Memes used to be a revolutionary way for everyday people to creatively remix media into viral jokes and social commentary. However, the memes of 2023 showed a noticeable decline in their originality and a shift towards mediocrity and commercialization. What led to this change?
The meme recession of the past year was no fluke – it was the inevitable result of shifting internet incentives over the past decade. In the early days, memes arose from non-commercial online communities like 4chan that valued raw creativity and humor over production quality. Early meme creators used basic editing skills to turn photos or video clips into absurd inside jokes like LOLCats or Rickrolling. The best memes combined mass appeal with participatory remixing – anyone could put their own spin on the template.
Sharing stuff online for everyone to enjoy was a big deal. Memes let regular folks influence what’s cool in media without following the usual rules. In the beginning, not all memes were super creative. There were some really bad ones like Advice Animals and rage comics everywhere. But memes gave people a new way to talk about culture, making inside jokes that grew naturally among smaller groups of people. Even the silly memes showed how people could have fun and be creative together on the internet.
But this mess couldn’t continue. As more people started using the internet, memes became popular for businesses to use and make money from. In the early 2010s, advertisers started using memes awkwardly to try to appeal to young people—like planking or the ice bucket challenge, remember those? At the same time, Facebook and Twitter started liking memes that were popular and smart instead of just creative. Making memes became a job, with companies figuring out how to make things go viral on purpose.
These changes completely took over meme culture by 2023. Last year, popular memes were mainly from companies and famous people using similar jokes for more social media attention. Memes like Smug Kevin James, Angela Bassett licking lips, Baby Gronk showed how unoriginal and dull memes had become, all designed to make money. When even popular places like Reddit create memes that seem like they were made by a group of people deciding what’s popular, we’ve lost the excitement.
Nostalgia tempts us to romanticize the past – there were always terrible memes cluttering the internet. But today’s meme assembly line reveals how thoroughly big brands and platforms have strip-mined grassroots creativity and community. Memes once felt by the people, for the people. Now they’re products exploited by corporate interests and influencer bros devoid of comedic imagination.
Can we bring back the fun and crazy creativity from the early internet memes? Maybe, as small online groups still make funny inside jokes. But it might need us to go back to digital communities that aren’t all about making money, which seems hard in a time of huge platforms.
The great meme recession of 2023 Showed how much we’ve moved away from the good old days of the early internet when memes represented sharing and trading ideas freely. Pour one out for the memes we loved before greed and algorithms consumed their soul. Only a true paradigm shift can resurrect the lost art of viral grassroots jokes. What vanished in 2023 was the innocent creativity of a young internet. We can mourn, but the web doesn’t move backwards. The meme glory days are gone.
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