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Based on several statements like this: >I feel this fact was exemplified by the "Damn Daniel" clip from 2015. I hated it at the time and still do. There was no

Based on several statements like this: >I feel this fact was exemplified by the "Damn Daniel" clip from 2015. I hated it at the time and still do. There was no humour to it. It was funny because everyone else thought it was funny. It seems like a lot of author's criticisms are due to them no longer being a part of the in-group which memes are being created by and intended for. I can ensure you, many teenagers found humor in the "Damn Daniel" clip in 2015. Given how heavily memes are tied to identification with an in-group, I imagine they will have an ever stronger "kids these days don't know real music" effect than other forms of pop culture.

Aunche 5y ago
I don't see how "Damn Daniel" is significantly different from "Badger Badger." I do agree with the author's other point that memes these days are much more mean spirited than they used to be. People these days tend to treat people they disagree with as if they were caricature wojaks rather than real people with complicated beliefs and motivations.
- unbanned 5y ago
  Are they? A lot of image macros from SA, 4chan, b3ta etc.. were racist and hate filled... Completely agree with Badger Badger. Weebls stuff cartoons were funny, because it was something to enjoy with people who also had access to the internet (which was quite few at the time, so the "in crowd") Additionally to explain why Damn Daniel is funny is as difficult as explaining why anything is funny.
  - ASalazarMX 5y ago
    Some people find "Badger badger" funny, and some don't. It's the same with "Damn, Daniel". I know about music and badgers and mushrooms and the "honey badger don't care" memes, so I find the badger song funny. I don't know anything about Daniel or his friend, and without context I don't find them funny. Now the images with a swirl blur effect that say "DAVE", "BROCCOLI", etc., for some reason I find some of them hilarious.
- ASalazarMX 5y ago
  Absurd and surreal humor has always been funny, it's not something GenZ invented. It's even possible that GenZ saw all the baggage and rules that late GenX and millennials established for using memes "correctly" and not wanting to be seen as clueless as the boomers, said "fuck it, let's do nonsense, if they criticize that we'll tell them they're the clueless ones". I also suspect memes like the ones you find in r/BoneHurtingJuice and r/AntiMemes are an interesting mix of that. They're creating their own baggage and rules for deconstruction memes. IMO the trend the article is hating is memes focused on ego and opinions. You can still see the deconstruction of a minion meme to make it funny again, but a significant part of memes today are personal opinions in trending templates. The template is not important, the opinion is, and its purpose is getting reactions, but not only laughs.
hnzix 5y ago
GenZ memes are much different to the venerable lolcat/Scumbag Steve format. They are often wackier and absurdist as opposed to pop-culture-referential. They're self-referential. It's not wrong it's just different. There's also a lot more people trying to meme who are really awkward at it - see every Minions meme ever.
- greatwave1 5y ago
  >There's also a lot more people trying to meme who are really awkward at it - see every Minions meme ever. There's nothing awkward about those wacky tic tacs! https://www.reddit.com/r/WackyTicTacs/ https://www.reddit.com/r/WackyTicTacs/
  - no_time 5y ago
    I wouldve just linked to https://www.reddit.com/r/ReallyWackyTicTacs/ https://www.reddit.com/r/ReallyWackyTicTacs/ if it wasnt banned already but we are talking about nu-reddit here. :/
- coldtea 5y ago
  Every Minion meme I've seen looks like it was done by a boomer or Gen Xer...
- PeterisP 5y ago
  There are lots of even older memes that were fully self-referential. For example, if a forum question got in response an ascii-art homage to the goatse shock site, I would also label that as absurdist/wacky subculture self-reference meme, and that predates the lolcat/Scumbag Steve memes by something like 10+ years.
skolskoly 5y ago
There is no in-group anymore. The term "meme" no longer serves as a shibboleth for any particular subculture, and anyone on major social media platforms has seen them and knows what they are. Memes have become the equivalent of grandma's Christmas chain letter. But, of course, this is the true meaning of the term coined by Dawkins. Somewhat fittingly, and a little ironically, we have watched the coded meaning of "meme as in-joke," (an anti-meme to the out-group) become absorbed into the original meaning. The word was a malapropism all along, and people are starting to understand that now.
- sjtindell 5y ago
  With the rise of TikTok, Youtube, and Twitch, people have the full spectrum available to them and have realized that memes are just content. And everything is about content.
- noduerme 5y ago
  And not a minute too soon. Even though the concept of "memes" existed in the 90s, the internet hadn't hit the mainstream as a way for dumb kids to take their dumb little in-jokes online. The meme of the '00s and since is just the same as what teenagers used to do in the '90s, pre-internet: Take some stupid joke or play on words, repeat it forever and make it a wink-wink thing. Like, "got a wilson" for having a woody. Or "Orobljew" if you turn a marlboro pack upside down. The age of meme culture online brought this extremely infantile 7th grade humor from junior high locker rooms into the mainstream. That's literally all it still is. Anyone who'd had a healthy childhood before the internet would recognize it as such.
  - pjc50 5y ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extraordinary_Popular_Delusions_and_the_Madness_of_Crowds https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extraordinary_Popular_Delusion... has a chapter "Popular Follies in Great Cities", on the memes of the first half of the nineteenth century. They are very old indeed. https://www.gutenberg.org/files/636/636-h/636-h.htm#link2H_4_0012 https://www.gutenberg.org/files/636/636-h/636-h.htm#link2H_4...
- 5y ago
iforgotpassword 5y ago
The tldr of the whole article: > Am I just getting older? Yes. This is basically the centuries old "stuff that I did when I was younger was funny, but now the next generation is just stupid." As you say, replace humor by music, kids/teens TV shows or any usual suspect. The remaining 99.99% of the article are just carefully picked but basically arbitrary differences between memes now and back then that are turned into arguments for why the old way was the right way. In 20 years someone will write the exact same rant about memes then and today.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- toyg 5y ago
  We "web people" thought age would never matter, because anybody could be a cow on the internet. Turns out that even cows eventually feel old. Also, with every passing year there are fewer and fewer differences between "internet people" and "regular people", because more and more "normies" spend more and more time online. That means social groups have been restructured along lines that mirror IRL ones - including age thresholds.
  - BlueTemplar 5y ago
    Yeah, this reminded me learning of the concept of "Eternal September"... but a decade+ after it happened, and as one of Eternal September's generation. And indeed also that exponential growth where the previous comminities are quickly rendered irrelevant happens slower and slower, since at some point you start to ran out of non-connected people and only the generational shift remains.
  - shrimp_emoji 5y ago
    I feel like there was something so novel and cool about "digital culture" and being on the Internet that it lured me into assuming some kind of exceptionalism. Like, "ha, this is all somehow too different from anything that came before to ever enter the dustbin of history". Surprisingly, that was wrong. There are people who enjoyed WoW and doge that are now dead, and the ones still alive are getting older. It's so weird how stuff that happens despite everything.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

