I'm the original creator of the "Still waiting on OP" meme from The Shining and have a mildly interesting story behind its creation if anyone would care to hear.
I would like to hear!
This is a mildly interesting story at best.
In 2010 I was working at a video rental store (RIP) and got access to new movies before they were available to the public. Every day I'd grab one, and every night I'd stream them online for 4channers on /tv and /r9k. There was a chat built into the stream and we had a lot of fun for months and months, hanging out watching movies and chatting. It built a pretty big following. Think Twitch before Twitch existed.
One night there were no new movies so I grabbed The Shining. We watched through it, and when that scene came on the screen I paused it to take a closer look. We joked and carried on about it in chat, and I screenshotted it and opened Photoshop and made the meme then and there. Everyone loved it. Several folks posted it on 4chan boards and it took off in a big way. We finished the movie and had a great night.
One of my favorite young adult memories.
That sounds like a good time. It's a little sad that you probably couldn't easily get away with that now.
Agreed. The modern internet is so locked down that it's difficult to find those kind of fun, niche communities. Lemmy has a similar feeling at least.
Nah it's still pretty easy lol
Where?
Stream on angelthump, discord, those are just the ones I know of there's definitely more ways to do it out there. Source the media from the piracy megathread. You're on your own with the 'gathering a community' part though.
me and.my middle.aged friends just download the same file and click start on the count of three. then it's beers and banter on zoom while we grind through Highlander 2. or Sgt Peppers Lonely Hearts club Band. featuring the Bee Gees.
Just add a new "ten years ago memes looked like this" frame to it every decade.
It's an old pic itself
Wait, the boy on the left is Keanu Reeves??
No that's Yoda
Someone's mind just got blown
Were these popular in 2014? I feel like these were more like 2010. I could be wrong.
I think they were still lingering around somewhat. I just cleared off my old laptop last night and found advice animal memes from 2014 on it. I'll probably drop a few of the better ones in 196 on Monday, maybe I'll spread the love to antique memes roadshow.
If my memory serves me right (it usually doesn't lol), it was mostly by 2015 that they were on their death throes, having been mostly usurped by the MLG era; I remember being upset that things like advice animals and rage comics were suddenly considered "things only clueless old people on facebook post nowadays" circa 2015. But they were still around in a smaller scale around 2014, so I think it still counts?
But I'm looking forward to seeing you share more old memes! I love 'em.
Philosoraptor is timeless
Advice Animals were much earlier, in the late 2000s. I remember seeing them on gaming forums before Reddit was even a thing, when SA and Digg still reigned supreme.
Well, memes sometimes last longer than the era they starred in.
I remember finding this chart showing the various meme eras (I don't remember where I found it, sadly):
And I definitely remember seeing old memes still being used after their debut "era" - I remember seeing some from the "experimental" era (1995-2004) like the Dancing Banana, All Your Base Are Belong to Us and less-commonly YTMND and Homestar Runner references in the Classic Era (2004-2009), and likewise I saw memes from that era (Pingas, demotivational posters, Leeroy Jenkins jokes/references, Chuck Norris, Over 9000, Keyboard Cat, etc) still being used well into 2012-2013 despite that already being a new "meme era".
And as I mentioned in another comment, Rage Comics and Advice Animals still persisted into 2014 (mostly dying/fading into obscurity around 2015), by which point "dank" memes were already at full swing; and I definitely recall still seeing some Surreal Memes in use around the early 2020s, so I'd say the boundaries of meme popularity are fairly fuzzy.
Ah, forgive my word usage. I meant to say that they first started in that era, not that they were solely used back then. I do appreciate how informative your comment is, nonetheless!
Advice dog was even older but yeah I assumed 2010 aswell
I remember a time when they weren't even called memes. They were just "image macros."
I tried watching that a few years ago, and had to stop almost immediately. I mean, what was going on with those random hallucination cuts?! No explanation or anything, it just cuts to her falling into a big wine glass, or something like that out of nowhere. Also it was too geared towards Gen X humor for me (which feels very dated. See Friends and its āhaha because gayā jokes)
In all fairness, we genXers were raised by extremely anti-gay parents and Ronald Reagan. Most of us eventually got over it and don't find the "because gay" humor funny at all anymore.
