Righter were filled with controversies and poor marketing to make it worthy of the year end list. Trump.Dating got hit upon its launch, when the Internet unearthed sex offenses by one of the models on the site's splash page. Meanwhile, Righter got dragged into oblivion before anyone could even sign up. It’s a lonely existence for the American conservative, it seems.

Deepfakes

Late last year, a subreddit called /r/deepfakes quietly launched. Little did anyone know that the technology it championed would become one of the year’s most controversial. The release of the easy-to-use FakeApp made the practice, which allowed users to swap faces in video content, easy and accessible, and for a time, it was good. The Internet did what the internet does best: They put Nicolas Cage’s face on stuff. But as fun and disturbing as Man of Steel starring Cage as Lois Lane is, the more nefarious and ugly practices of the app emerged as users began putting celebrity faces on adult film actors, violating both consent and good taste. By mid-year, people were already reporting the dangers of deepfakes due to its ability to propagate fake news. Even the government commented on the technology, calling it a threat to national security.

Facebook

Is it 2008? Why is Facebook on this list? All of Facebook's chickens came home to roost in 2018, putting Mark Zuckerberg on trial for the 2016 election hack, fake news and Russian interference. They just couldn't get ahead of any of their many scandals this year, from Cambridge Analytica to the company trading in anti-Semitic conspiracy theories to help quell the rising tide against them. Honestly, it’s hard to find an impressive thing the company did all year. Oh, wait, they managed to put out a video chat device nobody wanted and lost $123 billion in market value in a single day, one of the largest drops in history. Through it all, Mark Zuckerberg, who had his eyes on a presidential campaign at the beginning of the year, went from one robotic apology to another, hoping to rebuild the public trust. Did it work? Who knows, but at least we won’t have to worry about President Zucc anytime soon.

23andMe

23andMe is another old chestnut that really came into its own this year. For years, people were wowed by the work of genealogy company 23andMe, who made their money taking people’s DNA and telling them that, yup, they're European. The test results may have seemed like a fun thing to bring up at a party, but the DNA database became the subject of many surprising headlines this year. The company’s information was used to finally catch the Golden State Killer, a serial rapist and murderer who had eluded law enforcement for decades. Additionally, the British pharmaceutical GlaxSmithKline agreed to buy a $300 million stake in the company, giving them access to users’ DNA. While it remains to be seen what will come of all this, the two stories put what can be done 23andMe in perspective.

Fish4Hoes

Scam sites are a dime a dozen on the internet, especially when it comes to dating, sex and pornography. Surprisingly enough, very few of those scams become memes. Enter Fish4Hoes, a scam website that simply leads users to other scam websites with the promise of sex. Is anyone really surprised that a website called "Fish4Hoes" could be a scam, though? They weren't fooling anyone. Whatever Fish4Hoes was hoping to accomplish (scam lonely people out of their money), becoming a long-running and popular subject on the r/badfaketexts subreddit probably wasn't one of them. Memers joyfully replaced the weird incoming texts from the company, creating a series of funny exploitables that anthropomorphized the site as a cheeky Cassanova. The site, essentially, became a stand-in for all scam dating sites and shorthand for how pathetic their tactics are.

YouTube

It's been a rough year for YouTube. From December to December, the chasm between what YouTube wants to be (a welcoming place for a diverse, global audience) and what YouTube's audience wants became a canyon. Even before the year technically started, on New Year's Eve 2017, Logan Paul uploaded his now infamous Suicide Forest video, costing one of the site's most popular creators YouTube's seal of approval. Fast forward to about a year later, and the site's most popular star PewDiePie recommended a channel with anti-Semitic content to his 76 million subscribers. While PewDiePie has denied knowledge of the channel's politics--despite a racial slur appearing in the description for the video he highlighted--similar controversies got him removed from YouTube's preferred list in previous years. The events bookended a disastrous YouTube Rewind video that became YouTube's most disliked video of all time. All of this shines a spotlight on the real problem with YouTube: They cannot be a bastion of free speech, which their audience clearly wants, and police the actions of their young and quasi-nihilst creators, who do not wield their power responsibly. The absence of PewDiePie and Logan Paul from the Rewind video, replacing them with a group of creators and celebrities that YouTube's core audience couldn't care less about, is about as close as this controversy comes to poetry. Will YouTube ever solve this problem and find a balance between creators and company? Sound off in the comments below, and don't forget to dislike and subscribe.

Gang Weed

"We Live in a Society." Five little words with an unbelievable amount of weight and meaning in 2018. No group took this more to heart than Gang Weed, a fake group of memers spread across the internet that mainly posted images of the Joker in his many forms with captions "this meme was made by gang weed" and "we live in a society," like a stamp of approval. Ironic, hilarious and borderline non-sensical, Gang Weed and its many clones mocked the self-serious gamer, who believes that their vision of society, which Gang Weed hypothesizes comes from Batman movies, is best for the world. The series of memes provided a much needed check to the lousy Joker memes that permeate throughout the internet, ironically declaring "Gamers, rise up!"

Tumblr

Much like Facebook, Tumblr had a year fraught with news stories that made the well-established social media and micro-blogging platform appear a little shaky. But what was going on there? For starters, the site helped launch some of the biggest memes and images of the year. Surprised Pikachu mean anything to you? Yup, that started on Tumblr. Bernie Sanders's Kung Pow Penis? You guess it, Tumblr. Even the site's advertisements were properly mocked in tall order. Considering how well things were going for on-site meme-ing, it's surprising that the site would take a knife to its bread and butter: Pornography. In November 2018, the Tumblr app was removed from Apple's App Store due to adult content. Less than a month later, the company announced that they would be banning nudity from the site entirely, which, understandably became the source of more controversy and, yes, memes. Will Tumblr be able to rebound without the presence of female-presenting nipples? Only time will tell.