I saved this because I saw a relevant article, then forgot about it for a day. Anyhow

https://bigthink.com/mini-philosophy/what-makes-a-meme-take-off-the-3-rules-of-virality/

If we mean the OG definition coined in the 80s as being just “any information shared via non-genetic means” then a good meme is something useful and/or relatable to a large number of people so that it is shared more and spreads further.

Meme is actually just a single unit of information.

The way the image macro jokes are made now have come about from the way social media is laid out and needing quick consumption. They’re aldo easily made by anyone. Otherwise there was a time when Flash videos were the preferred medium for internet jokes.

Tom Nichols did a good video on an unrelated subject, but he covers a good and relevant point. That communities want to clarify who is part of the “in-crowd” and who is not. This is a role that inside jokes have always had. If you’re part of a group, then you have inside jokes that no one else understands, and there’s a feeling of community in that. Memes do this. My wife sees me laughing and asks why; then I find it difficult to explain 3 layers of reference in a meme (you have to know about the videogame and the political issue they’re referencing, as well as the fact that the meme is a variation of another meme…try explaining a derivative of a derivative of a “loss” meme and why that’s funny and why this story of miscarriage is funny).

Similarly the jokes look to exclude the undesirables. Boomer conservative memes do really well on Facebook and have no value in youth and liberal spaces. People do a lot of virtue signalling and display of values through memes.

We all love our memes, but essentially they’re all a bunch of dumb inside jokes. And the deeper you get inside a community, the more convoluted and weird the jokes get.

Well, I think of memes as online easily shareable references – text, images, videos, etc.

My favourite meme is definitely Loss, but I also love that one sniper copypasta.

What I like about memes is that it sets the stage with a single picture. You see Willy Wonka resting his head on his hand, and you instantly know the intended tone of the text.

Slap a troll face under a statement and suddenly everybody knows you aren’t being serious.

Memes instantly create the context for whatever you’re trying to express.

How to do memes?

Step 1: cut a hole in the box…

Seriously, memes are just a shared reference. It can even be a shared reference to itself, like most copy pasta. It’s a way to feel included and share an experience, opinion, and memory.

If an individual doesn’t find a meme funny, they probably just aren’t part of that in-group and that’s okay. Not everything is for everyone.

If you count widespread 90s jokes as memes the lady who got burnt by McDonalds coffee was seriously injured and and a dingo really did eat that woman’s baby.

Both are jokes in Seinfeld, S7 E2 and S10 E10 respectively. I feel like there’s a couple other examples of event-specific jokes not aging well in hindsight but I can’t remember them.

Meme is a one-shot less-effort message juggling objects, meaning and references to convey a feel, a joke, an idea or really whatever, more characterized by how it’s easy to share it (sometimes causing it spread like a virus) and canibalize it into another meme - just what social media needs. To succeed, a meme should be discernible by a target group, relevant to it and not contradicting itself. Due to how all sorts of multimedia are intertwined, nearly everything can become a meme or a meme material, but if the crowd don’t get, see it irrelevant or erroniously composed - it’s dead.

Best memes are usually organicly occuring first sources, e.g. videos of people doing awkward things (overly enthusiastic man drawing connections on a board), or best takes at interpreting them with added context (TFW you are explaining the minesweeper lore to your spouse), or best takes at repurposing them (your spouse is thankful you didn’t expose others to minesweeper lore at the extended family diner). And so it goes.

Worst memes are like jokes: you are either trying too hard, don’t know the audience (e.g. zoomers), try to promote your products or worldviews or just fail at composing a sensible message from the materials you use.

The easiest to understand proto-memes like emojies, stickers and reaction gifs aren’t that far from simplistic ragecomics of old, and characters from the latter found their way into the pool of the former ones. In the context, these reactions don’t need anything else to work and convey your simple opinion or idea. But the meme needs that context packaged-in to be understood when shared elsewhere to strangers, like rage comics were actually comics explaining why someone feels foreveralone or a smiling trollface in the end.

In the modern meme scene, there are layers over layers of added references, symbols, meanings and subversions, but their fast-food tier digestability is still the key of why they are here.

Anything can become memetic if not properly secured, contained and protected

I see it as a form of mass hysteria, similar to the dancing plagues in medieval europe, but less influenced by physical poisoning but of a mental one

A good meme is one that is based in truth (whether irl or in fiction) and is funny because of the irony or analogy.

Saying “skibidi toilet” on a picture is not a meme, it is a crime against memes.