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[Blablurn]

memes are life

 

[SpaceWolf]

 

[ColdLasagna]

Get off my lawn.

 

[Sephzilla]

Been online and on forums since '99 or '00 and can confirm that gaming communities online have deteriorated in the past ~4 years due to memes. Memes all suck. Yes, no exceptions. If it's a meme it's shit and you would have been better off stating what you intended to state in plain English or whichever language you were communicating in.

Meme's have been around a lot longer than the last 4 years

 

[Krejlooc]

Been online since '88 and memes have been online longer.

 

[Arthr2ShdsJcksn]

Going against the flow of the way culture moves forward is the path to the alt-right. You should really just accept that memes are a tool of communication, and there are precedents for them prior to the internet, and the current popularity of memes on the internet bears no relevance on whether the internet is good or bad.

 

[Jawmuncher]

I'm pretty sure replying to anti-meme posts with memes qualifies as a meme at this point. Doesn't get more predictable than that.

It was a necessity. This thread would have been off to a bad start without it.

 

[ColonialHawk]

Ye hath been visited by the Hare of Combat, glorious victory and honor will be bestowed upon ye, but only if ye type "for king and country" in the comments yonder.

 

[jroc74]

And I would say the internet took a turn for the worse when social media blew up.

Before Twitter, before Facebook opened its doors to everybody. Before Youtube.

Everything was in forums. Now its everywhere. Post a meme to Facebook and its guaranteed to get much more exposure than if it stayed in forums.

Seeing grown ass ppl on Twitter, Facebook acting a fool is saddening. We now have internet beefs based on something someone posted on Twitter, FB. Ppl getting rid of accounts because of something someone posted on Twitter, FB.

Internet beef...

And if you think the meme culture is that bad....dont ever visit thecoli com. My first time there I was so lost...

 

[Kade]

Some memes are fine but some people rely too heavily on referencing them to be funny.

 

[Novocaine]

I think it's more in line with the internet becoming more accessible to the masses. But don't be fooled, the internet has always been full of stinky shit.

 

[KmA]

I don't understand the need to witness people having some fun, and then shit all over it because you're a stick in the mud.

 

[ConfusingJazz]

*plonk*

And here is an article from 1994 about memes: http://www.wired.com/1994/10/godwin-if-2/

 

[HPX]

AOL had no memes because you couldn't post pictures in posts. We all should have appreciated AOL more.



MUD? What's a MUD?

Multi Uswr Dungeon - predecessor to mmorpg. It plays on a command line and you can chat with other players. Its not too late to start MUDding!

Also memes are awesome. Staredad is proof of that.

 

[DeathoftheEndless]

Memes are just internet inside-jokes. They've existed as long as the internet has.

 

[siddx]

Memes are stupid as fuck and drag the level of discourse down to the shitbox whenever applied to any topic. Nothing positive has ever been added to a discussion by using a meme.
But they are an ingrained part of the internet now and there's no escaping it so fuck it, let the memes roll.

 

[Horsemama1956]

The only one I found funny was the Ray Charles I can't see shit image whenever someone posted an image and it was a red X.

 

[Woetyler]

 

[Rhomega Beta]

Chuck Norris saw this thread and roundhouse kicked OP in the face.

Also:

 

[How About No]

Such mad, many butthurt wow.

U MAD BRO?!

 

[The Albatross]

No, it's always sucked it's just you were more simple minded then and have rose colored glasses.

The advertising success of clickbait has destroyed online news, but forums like this one are much healthier than most of the forums/BBS/bulletin boards that I visited from ~94 - 2006.

 

[hydrophilic attack]

Memes are just attractive ideas that spread effectively.

If you don't like a meme, don't blame memes. Blame the human race.

 

[Thorgal]

*Takes deep breath :

MY BODY IS READY!

U mad bro?

#dicksoutforHarambe

I once had fun. IT WAS AWFUL!

I used to be an adventurer like you, then I took an arrow to the knee.

STOP RIGHT THERE, CRIMINAL SCUM!

Hamsterdance

SURPRISE MOTHERFUCKER!

A fuckton of Kaz gifs .

White people dancing.

Damn nature, you scary.

NYAN CAT

Trololo song

*pases out due to meme overload.

 

[lastflowers]

Memes are not some kind of recent phenomenon. OP's claimed halcyon days of the internet were plagued with All Your Base, Mr. T Ate My Balls, Hamsterdance, l33t speak, and all the other memes of its day. It's an inevitable result of mass media. In the TV era they were called "catchphrases."

yeah, this is hilarious. That's what the internet has always been, s/he's just outta the loop.

Also:

Looking this up stunned me in middle school (? been a loooong time)

The roughest period was probably the reign of the "Le" comics.

Definitely agree with this. Those god old incredibly fast.