I'll admit to making some heartfelt apologies in adulthood to some gay high school classmates. I said some pretty nasty shit back then. I just didn't know any better until I got a few years under my belt and found some gay friends with enough patience to explain certain things to me in college.
Edit: someone already said this quote. May I suggest:
"You have no chance to survive, make your time"
What happen?
Web 2.0 happened :/
It centralized control to a few large corporations and lowered the barrier to entry for users such that everything became a popularity contest for eyeballs. TikTok, reddit, facebook, youtube, instagram, OF, its all a brainless race for engagement
Just wait till Web 3.0. We get blockchains!!!!! /s
I kinda miss having to visit individual websites to see if they posted any new content/videos. Newgrounds, Squirrelly, Homestar Runner, Stickdeath, thebestpageintheuniverse. Just going to check was part of the fun.
Everything is a meme now, hell even anyone could frame your comment and shit post it as a meme right now! (I won't be the one to do so).
The word meme is misused & I hate it. Ppl should know what memetics are.
This comment up till now isn't really (ok, the I hate it bit a little), but if I add 'you know that feeling of joy when you pet a cat' it would have a considerably stronger memetic effect on a lot (most?) humans. But its not funny as I didn't introduce a joke (sorry that I didn't introduce myself).
I get what you're feeling, but the word is not misused. Its meaning has changed :)
Before this even. We went wrong when dumb people took macro images and decided ideas needed packages that way for thought transmission to count as a meme.
*15
Never gives us up
Truly it was a golden age
These weren't even what we called "memes" back then (closer to twenty years ago).
These were image macros or caption images. A meme back then was usually a phrase or saying like Over 9000 and other crap like that.
And Milhouse!
The fact that "milhouse is not a meme" is a meme tickles my brain
But whether we called them memes or not, by definition they were. The Selfish Gene came out in 1976, where Dawkins coined it as "a unit of cultural transmission, or a unit of imitation".
Memes live in our head and propagate throughout society which is just an emergent phenomena of memes...I loved the selfish gene it's a great book and Dawkins is the man.
One trick was to post memes that don't have jokes, like the one about when I caught the ferry over to Caturday. I needed a new lol for my cat, so, I decided to go to digg, which is what they called fark in those days. So I tied a cheezburger to my belt, which was the style at the time. Now, to take the ferry cost a bitcoin, and in those days, bitcoins had pictures of doges on 'em. "Give me five doges for a bitcoin," you'd say. Now, where were we? Oh yeah, the important thing was I had a cheezburger on my belt, which was the style at the time. They didn't have white castle because of the war. The only thing you could get was those big macs.
I was posting these in the late 2000s and we definitely called them memes then.
Memes are not macro images.
Anyone down voting doesn't remember that this phrase itself was a meme at the time.
Memes are how I find my people!
Bro that's like 15 years ago
Raptors are extinct by now
Doge is the best meme ever created and I will fight anyone who says otherwise.
Otherwise.
Meet me behind the backstop after school. Be there or be square.
Sure I'll catch you at that place at that time, how about that?
FIGHT FIGHT FIGHT FIGHT!
kiss kiss kiss
Wasnāt that like 15 years ago. 10 years ago was gamergate
They'll rise up any day now, against...
Something. I was never quite sure. Women bad, I guess.
game critics take payola and thats bad but its especially bad when bad websites i dont pay any attention to publish positive reviews of works by women because women bad
in theory critics being bribed or coerced into positive reviews is a good thing to be against, but in reality the campaign was coopted within about 2 minutes of coming into existence by right wing agenda pushers who think a pride flag cosmetic or a woman who doesn't solely exist to have rule 34 made of her means a game is leftist propanda or some insane nonsense like that.
They did. Ian Danskin (Innuendo Studios) documented them and the rise of the alt right. Theyāre the same people.
Modern memes are not nearly as good imo.
Edit: these
Ah, a classic.
I always read it as F-uuu instead of Fuuu-ck.
Its funny how AI in 2024 can't come up with content as amusing or original as shitposts cooked up by teenagers from over a decade ago.
If an AI will start shitposting at a human level what will all of us do?
That's why I'm not on Reddit.
Fuckin random, but ok
These memes are most definitely older than 2014.........
Doge is from 2010.
I still like them, honestly...
