Forums / Discussion / Serious Debate

Another day, another batch of fresh upload of memes. Gee, I wonder what they will be. Tada! Straight from both right and left side oven, shitty political memes. This time, very easy recipe. Take picture, knead them neatly with photoshop or mspaint, add caption to invite vicious mockery from the community which shares your idpol stance to incite more heat, then spread it on reddit like a jam, and win upboats and reddit gold.

You know, memes used to be funny. Actors do something funny intentional or not, okay we can all laugh with that together even with the actors themselves. It is a lulz. Now we get shit like taking pictures of people on right or left side, caption it shittily and spread it, spread the hate for the (side) here. Looking at NOT ANOTHER DRUMPF MEME hatefully

I am starting to think Putin had the right of it when he starts banning memes. It overflows into cyberbully territory especially when it came to sigh motherplowing idpol.

Inb4 Clownfish you Nazi white knight sympathiser go eat dick and get banned hooray. I do not like Jigglypuff, Big Red, Carl Cuck/AIDS Skrillex either. And not just idpol related, sometime streisand effect is a bitch. Some people do not like memes of themselves whether good or bad on the internet everywhere and PLEADED for it to stop. The result? MORE MEMES xXxMLGxXxEPICREMIXGIGAZOR9000, "Lol its just a meme bro, its internet, why seriouslu", "EMBRACE THE MEME, MEME FOR MEME GOD DON LOL", etc.

This has to stop. And to the KnowYourMeme staff as well, please take my opinion into consideration, no matter what decision or inaction you may take upon it. I just want my voice to be heard so this bedlam can stop.

I agree. Political memes are not funny or interesting. As tucker carlson (I think) said, "you're not laughing because it's funny, you're laughing because you agree with them". Political memes are created only to make a statement, not to be enjoyable.
TL;DR STOP MAKING FUCKING TERRIBLE POLITICAL MEMES

it has gotten tedious at this point

Yeah sure I made the entry of chicken trump but that's because of its a funny inflatable to me.

Other than that this site has gotten way to over flooded with both Right and Left. Memes are meant to be helpful distractions from real life.

What really gets me about the overflow is that most of the things posted aren't even funny in the slightest.

Like for example, go to the Russiagate image gallery. For one, literally >95% of the image gallery (I literally counted every image to find out this calculation) was posted entirely by one person. Now, if they were at least funny I'd have less of a problem with it. However, most aren't funny or otherwise "memes" in any sense. A majority of them are just annotated news articles (what disturbs me more than the fact that their sources are absent is that it seems like whoever posted them seemed to have spent the time to annotate them too, and they post like at least 4 a day). Those aren't funny. The inflatable Trump Chicken was funny. Scaramucci as Boneitis Guy was funny. Bernie Sanders fighting Trump in a lightsaber duel was funny. Covfefe was funny. Two Scoops was funny.

Annotated news articles aren't funny. Political cartoons are only funny to those who agree with your ideology, and even then I hate most of them. Legal documents aren't funny. Constant excerpts from bias websites aren't funny.

I remember awhile back I used to complain how this site used to have too much fandom-related material. Now I wish for the sunny days back when that was the problem, because this is infinitely worse because the fandom stuff was at least funny if you're a part of the fandom. These things are only taking up space on the site and, worse of all, just aren't funny at best and just offensive at worst.

So is Don actually responsible for the politicization of the site, or are the owners forcing him and others to push it since there's money to be made?

Whoever is to blame, if they bring the site back to it's roots I might actually feel compelled to change my avatar and username to something less…ideologically charged.

A lot of it comes down to what's popular online. Don himself has stated multiple times that he hates the Trump memes, but unfortunately he has to do them mainly because that's the point of KYM: to function as a digital archive of internet trends as they come and go.

Whether or not the memes are funny doesn't really have any bearing in the end. It's all about the trends

Sad state of affair is it not? Thank you for reminding me about this place is a digital archive of the internet. If we are kind of like a museum, then may I suggest something about curating.

Past week, I noticed the surge of uploads of images mainly from /r/FULLCOMMUNISM, memes hellbent on attacking, some galleries uploaded by single account that was less than a week old at the time of this post. I understand people are free to upload their work to this archive, this museum, but spamming with weaponised memes to slander, push agenda, and incite action. Are there any plans on this? I do not want censorship on any, but I do not think it is good to left it alone either.

Politics is on the forefront of everyone's mind now because we are in crisis of cognitive dissonance.
We literally live in our own worlds now.
The "other side" drives us literally crazy in part because we disagree with each other's ideas, but also because their reality negates our reality, which our minds can't handle. It creates stress.
Having your reality questioned hurts your brain just like walking outside and seeing a pink and green paisley sky would hurt your brain.

