About

What Gives People Feelings of Power is an exploitable webcomic showing a bar graph of what makes people feel strong, including money and status. Online, people have replaced the last category on the bar graph, which also has the highest number of votes, with joke answers.

Origin

On March 20th, 2019, comics author @iamnotanartist_ published a webcomic entitled "What Gives People Feelings of Power" on Instagram. ^[1] The comic shows a bar graph featuring the answers "money," "status" and "a cat choosing to cuddle you over anyone else in the room." The final choice shows the most votes. The post received more than 5,000 likes in less than one year (shown below).

Spread

Roughly three weeks later, Redditor ^[2] ar_ish shared a variation in the /r/funny subreddit, replacing the final category with "catching something instantly as it's falling." The post received more than 29,000 points (95% upvoted) and 285 comments in less than one year (shown below, left).

Later that month, Redditor^[3] Spongedude1 shared a variation that featured a series of Reddit upvote tallies one number away from infamous joke numbers, such as 69, 420, 666 and 1,000. The post received more than 27,000 points (94% upvoted) and 200 comments in less than one year (shown below, center).

On December 19th, 2019, Redditor^[4] Pentagonal_Muffin shared a variation with the final option reading, "Going into the employees only area at your moms work." The post received more than 40,000 points (98% upvoted) and 110 comments in less than two months (shown below, right).

Various Examples

Templates

Search Interest

External References