That's not a meme. It's a macro.
Kids these days i swear
this post was submitted on 29 Aug 2025
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I miss pown.it - I never understood it but I thought it was great
I remember these were called Demotivational Posters before they were called memes.
Akhchually, they were called "memes" since 1976. It's just that the word didn't get popular with them damn kids.
Yeah I remember folks used to actually print and hang these.
YES! My graphic design class in highschool printed out a bunch of em for the art show.
So I badgerbadgerbadgerbadger which was the mushroom mushroom at the time.
snaaake!
The demotivational poster meme came before the advice animals meme.
That means you are old to other old people
And there was a whole kerfuffle about the advice dog/animal format not being a meme, but an image macro!
All image macros are memes but not all memes are image macros.
I remember the blogs that's icanhascheeseburger ran that had feeds with posts of various meme formats. Demotivational was my favorite style
Shoulda been Abe's head in the middle. Go the extra 15 miles!
This is more-or-less the format used for the motivational posters that were popular in offices in the 90s or so. People made fun of those with demotivational posters. But, those weren't really "memes", IMO.
But, the earliest thing that I think deserve the name "memes" (normally called Image Macros) were on the Something Awful forums (and soon after that on 4chan). In the early days they were mostly animal based: "lolcat", "doge", the "O RLY?" owl, etc.
Can someone point to "memes" that had the text underneath the picture, rather than using the impact font and written directly on top of the picture?
Question: Isn't what you describe in the first paragraph the very definition of a meme?
What is the definition of a meme?
Devoting oneself to one’s art, impoverishing oneself in the pursuit of Truth, or welcoming martyrdom for one’s cause do not, it seems, represent behaviours which are obviously beneficial to the individual of for the spread of that individual’s genes. So, given that this kind of behaviour clearly exists, and is widespread, what is reaping the benefit? Dawkins’ somewhat surprising answer was the ideas themselves. Ideas are clearly in competition with each other so perhaps there’s a selection process going on, analogous to natural selection, through which some ideas prove successful and spread whilst others die out. He concluded that there was such a selection process and, to emphasise the parallel to natural selection, he coined the term “meme” which come from an ancient Greek root, “mimeme”, meaning imitated thing.
That was the original use, but what is it in the modern Internet context?
meme noun [C] (ON INTERNET)
an idea, joke, image, video, etc. that is spread very quickly on the internet
- Take a look at the top ten internet memes for this past year.
So, would you agree that viral videos are memes? I wouldn't.
Yes, it's literally in the definition. Even ideas are memes.
A meme is to culture what a gene is to biology.
So, you completely accept that definition of a meme?
What are you talking about, my dude?
The definition of the term "meme" was given by Richard Dawkins in 1972. That's what the word means.
What's your point?
Definitions change. Dawkins didn't define an "internet meme". People who were spreading certain kinds of viral content on the Internet found Dawkins' word and adapted it to match the things they were doing.
I wouldn't say that viral videos are memes, they are viral videos. But their content can become a meme, which could be a quote from it or some kind of content shown in a different context.
E.g. the Area51 Naruto runner is a meme, but the report where he appears is not.
I like to drop in "as was the style at the time" in casual conversation to see who picks up on it.
I feel like we'd get along bc I'm constantly dropping random Simpson's/other media references into conversations ^^;
I miss Demotivators. Especially the RPG Demotivators from RPG.Net
It's strange how no matter when someone was born, the best period in world history is the one when they happened to be kids.
Call me a boomer but I feel kids growing up now are missing something that those of us who grew up before TikTok had.
They're missing a lot of things, especially including having a childhood where your mistakes weren't forever preserved online.
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