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BBC, the most trusted name in news, links to KYM in an article.

Last posted Apr 17, 2015 at 03:58AM EDT. Added Apr 16, 2015 at 09:28PM EDT
15 posts from 15 users

From the BBC trending article Russia’s (non) war on memes?

"Why were the authorities acting now? In the past few years, internet memes have become extremely popular on Russian social media, particularly on Vkontakte and Twitter. Russian memes were at first replicas of international internet memes (like thumbs up Jesus or Barack Obama, success kid and others). But these days users have become more active in creating and sharing their own, a trend fuelled by the Ukraine crisis, according to BBC Monitoring."

So, what do you guys think?

Last edited Apr 16, 2015 at 09:36PM EDT

inb4 memegate
I mostly forget that KYM is a meme documenting site that isn't offensive or filled with slang. tbh I find it weird when sites like BBC links to KYM

Last edited Apr 16, 2015 at 09:48PM EDT

>tfw BBC staff comes across Riff-Raff and realizes what they've just done

But in all seriousness, haven't things like this happened with semi-relative frequency over at least the past couple years? I remember hearing something about CNN liking us.

Yeah we're basically the most liked and reliable mainstream source for knowledge on memes and people forget this sometimes. Anytime someone googles a meme, the first link is almost without fail KYM on any computer (so it's not just mine and my search bias). If you ask around to people IRL, most people have been on KYM or at least heard of it before. Since the community and the people with actual accounts is pretty small and it doesn't compare to the likes of Twitter and stuff it can be easy to forget that KYM does get an awful lot of traffic as a news site.

Before I joined this site and started interacting with it's user base, I simply just used this place casually whenever I wanted to know more about a meme or where a meme started or whatever…

Back then, I thought this was a reliable, official and trustworthy place to find out information about memes.

But now that I'm more familiar with how articles are made, how basically anyone could make an article, (and some pretty shitty ones at that) on memes that might not even be a thing….

Plus, I've started to go on KYM on my School laptop, and it really opened my eyes on the NSFW nature of so many things Know Your Meme documents…

So now that image of a proffesional, SFW site has kinda been destroyed. Don't be fooled by how negative this is though, despite how easy it is to make articles, qaulity-control is still pretty good though. And KYM IS your go-to-place for meme info….

Yet at the same time I'm still surprised how this lovable-yet-kinda-dorky website got linked to by BBC.

We are kinda (if we aren't already) becoming a news site.
Most of the news nowadays I read them on KYM first.

Also, BBC linking KYM? That's cool.

The moment I realized some entries I submit actually end up on the first page of Google's search results:

[sweats nervously] Get it together Onion. Gotta be a role model. [wipes forehead]

But yeah… I'm impressed. I've heard of KYM getting linked by big news sites but seeing it with my own eyes is different. Good job. I know very well that KYM could definitely use a lot of work, but since no other site does what it does I suppose it isn't doing a bad job; plenty of articles are really good.

Know Your Meme's community is small. In terms of people "who are from the Internet," there aren't many even in the article comments, which tends to be separate from the forum community.

But for trending and notable entries (and many lesser known ones,) the admins and mods do a great job in doing research, making an easily read and well-enough edited article, and following a tried-and-true format in documenting the web phenomena.
 
Also, remember the full nature of KYM. Over a half million people/accounts "Like" Know Your Meme on Facebook. So even if they don't come by the site itself, they get KYM information in their newsfeed. So they have come to expect hard-hitting meme images such as the most recently posted one:

They likely aren't going to be terribly surprised by some off-color jokes. They would have unliked the site long ago if they were.

And the BBC has interns and reporters who know "the Internet." They know that many people who post in comments sections anywhere are going to be dumb. And the forums are still pretty hidden to most. We are far from important to the site. If you follow the habits and actions of the staff, most of the focus in terms of work and effort is near the articles. The forums are almost strictly an on-site KYM community thing. There often isn't a link to the forums from articles, and most people who visit will avoid Riff-Raff anyway, because it just plain won't make sense with all of the in-jokes. No one's going to make an account if they didn't have one to insult or cringe at you. Most people don't care. At worst, they leave the geeky kids alone.
 
And most of all, as others say, you're not going to find many relatively unbiased information on memes anywhere else. KYM serves and fulfills a very particular niche. It's not a stretch to say it serves a role that no other site can at this point: consistent, well-written, and easily (relatively) searchable articles on Internet phenomena.

I just hope that the people picking these articles are at least a little bit familiar with how we evaluate quality. Of the three articles that Jacob linked, only Buddy Christ is still a "submission," but it's also nowhere close to the current "confirmed" standard. There is a gradient of reliability here that I'm not sure they pick up on.

(And for god sakes, I hope they don't link anything from the deadpool!)

Skeletor-sm

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