I used to frequent imgur's user-sub back then. I never made a front-page post, but I did get top comment of the day once. I nearly earned the green giraffe token. Over time the community grew more cringey by the week, and devolved into selfies and sob stories. I made the switch to reddit and never cared about karma again. What a time.
The irony is that Imgur was originally created as a an image hosting service specifically for Reddit, then became its own society and culture. Only to have you return right back where it came from
I remember the exact moment the enshittification started, Imgur used to have a "(source)" link right below the post title, it was great that you could visit the reddit thread something that went viral on Imgur, basically using Imgur to browse subreddit images, once that got removed and they started hiding reddit posts as Imgur community posts it kinda went downhill
This made me wonder what the oldest internet meme still in common usage is.
I still see the penguin on occasion, but probably not enough to be common.
Maybe the rick roll? I don't think that'll ever die.
Sadly, rick-rolls are ruined by forced ads for many.
Even goats.ex has ads on it now.
Truly a dark age for the internet.
goatse.cx*
Rick Roll was one that came to mind for me, too. Looks like it dates back to around 2007.
Definitely not pre youtube (2005)
I was def getting Rick rolled before that.
If you remember anything specific, submit it here, because you'd be predating the earliest known usage.
It was over ICQ, IRC or msn messenger back when all I had was dialup. A lot of modern internet culture seems to be appropriated from the kind of old web neāer-do-wells I hung out with on IRC back in the day. Didnāt think to keep records tbh. The original ārickrollā was goatse or lemon party (nsfw, tbh I would not google those if you donāt know what they are).
I do remember getting Rick rolled with Never gonna give you up by a counter strike clan team member over ventrilo back in 2005. It must be 2004-05 because the clan I was in disbanded after Oct. 2005.
Rickrolling itself doesn't count, it has to be with that specific song. So your clan member was ahead of his time!
I mean, itās still just a bait and switch. I never really got why doing it with Rick Astley was groundbreaking.
I'm interested in the oldest still-used internet memes, regardless of their quality. Bait and switching itself has existed forever.
Is linking a Rick roll a meme? I thought memes were reused images with text, guessing the definition is shifting. I saw someone calling numa numa a meme the other day.
Goatse launched in 1999 and was just widely referenced this month with the eclipse.
I'm not saying we should be proud of goatse's legacy and staying power, I'm just observing the reality we've all built.
Not the evergreen meme we need, but the one we deserve
The smiley emoji - :-) - is from 1982
That's an emoticon. Emojis are these: š
There's an entry for emoticons, though I'm not sure I'd qualify all of them as memes. Not the kind I was thinking about, at least.
Well, they are memes in that they went viral and are now spread with slight variations. And I must note that a lot of contemporary post-irony, meta-irony, or even something further memes probably wouldn't qualify as memes either
ALL YOUR BASE?
People still refer to it from time to time, but generally only in the context that it's old.
Probably Caramel Dansen. I remember it from when I was a kid, and I still see it every once in a while.
Edit: There's this video from 2008, but it's probably not the original. And there's this video which is a re-upload from 2008, which I think was originally a flash animation.
According to Know Your Meme, the song originates from 2001, the animations started around 2008, and there was a semi-revival during 2020. So it depends on when you choose to start counting, but the arguments are there.
Never heard of that one.
I suddenly feel very old.
I'm pretty old myself, so I think it's more on me than time.
RIP Mr T ate my balls
Eternal September is one that dates back to irc and Usenet. I'm guessing there was some jokester sending ASCII dicks on Arpanet.
I'm talking about memes that are still commonly seen today.
Exploitables where you change or add text in a picture is quite old and now one of the most common memes. It's a huge category, so maybe not what you meant, but it looks like it started in 2006 according to https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/exploitables
That's more of a type of meme than a meme itself.
:) I was thinking kilroy, but then I read the word internet.
I'll bow to their judgement that it's a meme, but I was thinking of visual memes. This one probably wins as far as internet memes in general goes.
You made me look up the origin of the word meme
"When you plant a fertile meme in my mind you literally parasitize my brain, turning it into a vehicle for the meme's propagation in just the way that a virus may parasitize the genetic mechanism of a host cell."
Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene, 1976
That guy who shot himself on TV?
maybe trollface? it's at least as common as rare-but-recognizable wojaks
I don't see trollface much any more, but I might just not be looking in the right places.
This post smells like my grandmothers house on Thanksgiving.
Those are just "advice animals" (a longtime nexus being reddit's /r/adviceanimals). Yes, people are animals too. Memes in general have never been constrained by this clunky format though.
Philosoraptor memes were my favourite memes
And I miss it so hard
Still featuring daily on adviceanimals
Closer to 20.
That's not what advice dog looked like?
Sometimes I go back to z0r.de. Simpler time, simpler laugh.
Philosoraptor is 15 years old, Bad Luck Brian and Success Kid are 12 years, but Doge (without that background) is 10 years. Best I can do is $3.50
The last one is a mix of doge and advice dog, which is almost 18 years.
One might say a forgery
š“
Bad Luck Brian looking old af was in a recent "The General Auto Insurance" commercial.
First, I'm amazed no other insurance company has thought of this.
Second, Bad Luck Brian can deliver his lines better than Shaq.
That was actually pretty good for what it was
I mean, it just tricked some Lemmings into watching an ad.
Where is overly attached girlfriend and karate kid?
Cheapskate Rick? I have a whole warehouse filled with him. You'd have to pay me rent to pawn that.
Doge is older than philosaraptor, forced meme and was a bannable offense on just about every *chan site for 10 years
Once was a bannable offense, now a cryptocurrency affected by Musk xweets
::: spoiler ā There's no point or sense in my comment, pretty much the same as with what's going on with the world as of lately :::
They could only kill the messengers, but never the message
Your facts hurt. I feel old
Was about to say this, no way these memes are 10 years old. Even feels wrong regarding Doge tbh
2000s internet was simpler times
TAKE ME BAAAAAAAAAAAAACK
COUNTRY ROOOOOOOAD
I was never sure why it wanted a cheeseburger, and no one else seemed interested in the question.
Is everyone forgetting the ~half decade of "demotivators"? The ones with a picture on a black background?
Oh man, we thought everything was so bad, turns out those were the good times
I miss those.
Those go back to mid-90's, at least.
This is synonymous to me with fark.com.
That just makes me think of this:
https://youtu.be/paQhkCodc78
I'm the original creator of the "Still waiting on OP" meme from The Shining and have a mildly interesting story behind its creation if anyone would care to hear.
I would like to hear!
This is a mildly interesting story at best.
In 2010 I was working at a video rental store (RIP) and got access to new movies before they were available to the public. Every day I'd grab one, and every night I'd stream them online for 4channers on /tv and /r9k. There was a chat built into the stream and we had a lot of fun for months and months, hanging out watching movies and chatting. It built a pretty big following. Think Twitch before Twitch existed.
One night there were no new movies so I grabbed The Shining. We watched through it, and when that scene came on the screen I paused it to take a closer look. We joked and carried on about it in chat, and I screenshotted it and opened Photoshop and made the meme then and there. Everyone loved it. Several folks posted it on 4chan boards and it took off in a big way. We finished the movie and had a great night.
One of my favorite young adult memories.
That sounds like a good time. It's a little sad that you probably couldn't easily get away with that now.
Agreed. The modern internet is so locked down that it's difficult to find those kind of fun, niche communities. Lemmy has a similar feeling at least.
Nah it's still pretty easy lol
Where?
Stream on angelthump, discord, those are just the ones I know of there's definitely more ways to do it out there. Source the media from the piracy megathread. You're on your own with the 'gathering a community' part though.
Schrab Home Video is known to play things kinda lose with copyright law on occasion, but it's just one broadcast per week
me and.my middle.aged friends just download the same file and click start on the count of three. then it's beers and banter on zoom while we grind through Highlander 2. or Sgt Peppers Lonely Hearts club Band. featuring the Bee Gees.
If true, knowyourmeme needs a lore update
I've never been able to figure out how to edit it
That's a nice story! Very cool of you to stream these movies online.
Was this taking place on justinTV?
If so I was on your streams weekly
No, it was Procaster.
Eyyy!
I made "If buying isn't owning then pirating isn't stealing."
We should have a meme maker club.
Explain your story.
I feel like itās a great time to pull up the 4k bluray and do a remaster screenshot, since we missed the 10-year anniversary.
