I'm getting tired of modern meme culture

[Kolph]

>Kills your God

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qO6LWQhvzRw

 

[Still a Youth]

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qO6LWQhvzRw

View: https://youtu.be/pg0byaqVaXo

 

[vaporwavemaster1]

主な問題は、オリジナルのミームが少ないことだと思います。ミームが始まったとき、新しい可能性の爆発がありました。今、人々がミームについて考えるとき、彼らは最も人気のあるものだけを考えます。素晴らしいミームが何百万もありますが、より通常のミームの海では見過ごされています

 

[lain is here]

Jesus christ. This thread really blew up with lurkers. 18k views

Either this site gets way more lurkers than I thought, or the internet really is dead and we've got thousands of bots monitoring us. Of course what they don't know is that we are all bots as well.

 

[kaleidophilia]

I've grown dissatisfied with memes in general, not merely in my modernity but transhistorically, both the 2000s and 2010s feel frustrating to me, not necessarily because it's unfunny, or unentertaining, but because I find something pertinently dissatisfying about the medium as a whole.

If anything, all memes possess something to entertain a targeted demographic, including me. I can find something I find so endearing or funny in both the memes I find now, and the memes I find then, but both ultimately provide no fulfillment beyond mild amusement for a short period of time, in ways no different from choosing to eat junk food all day over a rich and finely cooked meal. I remember many of my explorations in food! I remember the first time making tuscan onion soup, or my first time trying tofu adobo that my dad made for me, or every single instance I went to my favourite Ethiopian place. Likewise, my most very fondest memories of laughing have been with friends over jokes we just sort of came up spontaneously ourselves, the first time I saw Monty Python movies with my boyfriend, my first time going to see a stand up comedian, and how I retold those jokes to some of my friends and how I made them laugh. It's simply more satisfying.

I've kind of sworn off memes for this reason. I seek rich experience and I don't think sitting alone with captioned images or recycling them by resending it to whatever chat client you use makes for richness. We could turn back our cultural clock to the 2000s and I'd still choose to seek out underground internet spaces like this where it's a brief mention over a common occurrence. Here is passion to be found in over a thousand words! And jokes only people here might get, and ones that I can't wait to find!

So, then there is the function of memes beyond their humor, to see memes as a means of expression, I've come to find a memetic medium as a private language to be no less superficial than most mass forms of communication, cheapening the personal quality of simply telling me how you feel. It's one thing to say that you feel alienated and alone, and that you don't like all these perceived social cliques around you, and another thing to make a wojak meme dehumanizing others. I've found, in interactions and conversations with people who express through memes, to actually have a tendency to inherit the simplicity of satire, doubling down on bad decisions because it's been tied to masculinity. In short, it doesn't encourage creative or critical faculties.

I don't know, though. Maybe, in part, I'm trying too hard to be human and not recognizing that people are silly and like to be silly, and I'm taking everything too seriously again. Here's a quote from an 1888 play titled Fin de Siècle:

"You are a decadent people, having the habititude of turning everything into a joke, incapable of that great enthusiasm which is at the bottom of all things. If Jesus Christ, Muhammed, Charlemagne, or Napoleon were to reappear today they would last no longer than a week. Not believing in anything anymore you will end up believing in everything. Gogo or Mercadet, this is France at the end of the 19th century."

 

[Still a Youth]

This probably is why lol

View attachment 12046

Agora compromised

 

[Geezus]

Damn see, and here I was going to admit that I'm a -

long-term lurker, finally signed up. Some
Excellent points in here. Really just had to say that this kind of thing is why I use the Internet. It sure as shit ain't fur the memes.

At least not anymore. I've been online since '98 and that bit about it being more geared toward expression now, with humor (ideally) sprinkled in is spot on in my opinion.

