this post was submitted on 29 Aug 2025
1248 points (99.2% liked)
memes
17147 readers
4491 users here now
Community rules
1. Be civil
No trolling, bigotry or other insulting / annoying behaviour
2. No politics
This is non-politics community. For political memes please go to !politicalmemes@lemmy.world
3. No recent reposts
Check for reposts when posting a meme, you can only repost after 1 month
4. No bots
No bots without the express approval of the mods or the admins
5. No Spam/Ads/AI Slop
No advertisements or spam. This is an instance rule and the only way to live. We also consider AI slop to be spam in this community and is subject to removal.
A collection of some classic Lemmy memes for your enjoyment
Sister communities
- !tenforward@lemmy.world : Star Trek memes, chat and shitposts
- !lemmyshitpost@lemmy.world : Lemmy Shitposts, anything and everything goes.
- !linuxmemes@lemmy.world : Linux themed memes
- !comicstrips@lemmy.world : for those who love comic stories.
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
The demotivational poster meme came before the advice animals meme.
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.
That means you are old to other old people
load more comments
(1 replies)
Shoulda been Abe's head in the middle. Go the extra 15 miles!
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!
That's not a meme. It's a macro.
Kids these days i swear
I miss Demotivators. Especially the RPG Demotivators from RPG.Net
My place of work in the early '90s used to have those original motivational posters all over the place, so I hung some of this original demotivational series in my cubicle. I believe they are the ones that started it all, and I still personally think they are the best.
load more comments
(1 replies)
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?
load more comments
(14 replies)
Nobody:
OP formatting his meme:
Meme format has progressed so much
/s
I like to drop in "as was the style at the time" in casual conversation to see who picks up on it.
load more comments
(1 replies)
You can't just tickle my nostalgia organ like that.
view more: next ›