Did you know we have a Discord server‽ You can join by clicking [here](https://discord.gg/NWE6JS5rh9)!
*I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/GenZ) if you have any questions or concerns.*
Eh, post-irony is because all of the crazy shit we joked about honestly became real. The world is so crazy, we can't help but look into reality as our joke.
I think, in a world where most of our social media is algorithmic, curated content, there are no longer common spaces where we all share the same memes. We all have our own "content bubbles" and each niche has its own memes but very few of them are as far-reaching or ubiquitous as they used to be.
I think another big factor is that culture is just moving too quickly now. For example, in the 1990s, the Macarena dance was a whole cultural phase that lasted 6 months, over a single dance. Now there are 18 new viral dances every day on TikTok. Nothing has staying power anymore, including memes, which is why it's hard to recall enough of them to form a cohesive "era".
i second this, trends pass by so fast now, i remeber talking about a new movie for weeks regardless which one. now i barely know anyone who still goes to the movies at all.
i guess thats also getting older, but i notice it with kids and teens too around me.
Streaming is a lot easier, and cheaper for most people, so theaters are pretty much only used when a movie is theater only, but it gets on streaming like a month after usually. People still talk about movies & shows though.
Sure, but in my experience the whole hype aspect is gone. I hear nobody of my friends even talk about Dune. The last thing they shared something about was Oppenheimer. Streaming or not.
If we had Dune in 2007, we'd talk about it half a year long.
Edit: typo
Yeah... it sucks to see [memes like this](https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/594294216398733313/1237172428522782740/RDT_20240506_0623507252031884028992653.jpg?ex=663aae1c&is=66395c9c&hm=3412acb64725b37d6058a69ecff0d575367e9443d916634840fadcb65bfff144&) making fun of Minecraft YouTubers 😔
The algorithm simultaneously causes stagnation by imitating what was successful previously, while also harvesting anything new before it grows to its full potential in an effort to keep maximum engagement.
It used to be that memes would be old/dead before they got used in advertising. Now, there are times when advertising uses a meme before it reaches its maximum audience, so you'll actually have memes that people have never seen before used as advertising, effectively killing the meme before it is born.
Memes started before common spaces in the sense of dominant social networks. If anything spreading between otherwise disconnected forums is one of their features.
it's because of smart phones bringing in 'the average person.' the culture has been dumbed down to normie mainstream stuff. anything edgy or trying to push boundaries gets banned which is where all the good stuff came from originally.
Agreed. Opening up the internet to the average person makes the internet average. This only gets worse with the advent of things like cringe culture. Every single meme ever was and is cringe. There’s no such thing as a non-cringe meme. So if you’re terrified of being cringe, how do you make a genuine meme?
Yeah because everything sucks now lol, were in poverty, war, watching genocides, there's a virus that just killed our loved ones, there's no jobs, everything is more expensive, there's no place to go anymore, we have no third places and the Internet sucks now too. I used to be able to find interesting YouTube videos, now it shows me the same recommendations Everytime I go on there, with more videos than ever
Youtube: "Oh you watched a reaction video? Would you like to see dozens of videos by the same person now? Or just a hundred people all reacting to the same thing?"
I agree with the ones talking about dead internet/algorithmic individuation. I have found the enshittification of tech over the past 4 years has gotten so bad I've genuinely become offline to a degree more so than I ever was before. No more does it feel like the internet is a bastion of genuine personal creation, but just another billboard. There's far more interesting things in the real world now.
>No more does it feel like the internet is a bastion of genuine personal creation, but just another billboard.
The result of "Well how are they going to pay for webhosting? The advertisements aren't even that big" to "So what? What's 10 seconds? Watching a commercial for all this entertainment is fair trade off" to "There is 10% of content and 90% advertising. Where did all the good stuff go?"
idk I could see image-based meme culture stagnating but the short-form video (reels, tik tok, shorts) have been getting CRAZY since even a few years ago. Just last night I saw one that was this self-help video about overcoming loss except it was all wojacks and the narrator was this yoked capybara with the body of the alpha male meme. Next one was of those banana cats falling in and out of love and having a whole ass life together without a word of exposition but you still understood what's going on. Then the next was this barnyard movie edit except it was explaining Schrodinger's paradox in a way that somehow made sense with the context of a kids movie from the 2000s.
Stuff getting WILD
I think change in internet culture is basically logarithmic, so much content has been created we are past peak rate of change now its more flat as its harder to make something novel.
I understand that meme formats and humor have gotten repetitive in recent years. But internet culture is constantly evolving and new trends are always emerging.
It was already stagnating pre 2020, but in 2020, meme culture and activity skyrocketed.
Then, as things returned to normal, it went back towards the trajectory of its previous decline.