 

[babycrow]

One simple observation I made irl reminded me of this thread. I was shopping at the supermarket and saw an advertisement for M&M's in the popular meme "me: x, also me: y" format. One huge aspect that hasn't been discussed in depth yet is the commercialisation of meme culture by companies, but also on sites like Youtube. For example:

Prime example of the worst of this is the mass-produced "dank meme compilations" you see all over YouTube. The result is that you just get tired of looking at something very quickly when a lot of people regurgitate it endlessly just for the sake of doing so.

Why do you think these compilations keep getting upload on a massive scale? It's not just because the uploader is only doing it out of personal enjoyment and appreciation for the humour, it's also about money. More views, more money. Even if it's not directly from the Youtube ads videos themselves because they might get copyright claimed, I often see advertisements for things like bootleg clothing sites incorporated in the video itself. You wouldn't see that on a 2008 Pingas video. Furthermore, even your popular meme videos don't earn any Youtube ad revenue, you can still use the views to funnel potential viewers to your monetisable video, or place ads directly in the videos for a quick buck.

This is just how a random individual scraping >reddit could make money from memes, companies are on a whole other levels. I'm sure everyone here knows about content farms, and meme culture is prime material for viral and thus profitable content. Even randomly viral content without no previous monetary intent is being commercialised. And now, big name brands are stepping up and using meme formats directly in their real life advertisements. They have been made into a marketing tool.

This is only scratching the surface as through the continuous growth and increasing scope of meme culture, more and more images are dragged in. An obvious example of this is SpongeBob or The Simpsons. It's not limited to niche interests like anime and specific games, skewing more to the mainstream as others in this thread have mentioned. While trying to find the specific ad that inspired me to write this post in the first place I googled "M&M's meme" and I went full circle. Instead of the ad I only found organic memes that featured M&M's in some way like this one:

Obviously something like this would never be officially posted by the brand itself, but the marketing function is the same. It's literally free advertisement. The same goes for mainstream shows like SpongeBob and Squid Game, or pretty much any other product or brand. There's no way marketing teams haven't caught on to the potential virality of meme culture. In fact, they have been harnessing its power since the very beginning and it's only now becoming more apparent.

Virality has been capitalised on since way back in the day with Numa Numa, Chocolate Rain and other early examples. This is not new. However, memes and meme culture contain a far potent, universal and resilient virality. It's a continuous cycle of new organically created content shared at an unfathomable scale and adapts to the exact tastes of the community it is posted in. While meme images, formats and trends replace each other with increasing frequency, as long as the meme culture, its visual language and humour remains intact, new content will continue to evolve and thrive.

With the extreme fleetingness of indvidual memes within the culture, fuel is necessary to power the production engine. Again, I've mentioned SpongeBob and The Simpsons already, but look at the Star Wars Prequel Trilogy or Twilight memes. This is were the brands come in. If you, as a company, can somehow control and create a product with a high probability of being incorporated in the meme culture of a specific group, nurture a meme community around the product or, better yet, mainstream meme status, the free and organic marketing potential is one a corporation can only dream of. And guess what? This tactic is already being deployed.

Look at Vtubers. Though I don't watch them myself, many of my friends and since I do like anime I'm confronted with a fair bit of surface level Vtuber content. One thing I've despite not watching any Vtuber videos is that many of the streamers have their own "inside jokes" or memes. In addition, a large part of being engaged with them and their live content outside of watching and commenting on their own videos is watching or making edits of their original videos, these can be called meme videos. Add some meme images and boom.

It's not an exaggeration to say their that many of the most popular Vtubers sustain and nurture their own meme communicaties, perhaps the sum of all Vtuber meme content could even be called an entire meme culture. 4chan has even added a seperate Vtuber board recently. And this entire meme culture is all being monetised. Like I said, the commercialisation of memes has been going on for years now and this not a new phenemon. Hatsune Miku just turned 14.

Like I said above, the point is not that anything new is happening, it's that the ongoing process of commercialisation along with its perceived degradation of meme culture has been become more common and blatant. Even looking at the OP, it's become so obvious.

