A simpler time

Philosoraptor is 15 years old, Bad Luck Brian and Success Kid are 12 years, but Doge (without that background) is 10 years. Best I can do is $3.50
- Doge (without that background) is 10 years.
  The last one is a mix of doge and advice dog, which is almost 18 years.
  One might say a forgery
  
  almost 18 years
  👴
- Bad Luck Brian and Success Kid are 12 years
  Bad Luck Brian looking old af was in a recent "The General Auto Insurance" commercial.
  
  First, I'm amazed no other insurance company has thought of this.
  Second, Bad Luck Brian can deliver his lines better than Shaq.
  
  That was actually pretty good for what it was
- Where is overly attached girlfriend and karate kid?
- Cheapskate Rick? I have a whole warehouse filled with him. You'd have to pay me rent to pawn that.
- Doge is older than philosaraptor, forced meme and was a bannable offense on just about every *chan site for 10 years
  
  Once was a bannable offense, now a cryptocurrency affected by Musk xweets
- Your facts hurt. I feel old
- Was about to say this, no way these memes are 10 years old. Even feels wrong regarding Doge tbh

2000s internet was simpler times
- TAKE ME BAAAAAAAAAAAAACK
- I was never sure why it wanted a cheeseburger, and no one else seemed interested in the question.
- Is everyone forgetting the ~half decade of "demotivators"? The ones with a picture on a black background?
  
  Oh man, we thought everything was so bad, turns out those were the good times
  
  I miss those.
  
  Those go back to mid-90's, at least.
- This is synonymous to me with fark.com.
- That just makes me think of this:
  https://youtu.be/paQhkCodc78

I'm the original creator of the "Still waiting on OP" meme from The Shining and have a mildly interesting story behind its creation if anyone would care to hear.
- I would like to hear!
  
  This is a mildly interesting story at best.
  In 2010 I was working at a video rental store (RIP) and got access to new movies before they were available to the public. Every day I'd grab one, and every night I'd stream them online for 4channers on /tv and /r9k. There was a chat built into the stream and we had a lot of fun for months and months, hanging out watching movies and chatting. It built a pretty big following. Think Twitch before Twitch existed.
  One night there were no new movies so I grabbed The Shining. We watched through it, and when that scene came on the screen I paused it to take a closer look. We joked and carried on about it in chat, and I screenshotted it and opened Photoshop and made the meme then and there. Everyone loved it. Several folks posted it on 4chan boards and it took off in a big way. We finished the movie and had a great night.
  One of my favorite young adult memories.
- Eyyy!
  I made "If buying isn't owning then pirating isn't stealing."
  We should have a meme maker club.
- I feel like it’s a great time to pull up the 4k bluray and do a remaster screenshot, since we missed the 10-year anniversary.
- Explain your story.

In 2014 these were already old I think
- Just add a new "ten years ago memes looked like this" frame to it every decade.
- It's an old pic itself

- Wait, the boy on the left is Keanu Reeves??
  
  No that's Yoda
  
  Someone's mind just got blown

Were these popular in 2014? I feel like these were more like 2010. I could be wrong.
- I think they were still lingering around somewhat. I just cleared off my old laptop last night and found advice animal memes from 2014 on it. I'll probably drop a few of the better ones in 196 on Monday, maybe I'll spread the love to antique memes roadshow.
  
  If my memory serves me right (it usually doesn't lol), it was mostly by 2015 that they were on their death throes, having been mostly usurped by the MLG era; I remember being upset that things like advice animals and rage comics were suddenly considered "things only clueless old people on facebook post nowadays" circa 2015. But they were still around in a smaller scale around 2014, so I think it still counts?
  But I'm looking forward to seeing you share more old memes! I love 'em.
  
  Philosoraptor is timeless
  
  Advice Animals were much earlier, in the late 2000s. I remember seeing them on gaming forums before Reddit was even a thing, when SA and Digg still reigned supreme.
  Know Your Meme traces them back to 2006.
  https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/advice-animals
- Advice dog was even older but yeah I assumed 2010 aswell

I remember a time when they weren't even called memes. They were just "image macros."

The internet peaked in 1999
https://i.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/newsfeed/000/000/999/AllYourBaseAnimated.gif
- Having Ally McBeal flashbacks.
- Hello all you gentlemen.
  
  ALL YOUR BASE ARE BELONG TO US
- What happen?
  
  Web 2.0 happened :/
  It centralized control to a few large corporations and lowered the barrier to entry for users such that everything became a popularity contest for eyeballs. TikTok, reddit, facebook, youtube, instagram, OF, its all a brainless race for engagement
  
  Someone set us up the bomb! (WHAT?)
- Based
- this but unironically

This is more like 18 years

Where did we go wrong??
- Yes
- Everything is a meme now, hell even anyone could frame your comment and shit post it as a meme right now! (I won't be the one to do so).
  
  The word meme is misused & I hate it. Ppl should know what memetics are.
  This comment up till now isn't really (ok, the I hate it bit a little), but if I add 'you know that feeling of joy when you pet a cat' it would have a considerably stronger memetic effect on a lot (most?) humans. But its not funny as I didn't introduce a joke (sorry that I didn't introduce myself).
- Before this even. We went wrong when dumb people took macro images and decided ideas needed packages that way for thought transmission to count as a meme.

*15

- Never gives us up

These weren't even what we called "memes" back then (closer to twenty years ago).
These were image macros or caption images. A meme back then was usually a phrase or saying like Over 9000 and other crap like that.
- And Milhouse!
  
  The fact that "milhouse is not a meme" is a meme tickles my brain
- But whether we called them memes or not, by definition they were. The Selfish Gene came out in 1976, where Dawkins coined it as "a unit of cultural transmission, or a unit of imitation".
  