Our facebook feeds and news is so vastly different that one guys world makes another guys world an impossible lie.
Any validation that your world is really real is pleasing. Any validation the the other world is fake is also pleasing.
So we laugh at memes we agree with that aren't funny because we are happy we aren't crazy, as well as because we agree with them and we get angry at memes we disagree with because they make our world illogical.

We look to each other when things get squirrely for validation. "Are they upset too?", "Is it just me?"
We rethink things when those we trust see things differently. "Why are they so upset?", "What am I missing?"
When everyone in your feed shares your views, it becomes hard to self-reflect. So when we are confronted with a opposing view, rather than consider things as we should, we simply reject the idea outright from the outset.
Soon we start to reject everything from outside our circles outright. And that's where we are.

Seeing conflicting memes from both side does hurt the brain, because both worlds can't be true.
One or both is a lie.
That's scary.

@yarknarf. Thank God I do not use facebook, twitter, or other social media then. Because from the sound of it alone, it seems a lot worse than here. Feels pretty dreadful when you are surrounded by madness everywhere.

I don't use FB either. Twitter is fun in a chaotic way.
I am a conservative on most foreign policy and 2nd amendment issues.
But I'm a liberal on everything else.
So, I find myself at the range hearing these right-wing conversations that make no sense to me at all because those guys have this nutso FB feed of news they consume. So I just sit quietly and nod because, I mean, where do you even start anymore?
Then I'll go hang out with my environmental / dog rescue friends and they also have conversations that make no sense to me. Are GMO's really really a grave threat to our existence? Not in my world.

I advise the most square and unfashionable point of view of all these days that both people on the left and right will think me a fool for.
Main Stream Media
For all it's faults, major newspapers and news channels are simply the best means of gathering information in the history of the human species. (unless someone can name a time and place that's ever been better)
It's not perfect but it's the best we have ever achieved so far.

Misinformed or uninformed, huh?

That's a George Carlin joke, but not an actual fact.

I think we must not become TV Tropes. Yeah I don't like unfunny memes, or normie memes for that matter, but if they are somewhat popular, this site must preserve and curate them. Altough I do agree there must be a better curating of memes and images. Otherwise, let the downvote and upvote feature do its job.

@yarknarf. That is the point :)

@Aramaki. A man after my own heart. I do not like downvote/upvote system because it encourage 'opinion policing' and enable shutting down opposition. Many forums had these, those many forums became wretched hives later. I agree wholeheartedly that we need better curating.

Like I said earlier, fresh accounts made solely for the purpose of posting weaponised political memes from far-left leaning subreddit which I surmise it is where they came from as well. I also suspect them in the recent act of silencing through mass downboats too. Thank God they are not here yet, as the forum seem quiet now (but I imagine it was very active back in its golden days).

If there were more strict rules for making entries, I think a lot of these issues would go away. If there was a rule that you had to wait a week before making an article, to see if a meme or event actually has staying power on the internet and is worthy of documentation and isn't just some bullshit that flares up for a few days before promptly being forgotten for the next piece of bullshit, it would likely rid the site of most of the political crap that's dragging it down.

But you don't get 500 comments and thousands of clicks with week old controversies and events.

YNG, The Mutual Ball said:

So is Don actually responsible for the politicization of the site, or are the owners forcing him and others to push it since there’s money to be made?

I'm sure someone has the screencap of Don complaining in the Discord about how he has to write another bunch of political entries. I'm not sure its a corporate move, though. It's on whoever decided to add the subculture, event, and person categories, which turned Know Your Meme into Know Your Internet Bullshit. Once that happened, every little hashtag and -gate became open for an article.

I'm pretty sure those categories were there when I joined so the meme grave's been dug for quite a while. It just took a particularly partisan election to finally kick the corpse in.

And the fact remains they, apparently (from what I understand) end up being the most popular entries no matter how much we, and everyone, hate them. It could be something that, if it simply didn't bring that much traffic and was still hated as it is now, could simply be glossed over.
And really, it looks like it.
No matter the entries, even if so many comments are saying it shouldn't be happening, people still flock to it, make multiple visits, multiple comments. Brings people from outside, too, some who are in it just for the politics and leave without improving anything, some that would be in for the memes, but check it out anyways, hate the fact this site has taken this turn, but look in anyways. And us, we keep looking, hating the fact the page exists, but visiting them again and again despite that hatred.
And thus, it becomes popular, too relevant to the net to ignore even within the site, let alone outside it. And so, when the next thing comes, everyone knows it's gonna be the exact same, so an entry to it needs to be done once more.
Really, it applies outside the site too. Everyone is sick and tired of politics, but keep coming back to them once more. Keep bringing them up, inserting them, complaining about it but never turning away.

No one is doing this to punish us, even if they wanted to.

We're doing this to ourselves.

Okay but seriously it's basically survival tactics combined with the reasons why clickbait works AND the fact we just can't turn away from shit we hate.

I don't bother using memes in my comments in any kind comment box.