But even then memes which are designed to be jokes are increasingly lost on me. A good example was the rather strange and somewhat grotesque "gamer girl pee". This seemed to poke at the fact that a lot of the people posting it were urine fetishists.

This was literally a marketing stunt by the woman selling her pee.

View attachment 11891

View attachment 11899

These two literally contain multiple product placements.

You can't deny the marketing potential they hold, despite being organic memes. And that's exactly the point. This kind of free and spontenous marketing is what the companies are after. While they not be able to manefacture it directly, they can intentionally nurture and sustain it, as we have seen with the Vtuber example. This is one reason why they want our data.

In short, with the expansion of the scope of meme culture and the internet, its potential marketing value and general profitability has also grown. This has caused increasingly noticable commercialisation of meme culture, thus in part bringing about its degradation, or flourishment
depending on who you ask ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

 

[Cinderpeach]

One simple observation I made irl reminded me of this thread. I was shopping at the supermarket and saw an advertisement for M&M's in the popular meme "me: x, also me: y" format. One huge aspect that hasn't been discussed in depth yet is the commercialisation of meme culture by companies, but also on sites like Youtube. For example:

Why do you think these compilations keep getting upload on a massive scale? It's not just because the uploader is only doing it out of personal enjoyment and appreciation for the humour, it's also about money. More views, more money. Even if it's not directly from the Youtube ads videos themselves because they might get copyright claimed, I often see advertisements for things like bootleg clothing sites incorporated in the video itself. You wouldn't see that on a 2008 Pingas video. Furthermore, even your popular meme videos don't earn any Youtube ad revenue, you can still use the views to funnel potential viewers to your monetisable video, or place ads directly in the videos for a quick buck.

This is just how a random individual scraping >reddit could make money from memes, companies are on a whole other levels. I'm sure everyone here knows about content farms, and meme culture is prime material for viral and thus profitable content. Even randomly viral content without no previous monetary intent is being commercialised. And now, big name brands are stepping up and using meme formats directly in their real life advertisements. They have been made into a marketing tool.

This is only scratching the surface as through the continuous growth and increasing scope of meme culture, more and more images are dragged in. An obvious example of this is SpongeBob or The Simpsons. It's not limited to niche interests like anime and specific games, skewing more to the mainstream as others in this thread have mentioned. While trying to find the specific ad that inspired me to write this post in the first place I googled "M&M's meme" and I went full circle. Instead of the ad I only found organic memes that featured M&M's in some way like this one:

Obviously something like this would never be officially posted by the brand itself, but the marketing function is the same. It's literally free advertisement. The same goes for mainstream shows like SpongeBob and Squid Game, or pretty much any other product or brand. There's no way marketing teams haven't caught on to the potential virality of meme culture. In fact, they have been harnessing its power since the very beginning and it's only now becoming more apparent.

Virality has been capitalised on since way back in the day with Numa Numa, Chocolate Rain and other early examples. This is not new. However, memes and meme culture contain a far potent, universal and resilient virality. It's a continuous cycle of new organically created content shared at an unfathomable scale and adapts to the exact tastes of the community it is posted in. While meme images, formats and trends replace each other with increasing frequency, as long as the meme culture, its visual language and humour remains intact, new content will continue to evolve and thrive.

With the extreme fleetingness of indvidual memes within the culture, fuel is necessary to power the production engine. Again, I've mentioned SpongeBob and The Simpsons already, but look at the Star Wars Prequel Trilogy or Twilight memes. This is were the brands come in. If you, as a company, can somehow control and create a product with a high probability of being incorporated in the meme culture of a specific group, nurture a meme community around the product or, better yet, mainstream meme status, the free and organic marketing potential is one a corporation can only dream of. And guess what? This tactic is already being deployed.

Look at Vtubers. Though I don't watch them myself, many of my friends and since I do like anime I'm confronted with a fair bit of surface level Vtuber content. One thing I've despite not watching any Vtuber videos is that many of the streamers have their own "inside jokes" or memes. In addition, a large part of being engaged with them and their live content outside of watching and commenting on their own videos is watching or making edits of their original videos, these can be called meme videos. Add some meme images and boom.

