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The internet took a turn for the worse once memes surfaced

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Doc Holliday

SPOILER: Columbus finds America
Op is wrong!

Aybabtu.png
 

Nickle

Cool Facts: Game of War has been a hit since July 2013
Square just shot themselves in the foot.

I don't know how much the rest of you know about Japanese culture (I'm an expert), but honor and shame are huge parts of it. It's not like it is in America where you can become successful by being an asshole. If you screw someone over in Japan, you bring shame to yourself, and the only way to get rid of that shame is repentance.

What this means is the japanese public, after hearing about this, is not going to want to purchase FFXIII for either system, nor will they purchase any of Square's games. This is HUGE. You can laugh all you want, but Square has alienated an entire market with this move.

Square, publicly apologize and cancel FFXIII for 360 or you can kiss your business goodbye.
 

Saganator

Member
I remember when the "all your base are belong to us" meme dropped. IRC went nuts (gamesNET) for it. Every channel and every forum was taken over for weeks. That was a super fun meme, it's the first one I can remember that was huge with internet subculture but went no where in real life, if any normal person saw it they'd be perplexed. Good times.
 
Like others have mentioned, they were not everywhere. I've been on forums since 1996. I don't know what hamster dance is.

Again, it depends on what you're focusing on. Image macro memes are relatively new due to expanded bandwidth, easier tools (the icanhazcheesburger network's online image macro creators did a lot for visibility and creation), etc.

But if you've been on forums since 1996, you've seen plenty of memes, albiet likely textual.

31337 speak, smilies ;), and ascii art macros like THIS IS BOB COPY AND PASTE TO MAKE BOB A MEME variants, etc. And those are just the easily-identifiable, visible ones. There's a "can't see the forest for the trees" issue as well. But, y'know, tl;dr: do you have stairs in your house?

Memes aren't just pictures, and not everyone is exposed to all the same memes at the same time, because that's not how the universe works. I'm rather glad for that. It can be annoying how some people think that "meme = global saturation", but the internet and culture is more fragmented than that.

I think image macros may spread more easily, because they're not reliant on text, which ties a thing to language, and language is super cultural. Seeing a cute doggo or pupper with the text "aww" on it, has a global appeal.

I remember when the "all your base are belong to us" meme dropped. IRC went nuts (gamesNET) for it. Every channel and every forum was taken over for weeks. That was a super fun meme, it's the first one I can remember that was huge with internet subculture but went no where in real life, if any normal person saw it they'd be perplexed. Good times.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cQnDkgdIn_A

Fox News, back in 2001.

Only Josh Schachter, who’d been running a weird-links message board called memepool since 1998, described the All Your Base phenomenon in something close to contemporary terms, calling it “a fairly virulent meme.”
- http://nymag.com/selectall/2016/02/all-your-base-are-belong-to-us-turns-15.html

Back then, it took All Your Base years to spread and years to die — and it happened in a time before social media, so there were no #brands on the scene to exhume its corpse for advertising purposes. There was no Twitter, so there were no fast-food burger chains tweeting bad “All Your Baes Are Belong to Us” puns.

It was a more innocent time, before somebody set up us the bomb.

Wired had a thing on it in 2001 as well: http://www.wired.com/2001/02/when-gamer-humor-attacks/

I remember the shirts, the mutations of the meme, and it's appearance and appropriation in the pop culture of the time. Even Subway used the phrase in advertising and billboards for a while. It was big, but, like most things in life, people forget about it a year later.
 

Sami+

Member
I remember when the "all your base are belong to us" meme dropped. IRC went nuts (gamesNET) for it. Every channel and every forum was taken over for weeks. That was a super fun meme, it's the first one I can remember that was huge with internet subculture but went no where in real life, if any normal person saw it they'd be perplexed. Good times.

True that. I remember laughing when they dropped a reference to it in the Spider-Man 2 game.
 

Lothar

Banned
Hamster dance is a meme from 1999. They've been around as we know them since almost forever.

I didn't know about it. I didn't know about the dancing baby either. Now I know about about current memes. That's the problem. I shouldn't know about them. Fix yourself, Internet.
 

Freshmaker

I am Korean.
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.

4 years?

They've been around since the beginning.
 
"____ Ate My Balls" is the first thing I can remember as being a meme as we know it now, with lots of pictures that variate on the theme, etc.
 

Saganator

Member
4 years?

They've been around since the beginning.

Maybe the OP is more upset about memes going more mainstream in the past few years? For a long time it was pretty much an internet subculture thing. Now even old people and news broadcasters know what a meme is.
 

geardo

Member
Threads like this are so transparent. OP says he hates thing - everyone posts thing. You know what you were doing OP.
 

Media

Member
Like others have mentioned, they were not everywhere. I've been on forums since 1996. I don't know what hamster dance is.

Hamsterdance was popular before that if I recall. I was maybe 14 when it was thing, and I knew about it. And I was just on an X-Files fan forum for the most part lol.
 

Lucumo

Member
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.

I completely agree with this. Memes have no value and they stifle discussions which forums are usually for.
Also, be happy that gaming communities deteriorated not that long ago. Anime/manga communities went downhill way before that thanks to 4chan.
 
Op is wrong!

Aybabtu.png

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We need to admit that the internet has a problem in the form of memes, and change has to start somewhere. Why not make it start with us, with GAF? The sooner we as a community accept that memes have made forum conversations far too predictable in the realm of replies, the better our collective future discourse will be in terms of intellectual quality.