In 2014 these were already old I think
Just add a new "ten years ago memes looked like this" frame to it every decade.
It's an old pic itself
Wait, the boy on the left is Keanu Reeves??
No that's Yoda
Someone's mind just got blown
Were these popular in 2014? I feel like these were more like 2010. I could be wrong.
I think they were still lingering around somewhat. I just cleared off my old laptop last night and found advice animal memes from 2014 on it. I'll probably drop a few of the better ones in 196 on Monday, maybe I'll spread the love to antique memes roadshow.
If my memory serves me right (it usually doesn't lol), it was mostly by 2015 that they were on their death throes, having been mostly usurped by the MLG era; I remember being upset that things like advice animals and rage comics were suddenly considered "things only clueless old people on facebook post nowadays" circa 2015. But they were still around in a smaller scale around 2014, so I think it still counts?
But I'm looking forward to seeing you share more old memes! I love 'em.
Philosoraptor is timeless
Advice Animals were much earlier, in the late 2000s. I remember seeing them on gaming forums before Reddit was even a thing, when SA and Digg still reigned supreme.
Know Your Meme traces them back to 2006.
https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/advice-animals
Well, memes sometimes last longer than the era they starred in.
I remember finding this chart showing the various meme eras (I don't remember where I found it, sadly):
And I definitely remember seeing old memes still being used after their debut "era" - I remember seeing some from the "experimental" era (1995-2004) like the Dancing Banana, All Your Base Are Belong to Us and less-commonly YTMND and Homestar Runner references in the Classic Era (2004-2009), and likewise I saw memes from that era (Pingas, demotivational posters, Leeroy Jenkins jokes/references, Chuck Norris, Over 9000, Keyboard Cat, etc) still being used well into 2012-2013 despite that already being a new "meme era".
And as I mentioned in another comment, Rage Comics and Advice Animals still persisted into 2014 (mostly dying/fading into obscurity around 2015), by which point "dank" memes were already at full swing; and I definitely recall still seeing some Surreal Memes in use around the early 2020s, so I'd say the boundaries of meme popularity are fairly fuzzy.
Ah, forgive my word usage. I meant to say that they first started in that era, not that they were solely used back then. I do appreciate how informative your comment is, nonetheless!
Advice dog was even older but yeah I assumed 2010 aswell
I remember a time when they weren't even called memes. They were just "image macros."
"Demotivational posters"
Despair.com
I had a folder of "funny pix" on my flash drive.
And TikTok was called YTMND
The internet peaked in 1999
https://i.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/newsfeed/000/000/999/AllYourBaseAnimated.gif
Having Ally McBeal flashbacks.
Single female lawyer,
Fighting for her clients,
Wearing sexy miniskirts
And being self-reliant
I tried watching that a few years ago, and had to stop almost immediately. I mean, what was going on with those random hallucination cuts?! No explanation or anything, it just cuts to her falling into a big wine glass, or something like that out of nowhere. Also it was too geared towards Gen X humor for me (which feels very dated. See Friends and its āhaha because gayā jokes)
In all fairness, we genXers were raised by extremely anti-gay parents and Ronald Reagan. Most of us eventually got over it and don't find the "because gay" humor funny at all anymore.
I'll admit to making some heartfelt apologies in adulthood to some gay high school classmates. I said some pretty nasty shit back then. I just didn't know any better until I got a few years under my belt and found some gay friends with enough patience to explain certain things to me in college.
Hello all you gentlemen.
ALL YOUR BASE ARE BELONG TO US
You are on way to destruction
Someone set us up the bomb!
Edit: someone already said this quote. May I suggest:
"You have no chance to survive, make your time"
What happen?
Web 2.0 happened :/
It centralized control to a few large corporations and lowered the barrier to entry for users such that everything became a popularity contest for eyeballs. TikTok, reddit, facebook, youtube, instagram, OF, its all a brainless race for engagement
Just wait till Web 3.0. We get blockchains!!!!! /s
I kinda miss having to visit individual websites to see if they posted any new content/videos. Newgrounds, Squirrelly, Homestar Runner, Stickdeath, thebestpageintheuniverse. Just going to check was part of the fun.
Someone set us up the bomb! (WHAT?)