It's not an exaggeration to say their that many of the most popular Vtubers sustain and nurture their own meme communicaties, perhaps the sum of all Vtuber meme content could even be called an entire meme culture. 4chan has even added a seperate Vtuber board recently. And this entire meme culture is all being monetised. Like I said, the commercialisation of memes has been going on for years now and this not a new phenemon. Hatsune Miku just turned 14.

Like I said above, the point is not that anything new is happening, it's that the ongoing process of commercialisation along with its perceived degradation of meme culture has been become more common and blatant. Even looking at the OP, it's become so obvious.

This was literally a marketing stunt by the woman selling her pee.



These two literally contain multiple product placements.

You can't deny the marketing potential they hold, despite being organic memes. And that's exactly the point. This kind of free and spontenous marketing is what the companies are after. While they not be able to manefacture it directly, they can intentionally nurture and sustain it, as we have seen with the Vtuber example. This is one reason why they want our data.

In short, with the expansion of the scope of meme culture and the internet, its potential marketing value and general profitability has also grown. This has caused increasingly noticable commercialisation of meme culture, thus in part bringing about its degradation, or flourishment
depending on who you ask ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Yeah, I mostly agree with this observation, I remember the moment i realized memes were becoming more commercialized was when The Wendy's Twitter account started to act sassy, and roast people and other companies (mostly MCDonalds), I'll admit it was kind of cute at first and we got some cute anime art out of it, but I found it to get old really quick especially when other companies started to follow suit and act more ""unprofessional-ish""". It really hit the wall for me when IIRC Sunny D started tweeting about being depressed and other twitter company accounts wanted to check on them.
I watched a youtube video (I cant remember the name of it atm) talking about this same thing and how some people found it cringe or annoying and there was a person in the comments who worked in marketing saying when companies use memes or have sassy twitter accounts, the role is usually given to like a Gen Z/Millennials person or sometimes the marketing person will do it just for fun and the company just so happens to like it. Idk, I find the whole companies using memes and Twitter to come across as relatable to be kind of sus, especially when its like a restaurant or something, and especially when user pour out their hearts to the account or treat them like they're friends...eeeh...

ALSO ALSO I heard SOMEWHERE that most V-tubers at least the BIG ones have professional meme makers, or maybe I'm thinking about that one scene between Homelander and StormFront from TheBOYS
the sound quality is kind of weird on this one, oof!

I also think that squid game and genshin impact have professional meme/twitter/youtube fan accounts for them under the guise that they're just a regular fan

 

[Still a Youth]

Yeah, I mostly agree with this observation, I remember the moment i realized memes were becoming more commercialized was when The Wendy's Twitter account started to act sassy, and roast people and other companies (mostly MCDonalds), I'll admit it was kind of cute at first and we got some cute anime art out of it, but I found it to get old really quick especially when other companies started to follow suit and act more ""unprofessional-ish""". It really hit the wall for me when IIRC Sunny D started tweeting about being depressed and other twitter company accounts wanted to check on them.
I watched a youtube video (I cant remember the name of it atm) talking about this same thing and how some people found it cringe or annoying and there was a person who worked in marketing saying when companies use memes or have sassy twitter accounts usually given to like a Gen Z/Millennials person or sometimes the marketing person will do it just for fun and the company just so happens to like it. Idk, I find the whole companies using memes and Twitter to come across as relatable to be kind of sus, especially when its like a restaurant or something, and especially when user pour out their hearts to the account or treat them like they're friends...eeeh...

ALSO ALSO I heard SOMEWHERE that most V-tubers at least the BIG ones have professional meme makers, or maybe I'm thinking about that one scene between Homelander and StormFront from TheBOYS
The sound quality on this is SUPER LOW, but it was the only one I could find, OOF!

I also think that squid game and genshin impact have professional meme/twitter/youtube fan accounts for them under the guise that they're just a regular fan

There's definitely a "how do we exploit the attention of the youth" thing going on.

