About

The 2024 Know Your Meme UI Update Controversy refers to an ongoing series of updates to the Know Your Meme website, intended to introduce a new user interface (UI) to the site, which have started some time during 2024 and been first published on April of that year. This UI redesign has been significantly controversial, with a vocal portion of the site's user base, including community moderators, reacting negatively to the changes, and posting public critiques of the redesign.

History

Prior to 2024, various UI updates had been attempted by Know Your Meme on several occasions, such as the early months of 2021, but these changes received significant backlash from the community and were usually scrapped after a few months. Some time around April of 2024, the current UI update was pushed to Know Your Meme with minimal advance announcement. This interface was thoroughly criticized by many users, with the main points of contention being:
- a seemingly corporate-sanitized interface, prioritizing advertisement and standardization over practicality;
- many bugs, making the experience on this interface tedious at best;
- several bugs permanently affecting the old interface as a result of the new one being implemented;
- a general lack of communication from the people in charge of implementing the new UI;
- the option for registered users to browse the website via its old interface, which was partially rendered pointless by the new interface being randomly imposed anyway after a few days at most.

Spread

On April 11th, 2024, user DLD493v2 posted a thread^[1] to the Know Your Meme forums titled "New site layout?", complaining about the updated UI. The thread quickly garnered attention from the Know Your Meme community members, who shared their own primarily negative reaction to the layout changes, bringing up major technical problems, and helping users who were dissatisfied with the changes revert to the old site design. The thread has gathered over 19,000 views as of November 2024.

Several users of Know Your Meme also uploaded screenshots to the Know Your Meme entry's picture gallery, documenting some technical problems they encountered with the UI redesign and commenting on some removed functionalities, with some users complaining of how the redesign resembled the pattern of UI designs that were widely seen as being the result of enshittification.

Other users uploaded original content to the gallery to voice displeasure with the redesign, regularly gaining a high volume of upvotes and entering the top positions of the Trending Images gallery. One of the earliest instances^[2], uploaded on May 20th, 2024 by user TheHolyEmpress, garnered 80 net upvotes and over 5,800 total views as of mid-November 2024. Another meme^[3] uploaded on August 8th by entry moderator Triplem received 170 net upvotes and over 6,800 views.

Relevant Examples

External References