Aunche 5y ago

I don't see how "Damn Daniel" is significantly different from "Badger Badger." I do agree with the author's other point that memes these days are much more mean spirited than they used to be. People these days tend to treat people they disagree with as if they were caricature wojaks rather than real people with complicated beliefs and motivations.

unbanned 5y ago
Are they? A lot of image macros from SA, 4chan, b3ta etc.. were racist and hate filled... Completely agree with Badger Badger. Weebls stuff cartoons were funny, because it was something to enjoy with people who also had access to the internet (which was quite few at the time, so the "in crowd") Additionally to explain why Damn Daniel is funny is as difficult as explaining why anything is funny.
- ASalazarMX 5y ago
  Some people find "Badger badger" funny, and some don't. It's the same with "Damn, Daniel". I know about music and badgers and mushrooms and the "honey badger don't care" memes, so I find the badger song funny. I don't know anything about Daniel or his friend, and without context I don't find them funny. Now the images with a swirl blur effect that say "DAVE", "BROCCOLI", etc., for some reason I find some of them hilarious.
ASalazarMX 5y ago
Absurd and surreal humor has always been funny, it's not something GenZ invented. It's even possible that GenZ saw all the baggage and rules that late GenX and millennials established for using memes "correctly" and not wanting to be seen as clueless as the boomers, said "fuck it, let's do nonsense, if they criticize that we'll tell them they're the clueless ones". I also suspect memes like the ones you find in r/BoneHurtingJuice and r/AntiMemes are an interesting mix of that. They're creating their own baggage and rules for deconstruction memes. IMO the trend the article is hating is memes focused on ego and opinions. You can still see the deconstruction of a minion meme to make it funny again, but a significant part of memes today are personal opinions in trending templates. The template is not important, the opinion is, and its purpose is getting reactions, but not only laughs.