 

[Vaporsleep]

There's definitely a "how do we exploit the attention of the youth" thing going on.

Companies desperate attempts to appeal to younger people (teens especially) is a tale as old as time. The informality and speed of social media has allowed them to more or less perfect the formula.

 

[SomaSpice]

What're you guys talking about? There's absolutely nothing weird about codifying a stance on an aspect of life or culture into an easily digestible image and then disseminating it and repeating it over and over and over and over and over and over and over until it becomes a part of people's identity. Nothing to see here. Also the word meme doesn't mean anything its just some silly repeated words like pee pee or poo poo.

 

[naggyboy]

"Meme culture" is nothing more than social engineering.

 

[Deleted member 3373]

I guess it's time to revive this for a bit because I have yet more observations.

That is that memes have increasingly overtaken serious discussion in various corners of the internet. Everything from old forums to social media is increasingly dominated by this stuff. Hell, what is tik tok but a meme machine? It is ten second long content which is almost perfect for a meme format. Actual discussion and comedy has been increasingly overshadowed by this stuff. Online animation has seemingly slowly drifted away from the traditional five minute animated short in favour of memes that are less than one minute. This can't be good for attention spans. I would even go as far as to say that this is a big driver of dead internet. So many people are addicted to this autogenerated content that the internet may as well be composed of bots. I was watching one of those absurd little youtube animations the other day and I simply asked myself "what are you watching?" It had become clear to me that the content was frankly garbage. It depicted some characters from cars in some altercation in which Lightning McQueen chases off Mater or something. I barely remember it but there simply was no humour. It was just juvinile. And that is an increasing amount of the internet landscape. I realise that the web used to be cutting edge for this kind of content but now it's just so over-saturated that there is just no value left. A pingas meme in 2008 was funny partially because up until then we were all reliant on TV where you would never see anything like that. Now it's just so common that it has no real value.

 

[Deleted member 4436]

"'"'Meme Culture'"'"?

Reading this thread was somewhat jarring. I'm surprised to learn that you people care so much about 'memes'. I, for one, hate that word. I would group 'meme theory' as >reddit terminology. What this is really about is the evolution of humor as the internet became homogenized during the past few decades. I don't think that everything online which is supposed to be funny should be labeled as a 'meme'. Reciprocally, not all image macros are supposed to be funny; neither are reaction images. This could be a contemporary development, but I personally doubt that the intention of these formats being posted were really always meant to make people laugh, even back during the early 00s.

As for the use of images in a non-humorous fashion, I can see how people think it can be inane and overused at times; that's because it is. I can understand the reasons why it is, though. I, myself, often try to incorporate a visual element into my posts. As a picture is worth a thousand words, so, too, can I use them to fill in the gaps of all the things I miss out on directly stating in my writing. They are my enthymemes. I also have a theory that people are more likely to 'engage' with a post if it has some sort of visual element which they can use as a reference point for the tone of the writing. That is what role to profile picture usually serves, when no other image is present.

That, or people who just mindlessly scroll websites --which I have sometimes been guilty of myself,-- are more likely to just stop and look at the pretty picture, and then place greater priority on reading my post because of it.

As for humor, I have a lot of feelings on the subject. I have no idea what my fellow zoomers laugh at at the moment, as it seems that most of their senses of humor are derived from what they see on Tik Tok, which is not something I have ever used. If I had to throw my personal experience in though, I've got to say:

I hate being funny. I hate trying to be funny. Worse, I hate actually succeeding at being funny. I suppose I can't stand myself having a sense of humor in general. In real life, I so often resort to trying to make people laugh, even though there's really no reason why I should be. I do so because that's simply what the social situation calls for. I don't think I've once succeeded at actually appealing to someone's sense of humor before, either. I've always struggled at holding my own it serious conversations, so I've been relegated to banter, instead. It's all formalities, though. Any laugh I generate is one of those fake-laughs that I inherited so perfectly from my mother, and any laugh I give is one of those fake-laughs, as well. I suppose the internet is no different, for most people. They just use image templates because that's what is expected of them. It was never intended to be funny, even if that's what the point of the image in the first place. It's just easier than to try and communicate all of the meaning the image presents using one's own vocabulary.

