this post was submitted on 18 Apr 2024
987 points (98.2% liked)
Antique Memes Roadshow
6044 readers
160 users here now
Giving you the backstory and appraisals of vintage memes!
Submissions should be vintage memes or commentary about vintage memes. Commenters are advised to appraise the internet value and provenance meme antiquities.
Rules:
- Posts should be old memes or about old memes.
- Don’t be a jerk. Be excellent to each other.
- Keep it safe for work.
- Follow global .world instance rules outlined here
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Advice Animals were much earlier, in the late 2000s. I remember seeing them on gaming forums before Reddit was even a thing, when SA and Digg still reigned supreme.
Know Your Meme traces them back to 2006.
https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/advice-animals
Well, memes sometimes last longer than the era they starred in.
I remember finding this chart showing the various meme eras (I don't remember where I found it, sadly):
And I definitely remember seeing old memes still being used after their debut "era" - I remember seeing some from the "experimental" era (1995-2004) like the Dancing Banana, All Your Base Are Belong to Us and less-commonly YTMND and Homestar Runner references in the Classic Era (2004-2009), and likewise I saw memes from that era (Pingas, demotivational posters, Leeroy Jenkins jokes/references, Chuck Norris, Over 9000, Keyboard Cat, etc) still being used well into 2012-2013 despite that already being a new "meme era".
And as I mentioned in another comment, Rage Comics and Advice Animals still persisted into 2014 (mostly dying/fading into obscurity around 2015), by which point "dank" memes were already at full swing; and I definitely recall still seeing some Surreal Memes in use around the early 2020s, so I'd say the boundaries of meme popularity are fairly fuzzy.
Ah, forgive my word usage. I meant to say that they first started in that era, not that they were solely used back then. I do appreciate how informative your comment is, nonetheless!