This is the opposite of culture. This shrinks your brain instead of stimulating it. They are just so bland. They are just so old. Spiciness and humour are completely unknown to them. Here are the current top 4:

  • https://lemmy.ml/post/4142470

  • https://lemmy.ml/post/4160748

  • https://lemmy.ml/post/4168053

  • https://lemmy.ml/post/4168053

How come liberals are so bad at meming? I'm sure I've seen half of these already, years ago. It's like someone dredged the bottom of ifunny.co for the most milquetoast, blandest things possible.

  • ReadFanon [any, any]
    ·
    1 year ago

    So I've been out of the meme game for a while now but to me it felt like there were a steady stream of meme formats that would come out and then in the past, say 3 or 4 years, the overall volume of new meme formats took a huge nosedive for some reason.

    Has any other (old) person noticed this or is it just me?

    • axont [she/her, comrade/them]
      ·
      1 year ago

      I think I know what you mean. It was all motivational posters or impact font macros for a while. Then there were those endless Epic Fail Guy or rage guy comics. Then I don't even know, it was wild for a while after around 2012.

      Now a meme is one of three things: a picture with a white box and black text, a wojack, or edits of webcomics from 15 years ago

      • Tachanka [comrade/them]
        ·
        1 year ago

        the original editor-in-chief of The Onion back in the 1980s, when they actually printed satirical newspapers, had a philosophy, that there are only 11 types of joke (each one of the examples below is an Onion headline from back in the day, forgive me for they are corny)

        1. Irony – Intended meaning is opposite of literal meaning

        Alcoholic Father Disappointed In Pothead Son

        1. Character – Comedic character acting on personality traits

        Mom Thinks You'd Enjoy Restaurant She Can't Remember Name Of Right Now

        1. Relatable – Common experiences that audiences can relate to

        Day Chalked Up As Loss By 10:15 A.M. (this is most "normie memes")

        1. Shock – Surprising jokes typically involving sex, drugs, gross-out humor, swearing

        Holy Shit, Man Walks On Fucking Moon

        1. Parody/Reference – Mimic a familiar character, trope or cliche in an unfamiliar way

        Al Gore Places Infant Son In Rocket To Escape Dying Planet

        1. Hyperbole – Exaggeration to absurd extremes

        Magnanimous Boss, King Of Kings, Allows Employees To Watch World Cup In Office

        1. Wordplay – Puns, rhymes, double entendres, etc.

        Fritolaysia Cuts Off Chiplomatic Relations With Snakistan kelly

        1. Analogy – Comparing two disparate things

        Man Approaches Unfamiliar Shower Knobs Like He's Breaking A Wild Stallion

        1. Madcap – Crazy, wacky, silly, nonsensical

        Wheelchair Basketball Players Stunned By Thunderous Slam Dunk

        1. Meta-humor – Jokes about jokes, or about the idea of comedy

        It Sadly Unclear Whether This Article Will Put Lives At Risk

        1. Misplaced Focus – Attention is focused on the wrong thing

        Really Fun Toy Banned Because Of 3 Stupid Dead Kids

      • ReadFanon [any, any]
        ·
        1 year ago

        Yep. That's exactly it.

        There was a period, at least a few years and probably more like 5 or so, where there was a short meme cycle to the point where sometimes a meme format would be stale within a month or two and there was a huge churn of new meme formats that would be constantly emerging.

        Then it's like someone just turned the tap off and the culture died (I wonder if something shifted in 4chan maybe?) and now we're just stuck with wojacks.

        Speaking of which...

        Show

        • axont [she/her, comrade/them]
          ·
          1 year ago

          There genuinely was a change in 4chan and I've often wondered if this had a profound effect on the rest of internet culture. It sounds silly, but I can't deny that something's really changed.

          moot (previous 4chan admin) retired from the site in January of 2015. After he left there was a scramble for mod positions and a honest to goodness white supremacist plot to control the site. That's definitely when things started to feel weird. I don't really know how or why the wider internet was impacted, it was probably multiple things at once, but 2015 seems like a weird shift of a year

          • proletarian_girlboss@lemmygrad.ml
            ·
            1 year ago

            I have thought of this a few times myself, and how much of the english speaking side of the internet's culture has been shaped by 4chan in some form or another. I have never been able to find an answer for why it seems like it is so influential, despite being relatively small compared to something like twitter or instagram.

      • DroneRights [it/its]
        ·
        1 year ago

        In the Star Trek community it's all screen caps with fake dialogue

    • TreadOnMe [none/use name]
      ·
      1 year ago

      The new 'meme format' is reminiscent of the sheer incomprehensibility of memes from 2005, where you could still easily stumble on just the most random stuff, and there were like four or five different videos players and they were all terrible, but the videos were occasionally funny

      But now it's like that through mainstream apps and on purpose. People are just throwing whatever they can think of at the algorithm and seeing what sticks

      The biggest 'trends' I see are stuff from TikTok, but still, even that is alot of nonsense, some of it comprehensible, some of it not.