An NYT commenter got it at least partially right: Something Awful, 4chan, and the like are the origin of a lot of the ephemeral web pop culture. Of course, by t

An NYT commenter got it at least partially right: Something Awful, 4chan, and the like are the origin of a lot of the ephemeral web pop culture. Of course, by the time that content gets to the kind of people that send funny pictures through email, the original source is long since forgotten. I'm not sure how you could make a site that collects this kind of thing without it being an echo of an echo of something that was never very good to begin with.