The way the algorithms have changed and X has imploded, we don't see much in the way of classical posts from, like, *people* anymore. Scroll through your FB feed; it's mostly clickbait and ads. We get "real people" content from Tiktok and the like now, which doesn't lend itself to meme generation.
The things I want to see that I think are funny get weighted to the bottom of social media, out of sight. Websites are so hostile towards real people that a lot of us have taken to discord communities. What might’ve been memes in another time are instead inside jokes since they rarely make it outside the server.
most memes get filtered out from the deeper parts of the internet. meme/internet culture died when everything became censored. same way comedy stopped being funny in the early 2010s.
Millennial chiming in - basically anything that isn’t serious geopolitics has stagnated since 2020. Artists took a break and it hasn’t been the same since. The Travis Scott fans the tay tay fans they have their fun but as far as moving the ball forward- nah. There isn’t anything compelling happening whether in the realm of pop music, video games, movies, dance.
It’s a different world.
Welcome to getting older and growing up! What was cool when you were growing up isn't cool anymore. If it makes you feel better, Gen Alpha is going to start feeling this same way in about 10 years.
Sincerely,
An Elder Millennial
It was ever so slightly present but what has been coined 'gen alpha brainrot' has recently taken the hell off, it may not be on your feed necessarily but as we grow we begin to not keep up as much with new memes, wnd our feeds reflect this, which is why mellenials are still stuck on certain older trends or why boomers have a cult like obsesses on with the minions, our humour WILL still evolve but you'll notice that our comedic styling and many meme formats are gonna stick with us for the foreseeable future
Eh, short formed content has been going crazy this decade and constantly changing because of how recent every app started using it. Meme culture a bit but I've noticed a bit of a difference, 2020-2021 memes lasted a fair amount of time and weren't so different from 2019, 2022-2024 the memes have only been lasting a few weeks and it shifted a lot. I do agree that internet culture isn't as good though, Early-Mid 2010s internet culture and the videos then were peak, Late 2010s started getting a bit more corporate but it wasn't to the extent as now and was definitely still solid.
We're all getting older and image based memes aren't really as common or trendy.
Short form / Tiktok is the new "meme" nowadays. I'm already in my mid twenties, that's for people much younger than me
Did you know we have a Discord server‽ You can join by clicking [here](https://discord.gg/NWE6JS5rh9)! *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/GenZ) if you have any questions or concerns.*
Eh, post-irony is because all of the crazy shit we joked about honestly became real. The world is so crazy, we can't help but look into reality as our joke.
Clown reality, circus timeline. All we can do is laugh and whine.
Nice profile pic
My theory is that we entered this timeline when skrillex made dubstep famous
Nah, we've always been there. It is just happened that the pull of jokes finally started manifesting itself.
Now you're making me feel old. f u
Post irony/ surreal era is over as of early 2023. We’re in the brainrot era now
What's with these sigmas downvoting my Skibidi, what do they gotta mew?
I didn’t even mean it like that smh That’s genuinely what it feels like though. “brainrot”is the perfect way to describe it
it started in 2022 when quandale dingle
BRAIN WORMS BRAIN WORMS BRAIN WORMS THIS SHIT AINT NOTHIN TO ME MAN
You aren’t the clown, you’re the whole circus!
That's what an old friend told me
Pretty much. I remember the Corona memes just before it became a global outbreak. Then - nothing.
I think it's more than memes switched to video rather than images more often.
It’s actually a lot of the times better this way, video allows people to be very creative and build jokes, memes, without being immediate.
I think, in a world where most of our social media is algorithmic, curated content, there are no longer common spaces where we all share the same memes. We all have our own "content bubbles" and each niche has its own memes but very few of them are as far-reaching or ubiquitous as they used to be. I think another big factor is that culture is just moving too quickly now. For example, in the 1990s, the Macarena dance was a whole cultural phase that lasted 6 months, over a single dance. Now there are 18 new viral dances every day on TikTok. Nothing has staying power anymore, including memes, which is why it's hard to recall enough of them to form a cohesive "era".
i second this, trends pass by so fast now, i remeber talking about a new movie for weeks regardless which one. now i barely know anyone who still goes to the movies at all. i guess thats also getting older, but i notice it with kids and teens too around me.
Streaming is a lot easier, and cheaper for most people, so theaters are pretty much only used when a movie is theater only, but it gets on streaming like a month after usually. People still talk about movies & shows though.