  Memes live in our head and propagate throughout society which is just an emergent phenomena of memes...I loved the selfish gene it's a great book and Dawkins is the man.
- One trick was to post memes that don't have jokes, like the one about when I caught the ferry over to Caturday. I needed a new lol for my cat, so, I decided to go to digg, which is what they called fark in those days. So I tied a cheezburger to my belt, which was the style at the time. Now, to take the ferry cost a bitcoin, and in those days, bitcoins had pictures of doges on 'em. "Give me five doges for a bitcoin," you'd say. Now, where were we? Oh yeah, the important thing was I had a cheezburger on my belt, which was the style at the time. They didn't have white castle because of the war. The only thing you could get was those big macs.
- I was posting these in the late 2000s and we definitely called them memes then.

Truly it was a golden age

Bro that's like 15 years ago
- Raptors are extinct by now

Memes are not macro images.
- Anyone down voting doesn't remember that this phrase itself was a meme at the time.
  
  Memes are how I find my people!

Doge is the best meme ever created and I will fight anyone who says otherwise.
- Otherwise.
  
  Meet me behind the backstop after school. Be there or be square.

Wasn’t that like 15 years ago. 10 years ago was gamergate
- They'll rise up any day now, against...
  Something. I was never quite sure. Women bad, I guess.
  
  game critics take payola and thats bad but its especially bad when bad websites i dont pay any attention to publish positive reviews of works by women because women bad
  in theory critics being bribed or coerced into positive reviews is a good thing to be against, but in reality the campaign was coopted within about 2 minutes of coming into existence by right wing agenda pushers who think a pride flag cosmetic or a woman who doesn't solely exist to have rule 34 made of her means a game is leftist propanda or some insane nonsense like that.
  
  They did. Ian Danskin (Innuendo Studios) documented them and the rise of the alt right. They’re the same people.

Modern memes are not nearly as good imo.
Edit: these
- Modern memes are incomprehensible, just take a random picture and slap some completely unrelated text on top of it. Or maybe I'm just too old to get it. 🤷
  
  Because they're not memes. I had a heck of a time explaining to my partner that a picture with text on it does not constitute a meme - the same picture used repeatedly with different text captions? Meme.
  It did not compute.

- Ah, a classic.
  I always read it as F-uuu instead of Fuuu-ck.

Its funny how AI in 2024 can't come up with content as amusing or original as shitposts cooked up by teenagers from over a decade ago.
- If an AI will start shitposting at a human level what will all of us do?
  
  That's why I'm not on Reddit.
- Fuckin random, but ok

I still like them, honestly...

These memes are most definitely older than 2014.........
- Doge is from 2010.

I used to frequent imgur's user-sub back then. I never made a front-page post, but I did get top comment of the day once. I nearly earned the green giraffe token. Over time the community grew more cringey by the week, and devolved into selfies and sob stories. I made the switch to reddit and never cared about karma again. What a time.
- The irony is that Imgur was originally created as a an image hosting service specifically for Reddit, then became its own society and culture. Only to have you return right back where it came from
- I remember the exact moment the enshittification started, Imgur used to have a "(source)" link right below the post title, it was great that you could visit the reddit thread something that went viral on Imgur, basically using Imgur to browse subreddit images, once that got removed and they started hiding reddit posts as Imgur community posts it kinda went downhill

This made me wonder what the oldest internet meme still in common usage is.
- I still see the penguin on occasion, but probably not enough to be common.
  Maybe the rick roll? I don't think that'll ever die.
  
  Sadly, rick-rolls are ruined by forced ads for many.
  
  Rick Roll was one that came to mind for me, too. Looks like it dates back to around 2007.
- Goatse launched in 1999 and was just widely referenced this month with the eclipse.
  I'm not saying we should be proud of goatse's legacy and staying power, I'm just observing the reality we've all built.
  
  Not the evergreen meme we need, but the one we deserve
- The smiley emoji - :-) - is from 1982
  
  That's an emoticon. Emojis are these: 😜
  There's an entry for emoticons, though I'm not sure I'd qualify all of them as memes. Not the kind I was thinking about, at least.
- ALL YOUR BASE?
  
  People still refer to it from time to time, but generally only in the context that it's old.
- Probably Caramel Dansen. I remember it from when I was a kid, and I still see it every once in a while.
  Edit: There's this video from 2008, but it's probably not the original. And there's this video which is a re-upload from 2008, which I think was originally a flash animation.
  According to Know Your Meme, the song originates from 2001, the animations started around 2008, and there was a semi-revival during 2020. So it depends on when you choose to start counting, but the arguments are there.
  
  Never heard of that one.
- RIP Mr T ate my balls
- Eternal September is one that dates back to irc and Usenet. I'm guessing there was some jokester sending ASCII dicks on Arpanet.
  
  I'm talking about memes that are still commonly seen today.
- :) I was thinking kilroy, but then I read the word internet.
- Exploitables where you change or add text in a picture is quite old and now one of the most common memes. It's a huge category, so maybe not what you meant, but it looks like it started in 2006 according to https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/exploitables
  
  That's more of a type of meme than a meme itself.
- maybe trollface? it's at least as common as rare-but-recognizable wojaks
  
  I don't see trollface much any more, but I might just not be looking in the right places.
- That guy who shot himself on TV?
- SPAM?
  
  I think of spam as a term that originated from that skit more than a meme.

This post smells like my grandmothers house on Thanksgiving.

Those are just "advice animals" (a longtime nexus being reddit's /r/adviceanimals). Yes, people are animals too. Memes in general have never been constrained by this clunky format though.