WHAT YOU SAY!?
this but unironically
Based
This is more like 18 years
Where did we go wrong??
Yes
Reagan.
Everything is a meme now, hell even anyone could frame your comment and shit post it as a meme right now! (I won't be the one to do so).
The word meme is misused & I hate it. Ppl should know what memetics are.
This comment up till now isn't really (ok, the I hate it bit a little), but if I add 'you know that feeling of joy when you pet a cat' it would have a considerably stronger memetic effect on a lot (most?) humans. But its not funny as I didn't introduce a joke (sorry that I didn't introduce myself).
I get what you're feeling, but the word is not misused. Its meaning has changed :)
Before this even. We went wrong when dumb people took macro images and decided ideas needed packages that way for thought transmission to count as a meme.
*15
Never gives us up
Truly it was a golden age
These weren't even what we called "memes" back then (closer to twenty years ago).
These were image macros or caption images. A meme back then was usually a phrase or saying like Over 9000 and other crap like that.
And Milhouse!
The fact that "milhouse is not a meme" is a meme tickles my brain
But whether we called them memes or not, by definition they were. The Selfish Gene came out in 1976, where Dawkins coined it as "a unit of cultural transmission, or a unit of imitation".
Memes live in our head and propagate throughout society which is just an emergent phenomena of memes...I loved the selfish gene it's a great book and Dawkins is the man.
One trick was to post memes that don't have jokes, like the one about when I caught the ferry over to Caturday. I needed a new lol for my cat, so, I decided to go to digg, which is what they called fark in those days. So I tied a cheezburger to my belt, which was the style at the time. Now, to take the ferry cost a bitcoin, and in those days, bitcoins had pictures of doges on 'em. "Give me five doges for a bitcoin," you'd say. Now, where were we? Oh yeah, the important thing was I had a cheezburger on my belt, which was the style at the time. They didn't have white castle because of the war. The only thing you could get was those big macs.
I was posting these in the late 2000s and we definitely called them memes then.
Memes are not macro images.
Anyone down voting doesn't remember that this phrase itself was a meme at the time.
Memes are how I find my people!
Bro that's like 15 years ago
Raptors are extinct by now
Doge is the best meme ever created and I will fight anyone who says otherwise.
Otherwise.
Meet me behind the backstop after school. Be there or be square.
Sure I'll catch you at that place at that time, how about that?
FIGHT FIGHT FIGHT FIGHT!
kiss kiss kiss
Wasnāt that like 15 years ago. 10 years ago was gamergate
They'll rise up any day now, against...
Something. I was never quite sure. Women bad, I guess.
game critics take payola and thats bad but its especially bad when bad websites i dont pay any attention to publish positive reviews of works by women because women bad
in theory critics being bribed or coerced into positive reviews is a good thing to be against, but in reality the campaign was coopted within about 2 minutes of coming into existence by right wing agenda pushers who think a pride flag cosmetic or a woman who doesn't solely exist to have rule 34 made of her means a game is leftist propanda or some insane nonsense like that.
They did. Ian Danskin (Innuendo Studios) documented them and the rise of the alt right. Theyāre the same people.
Modern memes are not nearly as good imo.
Edit: these
Ah, a classic.
I always read it as F-uuu instead of Fuuu-ck.
Its funny how AI in 2024 can't come up with content as amusing or original as shitposts cooked up by teenagers from over a decade ago.
If an AI will start shitposting at a human level what will all of us do?
That's why I'm not on Reddit.
Fuckin random, but ok
These memes are most definitely older than 2014.........
Doge is from 2010.
I still like them, honestly...
I used to frequent imgur's user-sub back then. I never made a front-page post, but I did get top comment of the day once. I nearly earned the green giraffe token. Over time the community grew more cringey by the week, and devolved into selfies and sob stories. I made the switch to reddit and never cared about karma again. What a time.
The irony is that Imgur was originally created as a an image hosting service specifically for Reddit, then became its own society and culture. Only to have you return right back where it came from
I remember the exact moment the enshittification started, Imgur used to have a "(source)" link right below the post title, it was great that you could visit the reddit thread something that went viral on Imgur, basically using Imgur to browse subreddit images, once that got removed and they started hiding reddit posts as Imgur community posts it kinda went downhill
This made me wonder what the oldest internet meme still in common usage is.