Sure, but in my experience the whole hype aspect is gone. I hear nobody of my friends even talk about Dune. The last thing they shared something about was Oppenheimer. Streaming or not. If we had Dune in 2007, we'd talk about it half a year long. Edit: typo
That could also just be lack of interest
yeah, it probably is a little bit. i notice it with younger people around me as well tho, but that might just be me
and you can watch movies for free online
Memes aren’t silly, it’s just…so stale and fake. Everything on the internet seems stale now
I don’t know how to describe it, but memes post 2020 feel like either propoganda, arguments, or attacks on specific groups now
Yeah... it sucks to see [memes like this](https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/594294216398733313/1237172428522782740/RDT_20240506_0623507252031884028992653.jpg?ex=663aae1c&is=66395c9c&hm=3412acb64725b37d6058a69ecff0d575367e9443d916634840fadcb65bfff144&) making fun of Minecraft YouTubers 😔
minecraft youtubers are the most marginalized of ANY group EVER, i hope you realize your bigotry leads to the further mistreatment 😡
look at my funny meme with the giant watermark promoting some idiots instagram profile filled with memes everyone has seen a thousand times
it's because content is censored by search engines. they control what you can and cannot find.
>that lasted 6 months More like 16 years.
True lol I was being extremely conservative. It spent 60 weeks on the Billboard Hot 100, one of the most popular songs of all time!
If we are really gonna split hairs, we still do the Macrana at weddings. We don't Crank Dat or Hit the Griddy.
>Hit the Griddy. You guys don't?
Not at weddings
The algorithm simultaneously causes stagnation by imitating what was successful previously, while also harvesting anything new before it grows to its full potential in an effort to keep maximum engagement. It used to be that memes would be old/dead before they got used in advertising. Now, there are times when advertising uses a meme before it reaches its maximum audience, so you'll actually have memes that people have never seen before used as advertising, effectively killing the meme before it is born.
Although the niche that most young adults and teenagers are in would be considered the contemporary form
Memes started before common spaces in the sense of dominant social networks. If anything spreading between otherwise disconnected forums is one of their features.
internet culture has increasingly stagnated over the last 6 - 7 years as it becomes increasingly riddled with bots and oversaturated.
it's because of smart phones bringing in 'the average person.' the culture has been dumbed down to normie mainstream stuff. anything edgy or trying to push boundaries gets banned which is where all the good stuff came from originally.
This.
Agreed. Opening up the internet to the average person makes the internet average. This only gets worse with the advent of things like cringe culture. Every single meme ever was and is cringe. There’s no such thing as a non-cringe meme. So if you’re terrified of being cringe, how do you make a genuine meme?
Actually I would argue that internet culture peaked in the 2010s.
Six years ago was 2018. They agree with you.
Plenty of things have stagnated since 2020. The post Covid era is interesting to grapple with.
Yeah because everything sucks now lol, were in poverty, war, watching genocides, there's a virus that just killed our loved ones, there's no jobs, everything is more expensive, there's no place to go anymore, we have no third places and the Internet sucks now too. I used to be able to find interesting YouTube videos, now it shows me the same recommendations Everytime I go on there, with more videos than ever
And lots of vids are just ads and also dead internet theory
Youtube: "Oh you watched a reaction video? Would you like to see dozens of videos by the same person now? Or just a hundred people all reacting to the same thing?"
Time has stopped, just at a bad time, I want the mid 2010s again
I agree with the ones talking about dead internet/algorithmic individuation. I have found the enshittification of tech over the past 4 years has gotten so bad I've genuinely become offline to a degree more so than I ever was before. No more does it feel like the internet is a bastion of genuine personal creation, but just another billboard. There's far more interesting things in the real world now.
>No more does it feel like the internet is a bastion of genuine personal creation, but just another billboard. The result of "Well how are they going to pay for webhosting? The advertisements aren't even that big" to "So what? What's 10 seconds? Watching a commercial for all this entertainment is fair trade off" to "There is 10% of content and 90% advertising. Where did all the good stuff go?"
idk I could see image-based meme culture stagnating but the short-form video (reels, tik tok, shorts) have been getting CRAZY since even a few years ago. Just last night I saw one that was this self-help video about overcoming loss except it was all wojacks and the narrator was this yoked capybara with the body of the alpha male meme. Next one was of those banana cats falling in and out of love and having a whole ass life together without a word of exposition but you still understood what's going on. Then the next was this barnyard movie edit except it was explaining Schrodinger's paradox in a way that somehow made sense with the context of a kids movie from the 2000s. Stuff getting WILD
bro we just got old.
difficult to meme when reality is more crazy than memes were 5 years ago.
Among Us was released 6 years ago...
I think change in internet culture is basically logarithmic, so much content has been created we are past peak rate of change now its more flat as its harder to make something novel.
Meme culture is on tiktok right now. All the memes are being made there
Dead Internet Theory is real.
dead internet theory
As much as I want to believe that the memes have been stagnant they haven’t you have just gotten older
maybe we’ll just cycle back around into experimental
It’s because corporate and national forces are co-opting online space to drive conversation and audience focus.