What I propose is that, instead of the usual first to fourth and beyond pages of inane meme-spamming and -regurgitating that almost all forum topics (especially here on NeoGAF) devolve into, that it should be the obligation of EVERY attention-seeking, juvenile meme-inclined 1st-poster wannabe to curb their shallow enthusiasm and instead, post ASAP the following acronym in a joke-baity thread, in full capital and bold:

UMA

or

UMA.me#

Note: The '#' in '.lol#' being any number from 0 to 9001; this being an incorporation of the venerable GAFic advanced humour scale, to permit a semblance of mathematical magnitude and thus verisimilitude to the fair use of UMA. A higher number indicates that that particular deployment of UMA compensates for a greater amount of meme possibilitie (e.g., the posting of the phrase "UMA.me9001" means that the thread it was posted in has maximum meme-response potential, but all thread participants should refrain, cease and desist from posting said funniest memes, because it would stifle discussion of a real, actual topic).​

This acronym/symbol is what I have created for our sake and hereby name: Universal Memetic Aggregate, or UMA, for short. It may be deployed as-is in text form like above, or incorporated into a simple text-only image for graphical emphasis.

The power-word UMA is intended to represent EVERY SINGLE POSSIBLE MEME RESPONSE that could ever be made at any given opportune time. If a picture is worth a thousand words, then UMA is worth a thousand memes. By posting this symbolic acronym ASAP in a joke-inclined thread, your post will hereby account for ALL possible meme/joke responses and/or GIFs that could be implied by the thread topic at hand; therefore, promoting for the conversation to continue meme-free, and thus continue intelligently.

To post a meme after someone has posted UMA in a thread, is to bring the shame of dead horses upon you. It is to be beaten by the weight of your own tactlessness. To post a meme in a thread post-UMA is to invite justified ridicule for your bad taste in humour and your utterly contemptible disregard for what is sacred. To post a meme post-UMA is to admit that not only are you the type of person that explains jokes to people who didn't get it, you are also the type of person that explains jokes.

From now on, if you see a thread pop up, and the topic of discussion has one (or more) meme(s) that could be humorously relevant if posted, DON'T POST THE MEME(S).

Do memes a favour. Spam isn't dank, witty tact is. So, when in doubt... post UMA or variant UMA.me# instead. By doing so, you officially acknowledge the possibility of all the meme(s) on behalf of all participants in the conversation, and therefore help to prevent poor execution of memes from encroaching upon your intelligent conversation with their repetitive triteness and obscurity.

Do the internet a favour.

Post UMA instead.
 

Lothar

Banned
Ironically the SA forums will ban/probate people who spout memes.

This is the best rule in the history of the Internet.

Low Content Posts: Please do not make posts containing no content (ie, "first post," "hello, I'm new here," etc.). These just litter up the forums and with over 100,000 registered users, we need to eliminate these as much as possible. If you do not like a thread, then just vote it a "1" and move on; replies consisting solely of trolling fall into this category. As a general rule, write as if you were speaking in real life to another human being. Do not use any catchphrases, memes, internet slang, or any other crap that makes you look like a 12-year old.

I'd be willing to pay a yearly fee to post here if we implemented something similar.
 

jstripes

Banned
Again, it depends on what you're focusing on. Image macro memes are relatively new due to expanded bandwidth, easier tools (the icanhazcheesburger network's online image macro creators did a lot for visibility and creation), etc.

But if you've been on forums since 1996, you've seen plenty of memes, albiet likely textual.

31337 speak, smilies ;), and ascii art macros like THIS IS BOB COPY AND PASTE TO MAKE BOB A MEME variants, etc. And those are just the easily-identifiable, visible ones. There's a "can't see the forest for the trees" issue as well. But, y'know, tl;dr: do you have stairs in your house?

Memes aren't just pictures, and not everyone is exposed to all the same memes at the same time, because that's not how the universe works. I'm rather glad for that. It can be annoying how some people think that "meme = global saturation", but the internet and culture is more fragmented than that.

I think image macros may spread more easily, because they're not reliant on text, which ties a thing to language, and language is super cultural. Seeing a cute doggo or pupper with the text "aww" on it, has a global appeal.

Yup. When you had to wait for individual images to load, image memes were less prevalent. But text-based memes were absolutely rampant on things like IRC. It's been so long that I have a hard time remembering them...

But anyway, memes are serious business.
 

PSqueak

Banned
i don't know what OP is talking about, memes have been on the net since i can remember, like "Mr. T can throw helluva far" (and MR. T vs everything photoshop comics) back in the late 90s.
 
I didn't know about it. I didn't know about the dancing baby either. Now I know about about current memes. That's the problem. I shouldn't know about them. Fix yourself, Internet.
Sounds like your just spend more time on the internet now. I didn't even have the internet when dancing baby was a meme and I knew what it was by the early 2000s.
I completely agree with this. Memes have no value and they stifle discussions which forums are usually for.
Also, be happy that gaming communities deteriorated not that long ago. Anime/manga communities went downhill way before that thanks to 4chan.
Not all discussion on forums has to be serious.

I agree that people here use memes during times when they shouldn't and generally run jokes into the ground. But memes have their value. I think that the problem is that most people here aren't very funny and just use memes instead of making jokes of their own. I don't think I can think of one meme that started here that I ever found funny.
 

BamfMeat

Member
Like others have mentioned, they were not everywhere. I've been on forums since 1996. I don't know what hamster dance is.

You're full of shit :)

I'd been BBSing (Panoptic, FlagNet BBS represent) since probably 92, 93. They not only had memes, but memes everywhere, including inside games, ala Legend of the Red Dragon. RelayNet had text and ascii memes all the time.

I have no clue what you're on about, but I seriously doubt your nerd creds, sir.
 

Cindres

Vied for a tag related to cocks, so here it is.
SomethingAwful has banned memes now? They invented a good chunk of the old ones, how do they survive?

I mean SA isn't exactly relevant anymore anyway, amazed after all this time they're still going with the subscription fee.
 
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