I still see the penguin on occasion, but probably not enough to be common.
Maybe the rick roll? I don't think that'll ever die.
Sadly, rick-rolls are ruined by forced ads for many.
Even goats.ex has ads on it now.
Truly a dark age for the internet.
goatse.cx*
Rick Roll was one that came to mind for me, too. Looks like it dates back to around 2007.
Definitely not pre youtube (2005)
I was def getting Rick rolled before that.
If you remember anything specific, submit it here, because you'd be predating the earliest known usage.
It was over ICQ, IRC or msn messenger back when all I had was dialup. A lot of modern internet culture seems to be appropriated from the kind of old web neāer-do-wells I hung out with on IRC back in the day. Didnāt think to keep records tbh. The original ārickrollā was goatse or lemon party (nsfw, tbh I would not google those if you donāt know what they are).
I do remember getting Rick rolled with Never gonna give you up by a counter strike clan team member over ventrilo back in 2005. It must be 2004-05 because the clan I was in disbanded after Oct. 2005.
Rickrolling itself doesn't count, it has to be with that specific song. So your clan member was ahead of his time!
I mean, itās still just a bait and switch. I never really got why doing it with Rick Astley was groundbreaking.
I'm interested in the oldest still-used internet memes, regardless of their quality. Bait and switching itself has existed forever.
Is linking a Rick roll a meme? I thought memes were reused images with text, guessing the definition is shifting. I saw someone calling numa numa a meme the other day.
Goatse launched in 1999 and was just widely referenced this month with the eclipse.
I'm not saying we should be proud of goatse's legacy and staying power, I'm just observing the reality we've all built.
Not the evergreen meme we need, but the one we deserve
The smiley emoji - :-) - is from 1982
That's an emoticon. Emojis are these: š
There's an entry for emoticons, though I'm not sure I'd qualify all of them as memes. Not the kind I was thinking about, at least.
Well, they are memes in that they went viral and are now spread with slight variations. And I must note that a lot of contemporary post-irony, meta-irony, or even something further memes probably wouldn't qualify as memes either
ALL YOUR BASE?
People still refer to it from time to time, but generally only in the context that it's old.
Probably Caramel Dansen. I remember it from when I was a kid, and I still see it every once in a while.
Edit: There's this video from 2008, but it's probably not the original. And there's this video which is a re-upload from 2008, which I think was originally a flash animation.
According to Know Your Meme, the song originates from 2001, the animations started around 2008, and there was a semi-revival during 2020. So it depends on when you choose to start counting, but the arguments are there.
Never heard of that one.
I suddenly feel very old.
I'm pretty old myself, so I think it's more on me than time.
RIP Mr T ate my balls
Eternal September is one that dates back to irc and Usenet. I'm guessing there was some jokester sending ASCII dicks on Arpanet.
I'm talking about memes that are still commonly seen today.
Exploitables where you change or add text in a picture is quite old and now one of the most common memes. It's a huge category, so maybe not what you meant, but it looks like it started in 2006 according to https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/exploitables
That's more of a type of meme than a meme itself.
:) I was thinking kilroy, but then I read the word internet.
SPAM?
I think of spam as a term that originated from that skit more than a meme.
https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/spam-spammed
I'll bow to their judgement that it's a meme, but I was thinking of visual memes. This one probably wins as far as internet memes in general goes.
You made me look up the origin of the word meme
"When you plant a fertile meme in my mind you literally parasitize my brain, turning it into a vehicle for the meme's propagation in just the way that a virus may parasitize the genetic mechanism of a host cell." Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene, 1976
That guy who shot himself on TV?
maybe trollface? it's at least as common as rare-but-recognizable wojaks
I don't see trollface much any more, but I might just not be looking in the right places.
This post smells like my grandmothers house on Thanksgiving.
Those are just "advice animals" (a longtime nexus being reddit's /r/adviceanimals). Yes, people are animals too. Memes in general have never been constrained by this clunky format though.
Philosoraptor memes were my favourite memes
And I miss it so hard
Still featuring daily on adviceanimals
Closer to 20.
That's not what advice dog looked like?
Sometimes I go back to z0r.de. Simpler time, simpler laugh.
Meme-evolution.