hnzix 5y ago

GenZ memes are much different to the venerable lolcat/Scumbag Steve format. They are often wackier and absurdist as opposed to pop-culture-referential. They're self-referential. It's not wrong it's just different. There's also a lot more people trying to meme who are really awkward at it - see every Minions meme ever.

greatwave1 5y ago
>There's also a lot more people trying to meme who are really awkward at it - see every Minions meme ever. There's nothing awkward about those wacky tic tacs! https://www.reddit.com/r/WackyTicTacs/ https://www.reddit.com/r/WackyTicTacs/
- no_time 5y ago
  I wouldve just linked to https://www.reddit.com/r/ReallyWackyTicTacs/ https://www.reddit.com/r/ReallyWackyTicTacs/ if it wasnt banned already but we are talking about nu-reddit here. :/
coldtea 5y ago
Every Minion meme I've seen looks like it was done by a boomer or Gen Xer...
PeterisP 5y ago
There are lots of even older memes that were fully self-referential. For example, if a forum question got in response an ascii-art homage to the goatse shock site, I would also label that as absurdist/wacky subculture self-reference meme, and that predates the lolcat/Scumbag Steve memes by something like 10+ years.

skolskoly 5y ago

There is no in-group anymore. The term "meme" no longer serves as a shibboleth for any particular subculture, and anyone on major social media platforms has seen them and knows what they are. Memes have become the equivalent of grandma's Christmas chain letter. But, of course, this is the true meaning of the term coined by Dawkins. Somewhat fittingly, and a little ironically, we have watched the coded meaning of "meme as in-joke," (an anti-meme to the out-group) become absorbed into the original meaning. The word was a malapropism all along, and people are starting to understand that now.

sjtindell 5y ago
With the rise of TikTok, Youtube, and Twitch, people have the full spectrum available to them and have realized that memes are just content. And everything is about content.
noduerme 5y ago
And not a minute too soon. Even though the concept of "memes" existed in the 90s, the internet hadn't hit the mainstream as a way for dumb kids to take their dumb little in-jokes online. The meme of the '00s and since is just the same as what teenagers used to do in the '90s, pre-internet: Take some stupid joke or play on words, repeat it forever and make it a wink-wink thing. Like, "got a wilson" for having a woody. Or "Orobljew" if you turn a marlboro pack upside down. The age of meme culture online brought this extremely infantile 7th grade humor from junior high locker rooms into the mainstream. That's literally all it still is. Anyone who'd had a healthy childhood before the internet would recognize it as such.
- pjc50 5y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extraordinary_Popular_Delusions_and_the_Madness_of_Crowds https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extraordinary_Popular_Delusion... has a chapter "Popular Follies in Great Cities", on the memes of the first half of the nineteenth century. They are very old indeed. https://www.gutenberg.org/files/636/636-h/636-h.htm#link2H_4_0012 https://www.gutenberg.org/files/636/636-h/636-h.htm#link2H_4...
5y ago

iforgotpassword 5y ago

The tldr of the whole article: > Am I just getting older? Yes. This is basically the centuries old "stuff that I did when I was younger was funny, but now the next generation is just stupid." As you say, replace humor by music, kids/teens TV shows or any usual suspect. The remaining 99.99% of the article are just carefully picked but basically arbitrary differences between memes now and back then that are turned into arguments for why the old way was the right way. In 20 years someone will write the exact same rant about memes then and today.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
toyg 5y ago
We "web people" thought age would never matter, because anybody could be a cow on the internet. Turns out that even cows eventually feel old. Also, with every passing year there are fewer and fewer differences between "internet people" and "regular people", because more and more "normies" spend more and more time online. That means social groups have been restructured along lines that mirror IRL ones - including age thresholds.
- BlueTemplar 5y ago
  Yeah, this reminded me learning of the concept of "Eternal September"... but a decade+ after it happened, and as one of Eternal September's generation. And indeed also that exponential growth where the previous comminities are quickly rendered irrelevant happens slower and slower, since at some point you start to ran out of non-connected people and only the generational shift remains.
- shrimp_emoji 5y ago
  I feel like there was something so novel and cool about "digital culture" and being on the Internet that it lured me into assuming some kind of exceptionalism. Like, "ha, this is all somehow too different from anything that came before to ever enter the dustbin of history". Surprisingly, that was wrong. There are people who enjoyed WoW and doge that are now dead, and the ones still alive are getting older. It's so weird how stuff that happens despite everything.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]