Forums / Discussion / Meme Research

So I ran into this issue specifically when uploading this image. Like a large number of drawn images that are posted for years on 4chan as reaction images, the original has a light blue background. When I was wanting to upload it I was thinkning it might be more useful for some people if it was instead transparent, and given that the background is solid blue, this is pretty easy to do. However, this sorta brought up and issue in my head.

Know Your Meme is a site meant specifically to document online internet culture. This kind of editing is technically a 'perversion' of this.Likewise, there are other memes that I have uploaded that I have modified from their original version. Sometimes when text was misspelled I edited the image to correct it. If the image was poorly edited/low quality (by accident or laziness, not deliberately like deep frying) I might go back and clean it up a bit, and/or use something like Waifu2x so it isn't as painful to look at.
I don't think this is a really big issue for most (I am pretty sure most would rather see the same meme slightly improved visually than the original one of poorer quality) but technically this is editing it from how it was originally. I don't know if something like this would rub people the wrong way.

The only time I could really see this becoming a real issue IMO, would be for the original image that spawned a meme. In this case, I can see value in preserving faults in the original upload. Most of these will end up being modified (onsite or elsewhere) into relatively high quality blank templates anyways.

I guess, while I get that it's extra work, so I certainly don't expect it to be a 'rule' to follow, are there objections to modifying images for uploads if they are just to improve quality?

Also, uh… would there be any interest in essentially the reverse? I've been working on editing some memes into discord emotes. This generally is making transparent small square images. While they are generally relatively good for the size they are.. there are not going to be all that useful for anything else. Just curious to see if there would be any interest in them.

I always clean up memes. I hate awful jpeg artifacts and such.
The last meme I upload I cleaned up… I then saw someone repost it on discord at a much lower quality literally just 24 hours later..

I would say that uploading both versions is the best approach documentation-wise. Title the uneditted one "Original" and the editted one "Optimized". I have seen this done for some prominent meme samples here.

I agree this makes the most sense for documentation standpoint. Sort of like if you translate an image, it'd make sense to upload both and then just cross-reference them in the image notes.

On a related note, what do we think about uploading enlarged versions of the same image? Not better quality, just an enlarged version. I've run into the issue before where an image is small but legible if zoomed in, and I've always debated whether to upload the postage-stamp-sized one or generate a simple 200% version an upload that would allow users to read it without manually zooming in. To me, this could be a situation where the alteration could simply be indicated in the notes without necessarily uploading twice. The reason's that the contents are materially the same and you can always go to 50% zoom if you wanted to see how it looked in its material form, but also the 200% version is more useful to the vast majority of users.

I don't have strong opinions on it, but I am curious how people handle that.

The other potential exception that I want to discuss is multi-panel comics. Even way back in the MLP:FiM days, people often spliced together individual comic panels into a single image showing the whole comic, since artists often uploaded each panel as a separate image on Tumblr but posted them all contemporaneously in a single post. Obviously, that's still how comics get posted on websites like Twitter. That's technically an alteration, but it's one that preserves the original presentation of a whole in a different format rather than materially altering it. The alternative is uploading each panel and cross-referencing to them all as you go. So the question is whether the "proper" way to document these is to upload the individual panels separately or the combined comic. Provided all the panels were posted together, I tend to favor the latter approach over the first, but I want to know what others think.

I think improving them, documenting improvements in the notes, and still linking the original as the "source" is good.

What everyone else said. Improve it if you want, but still upload the original version too. You never know if your idea of a "harmless improvement" is actually something detrimental to how someone else remembers the meme