 

[Lothar]

Meme's have been around a lot longer than the last 4 years

Not in any of the good forums. Now they're even in the good forums.

Before 4 years ago, the only time I saw memes come up is when people made fun of the kind of people that wanted to post memes.

 

[hydrophilic attack]

Hating memes is a meme

 

[SecretMoblin]

dude shugg is dead

he can't hurt you any more

 

[Glendemonium]

I was there in the hey day of All Your Base, Nyan Cats, Over 9000, and RickRolling. YTMND was all over the place. Only meme from that era still popping up is the Trollface, though usage of that has gone down considerably.

Now, it's about some frog on a unicycle, nope scopes, and that face done with ascii.... oh, and smug anime girls.

Can we go back to rick rolling?

Spoiler

/oldmanyellsatmemes

 

[ConfusingJazz]

Not in any of the good forums. Now they're even in the good forums.

Before 4 years ago, the only time I saw memes come up is when people made fun of the kind of people that wanted to post memes.

Define "good forums"

 

[The Albatross]

Also, there have always been memes

There's also always been trolling. I still distinctly remember getting trolled so hard in 1995 on the Prodigy videogame BBS discussing NBA Live '95 by a guy who claimed that he was so rich his parents bought him a computer that could analyze the code in a game and it showed him how to do tip slams in the game.

Long backstory: Back of the box NBA Live 95 advertised tip slams (e.g., slamming a ball off a rebound in basketball), but the feature was not in the game or impossible to do. Nobody even knew what they were. As a 9 year old I argued with this guy that his method for reproducing tip slams didn't work and he insisted I was foing it wrong. I actually printed out the posts and brought them to my genesis to no avail.

Took me like 2 years to realize he was bull shitting a whole ignorant mass on the prodigy BBS.

 

[Par Score]

OBEY

 

[Mupod]

fucking kids who think a 'meme' is specifically an image macro.

 

[Spiritwalker]

memes have been around since the dawn of time

 

[fredrancour]

Meme's have been around a lot longer than the last 4 years

yeah people have been running inside jokes into the ground for an eternity. I can totally understand being pissed off by current popular ones, or by the noise-to-signal ratio now that so many online communities are enormous, but the core concept didn't appear out of nowhere when reddit blew up.

 

[Sephzilla]

Not in any of the good forums. Now they're even in the good forums.

Before 4 years ago, the only time I saw memes come up is when people made fun of the kind of people that wanted to post memes.

Define "good forums"

"Small forums I like"

 

[DeathoftheEndless]

Hating memes is a meme

 

[Codeblue]

Memes are sort of like puns. They can be funny, but not everyone is Shakespeare, so you end up with an overwhelming amount of unfunny trash.

 

[jmdajr]

You're the man now dog!

 

[Boss Doggie]

memes even existed before internet

look at those graffiti, most of them exhibit memes

 

[Daedardus]

We still have serious discussions here on NeoGAF and I'm pretty sure that a normal human conversation isn't full of memes either. So it's a pretty great distractor for all the bad shit that is out there on the internet, too.

 

[andythinkpad]

It just became a word at some point. Before MEME people were replying in catchphrases on usenet.

 

[afternoon delight]

What's this revisionist crap? Memes have always been a thing on the internet.

Hey, OP's been internetting since 2000! What are you old timer, huh?

 

[Manu]

There used to be serious conversation on the internet

But everything changed when the Meme Nation attacked.

 

[kavanf1]

It just became a word at some point.

Yes, in 1976.

 

[Griss]

It just became a word at some point. Before MEME people were replying in catchphrases on usenet.

We called them 'in-jokes' growing up. All communities and groups of friends had them, and this was pre-internet. Not sure why people have a problem with them.

 

[paragonpro]

A co-worker of mine who is the type of guy who love shoving his phone in your face and shoutinf "check out this spicy meme" once reffered to himself as a memester...

 

[AlexBasch]

Not gonna lie. As much as inappropriate and juvenile they were, I'm glad I experienced 4chan in 2006-2008.

At least the rage faces are over though.

 

[clemenx]

I don't care about them on the internet, I seldom laugh at them but some real gems come out once in a while so whatever. But it's starting to filter into real life speak for some people and I don't doubt for a second that 5 years from now it will be completely normal in real life conversation to blast out dank memes.

That does suck.

 

[Raiden]

I do think that cultural artifacts like memes are being leveraged in pop culture to take our focus off of more important, longer-term stuff. Like how to displace the rich, old white guys running this show.

Guys like him have been around as long as the public internet as well.

 

[sappyday]

Memes are sort of like puns. They can be funny, but not everyone is Shakespeare, so you end up with an overwhelming amount of unfunny trash.

If we had to pick a meme worthy of Shakespeare what would it be?