3 ms·
I wonder about the demographic breakdown for these memes. "Downfall" due to the nature of its original subject matter largely seemed to attract memes targeting
by hnbad 3y ago
I wonder about the demographic breakdown for these memes. "Downfall" due to the nature of its original subject matter largely seemed to attract memes targeting "boomers" (or more specifically Gen X and beyond) and "gamers" (or more specifically young men leaning on average to the political right). Given the way the Gemini version of this meme frames the issue (too much DEI, woke, etc rather than Google hamfistedly overcorrecting for its history of racist algorithms in a way that hilariously backfires) and that it was reposted by Elon Musk and that the "template" works best when you aren't fluent in Spanish, I'd not be surprised if this one is similar.
It's especially interesting that the author refers to it as "the greatest meme" when the general consensus among Millenials and below is that memes are already dead by the time they become popular outside their original circles and this meme template is ancient by Internet standards (which isn't surprising given Elon Musk is known to share memes he finds - which means the meme had to be popular enough to fall into his lap in the first place). I was honestly surprised it's about this specific template given that I remember it first appearing on Twitter about 3 years ago.
It's also odd to survey the reactions based on a post by Elon Musk on Twitter when even before the buyout the responses were known to suffer more from an overrepresentation of bots, sockpuppets and spam than other celebrity accounts and things have only gotten worse since the buyout (if only because he's literally the person to appeal to if you want to influence Twitter's direction). In other words it's measuring popularity by looking at a room full of yes men who will cry laugh on the floor as soon as they think he said something intended to be funny - not exactly empirical science is it.