The past glory of our beloved memes

Memes are shared on social media left, right and center. While till a few years back, your feed would be flooded with status updates, now the flurry of posts on social media are majorly memes--some hilarious, others, not so much. If we just analyze the quality of memes circulating today, it wouldn't be hard to conjecture that the best period of creative memes is already behind us. The best year being 2011. We will tell you why!

There were at least 317 created in 2011, which were sanctioned by KnowYourMeme.com, the internet’s most comprehensive archive of meme genesis. Some of those memes went viral. lived past lives as viral, and some are just refurbished in the most messed up ways.

Several series of memes peaked in 2011, including Rage Comics--a crudely-drawn comic book series that started with Rage Guy--Advice Animals, memes featuring different animals with captioned text, and the revival of “My Little Pony,”--a popular children’s toy franchise and cartoon series from the 1980s that has since been reclaimed by adult male fans called Bronies.

Brad Kim, the editor of Know Your Meme, said that year was a “major turning point for the growth of meme culture in multiple senses. It was the in-between period when memes really started making their ways offline and into mainstream pop culture and commercial domains.”

According to Google Trends, a number of searches for the phrase “meme” took off in 2011. One of the most beloved memes from that year was Conspiracy Keanu, featuring a dopey-faced picture of actor Keanu Reeves culled from the 1989 comedy “Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure,” overlaid with funny conspiracy suggestions like “What if the CIA invented dinosaurs to discourage time travel?”

Conspiracy Keanu was spun off from the Advice Animal meme, a bunch of similar memes featuring animals, like Socially Awkward Penguin and Actual Advice Mallard. But that's not the root either. According to Know Your Meme, these too were spin-offs of Advice Dog, a meme that started on a Super Mario fan site in 2006, called The Mushroom Kingdom.

Memes are visual images laden with text that doesn't really go out of fashion. Even when people don't share it anymore, they will lie dormant till someone re-discovers it. In 2012, the number of new memes almost halved to 180, and fewer than 100 new memes were made in 2013. Last year, Know Your Meme only recorded 34 total memes, including Netflix and Chill and Deez Nuts, respectively created on Twitter and Instagram.

At a time, memes became so popular that it also came under scrutiny, and a stricter filtering process. “As our community grew larger, so did our moderation team,” said Kim “and as per popular request, we decided to delegate the confirmation process to the moderators (“the meme council”) on behalf of the community. Naturally, the bar for confirmation was raised so that only entries with sufficient information & citation would get confirmed.

In 2015 memes started originating on 4chan, where we see a proliferation of frictionless mockery, and memes are a soft weapon in their armory. The anonymous discussion board has been a leader in meme creation since it launched in 2003, which means many of the memes you know and love came from a hotbed for pedophiles and neo-nazis and a community.

A total of 269 of the 2,500 memes in the KYM vaults stem from 4chan. YouTube takes second place overall by volume. By the end of 2015, YouTube was responsible for 246 memes.