It could also be me developing some sense of reproach for humor in general, due to the overexposure to it. I was browsing a Webm thread on /wsg/ recently, and behind every post was some sense of wistfulness and self-analysis of me wanting to do something else. I never wanted to laugh. I felt a sense of guilt every time I did. Now, this could just be me being an edgelord, but I think there's something to be said about people resorting to humor because of habit, and not because the situation actually calls for it. It's humor without the desire to be funny. It's humor without the humor.

Anyways, if you want to see something that I really do enjoy finding humorous, check out Xavier Renegade Angel.

 

[bnuungus]

Spend any time scrolling r/memes and you'll understand why memes are shit. Yes, there are a good ones there but they're either the 2 or 3 big ones per day or you need to sift through an absolute fuck ton by sorting by new and find the few memes sprinkled in there that aren't reposts yet are rejected by the hivemind. Ever since people figured out how to monetize karma, posting on a sub like r/memes became solely about how to gain karma and not about "hehe fnuuy mem"

 

[manpaint]

Earlier this year, I was in some Discord server where most people spammed the picture of some dude (including regular users and admin).

When I asked them why they were doing this, they replied they did so because it was funny and a meme.

This was just the picture of some random dude, no captions of anything. I totally failed to see any trace of humor in it.

The fact that some people think spamming a picture is funny, is beyond my comprehension.

 

[Deleted member 3373]

​

It could also be me developing some sense of reproach for humor in general, due to the overexposure to it. I was browsing a Webm thread on /wsg/ recently, and behind every post was some sense of wistfulness and self-analysis of me wanting to do something else. I never wanted to laugh. I felt a sense of guilt every time I did. Now, this could just be me being an edgelord, but I think there's something to be said about people resorting to humor because of habit, and not because the situation actually calls for it. It's humor without the desire to be funny. It's humor without the humor.

Anyways, if you want to see something that I really do enjoy finding humorous, check out Xavier Renegade Angel.

This, 100% this. There is simply an overabundance of humour in the modern world. It's happening in media and IRL. Eventually it gets tiring and you desire to just have a functioning conversation. It becomes humour without any humour and just seems like a form of escapism.

Earlier this year, I was in some Discord server where most people spammed the picture of some dude (including regular users and admin).

When I asked them why they were doing this, they replied they did so because it was funny and a meme.

This was just the picture of some random dude, no captions of anything. I totally failed to see any trace of humor in it.

The fact that some people think spamming a picture is funny, is beyond my comprehension.

In the pre-internet days this is what's called an in-joke. However in cases like this it's an in-joke that no one really gets. The context may perhaps be known to an admin or two but the majority partaking simply do it for reactions on a given social media platform. Humour is no longer humour but rather a contest.

 

[Craige]

social media is a machine that devours the slightest smidgen of comedy a meme contained to propagate its insanity. amusement is quickly lost in the slop of self-referencing hyper-meta post-post-ironic gibberish brain vomit. there's good modern memes out there but they're typically pretty niche. anything pulled into the "mainstream", so to speak, is drowned and sodden with unfunniness.

enjoy some cat videos and Calvin and Hobbes.

 

[Craige]

This, 100% this. There is simply an overabundance of humour in the modern world. It's happening in media and IRL. Eventually it gets tiring and you desire to just have a functioning conversation. It becomes humour without any humour and just seems like a form of escapism.


In the pre-internet days this is what's called an in-joke. However in cases like this it's an in-joke that no one really gets. The context may perhaps be known to an admin or two but the majority partaking simply do it for reactions on a given social media platform. Humour is no longer humour but rather a contest.

stop being so accurate! obsession with being funny removes the comedy from the joke through oversaturation.