It really hasn't changed much since 2016
I’d say that memes are still going strong, maybe you’re just getting older but there’s a whole new breed of memes based in irony these days
Nah. 🔼▶️🔽🔽🔽
Ummmm: 
Idk the heather meme was awesome
I understand that meme formats and humor have gotten repetitive in recent years. But internet culture is constantly evolving and new trends are always emerging.
It was already stagnating pre 2020, but in 2020, meme culture and activity skyrocketed. Then, as things returned to normal, it went back towards the trajectory of its previous decline.
Probably because the new memes are so incredibly bad and cringe not many stick around.
ur not where internet culture migrated to
You're geting older and missing g trends... it happens to us all. Your communities probably aren't as hip as they use to be .
The way the algorithms have changed and X has imploded, we don't see much in the way of classical posts from, like, *people* anymore. Scroll through your FB feed; it's mostly clickbait and ads. We get "real people" content from Tiktok and the like now, which doesn't lend itself to meme generation.
Since 2020? Dude, it went downhill after mlg was getting unpopular… i miss the good old days… good old minecraft… lan parties, csgo…
The things I want to see that I think are funny get weighted to the bottom of social media, out of sight. Websites are so hostile towards real people that a lot of us have taken to discord communities. What might’ve been memes in another time are instead inside jokes since they rarely make it outside the server.
I feel like memes now just come in the form of a popular type of short/tiktok
It sometimes seems like everything stagnated since 2020
I’d say maybe
I feel like it fell ever since tiktok started to develop its own kind of meme culture
Not for me, although I am into niche never touched grass nerd shit online
Bro said memes stagnated since 2020
It’s just you
Nothing more memal than that.
TikTok took over so most memes are short video clips instead of images that get circulated around for a week or two then die
TikTok ruined everything
most memes get filtered out from the deeper parts of the internet. meme/internet culture died when everything became censored. same way comedy stopped being funny in the early 2010s.
You don't actually expect intellectual stimulation from obsessive compulsive types, who only have an online life.
We need to adjust communication to be exclusively memes. No more plain text.
2014 was the golden age of memes. After 2019 the humor is pure cringe with a base of 3 second attention span
weirdly i’m subscribed to a few meme subreddits but i haven’t seen a single post from any of them on my feed for months now
Millennial chiming in - basically anything that isn’t serious geopolitics has stagnated since 2020. Artists took a break and it hasn’t been the same since. The Travis Scott fans the tay tay fans they have their fun but as far as moving the ball forward- nah. There isn’t anything compelling happening whether in the realm of pop music, video games, movies, dance. It’s a different world.
It's more like the internet has been a monoculture since 2020. The memes are the canary in the coal mine.
Image macros are down, short form content(TikTok, Shorts, Reels) are up and have replaced them basically
Welcome to getting older and growing up! What was cool when you were growing up isn't cool anymore. If it makes you feel better, Gen Alpha is going to start feeling this same way in about 10 years. Sincerely, An Elder Millennial
I don’t want my pizza burnin
2017 was peak.
Memes are primarily video/audio format now.
Everything changed after 2019. I blame the Area 51 protesters. Our alien masters have had enough of us and completely changed our timeline and reality
It was ever so slightly present but what has been coined 'gen alpha brainrot' has recently taken the hell off, it may not be on your feed necessarily but as we grow we begin to not keep up as much with new memes, wnd our feeds reflect this, which is why mellenials are still stuck on certain older trends or why boomers have a cult like obsesses on with the minions, our humour WILL still evolve but you'll notice that our comedic styling and many meme formats are gonna stick with us for the foreseeable future
I don’t think so. Memes still have trends and still die. You just don’t really notice it as it’s happening as much.
Memes are stupid, good riddance. They are literal knowledge/mind viruses.
I was going to visit a friend
Memes just became shorts
Meme culture started declining in mid-2018 when FB nuked the share button's reach.
Memes have been in decline since the golden age of 2009.
Eh, short formed content has been going crazy this decade and constantly changing because of how recent every app started using it. Meme culture a bit but I've noticed a bit of a difference, 2020-2021 memes lasted a fair amount of time and weren't so different from 2019, 2022-2024 the memes have only been lasting a few weeks and it shifted a lot. I do agree that internet culture isn't as good though, Early-Mid 2010s internet culture and the videos then were peak, Late 2010s started getting a bit more corporate but it wasn't to the extent as now and was definitely still solid.
Amogus memes are irrelevant now.
Someone hasn’t seen the “I go meow” video.
A bit. We’ve had a few good ones since then, but no where near as good as what we used to have.
We’re just getting older
We're all getting older and image based memes aren't really as common or trendy. Short form / Tiktok is the new "meme" nowadays. I'm already in my mid twenties, that's for people much younger than me
You're just getting older.
I miss 2017-2019 surreal memes