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:
I used to frequent imgur's user-sub back then. I never made a front-page post, but I did get top comment of the day once. I nearly earned the green giraffe token. Over time the community grew more cringey by the week, and devolved into selfies and sob stories. I made the switch to reddit and never cared about karma again. What a time.
The irony is that Imgur was originally created as a an image hosting service specifically for Reddit, then became its own society and culture. Only to have you return right back where it came from
I remember the exact moment the enshittification started, Imgur used to have a "(source)" link right below the post title, it was great that you could visit the reddit thread something that went viral on Imgur, basically using Imgur to browse subreddit images, once that got removed and they started hiding reddit posts as Imgur community posts it kinda went downhill
This made me wonder what the oldest internet meme still in common usage is.
Goatse launched in 1999 and was just widely referenced this month with the eclipse.
I'm not saying we should be proud of goatse's legacy and staying power, I'm just observing the reality we've all built.
ALL YOUR BASE?
People still refer to it from time to time, but generally only in the context that it's old.
The smiley emoji - :-) - is from 1982
That's an emoticon. Emojis are these: 😜
There's an entry for emoticons, though I'm not sure I'd qualify all of them as memes. Not the kind I was thinking about, at least.
Probably Caramel Dansen. I remember it from when I was a kid, and I still see it every once in a while.
Edit: There's this video from 2008, but it's probably not the original. And there's this video which is a re-upload from 2008, which I think was originally a flash animation.
According to Know Your Meme, the song originates from 2001, the animations started around 2008, and there was a semi-revival during 2020. So it depends on when you choose to start counting, but the arguments are there.
This post smells like my grandmothers house on Thanksgiving.
Those are just "advice animals" (a longtime nexus being reddit's /r/adviceanimals). Yes, people are animals too. Memes in general have never been constrained by this clunky format though.