[dualvariable]

> All the stuff all these people post on X is just regurgitation of 4chan circa 2016.

You can trace a lot of what is wrong with 2026 back to the right-wing countercultural movement on 4chan, probably along with meme culture in general.

[cloverich]

it is weird how when i first heard of meme it was in the dawkins sense. then people showed me memes and i thought wtf this is just dumb jokes, what a weird transformation of the term (my understanding of it). Then i watched it become an actual vehicle for political ideology, "just jokes" when too far but real ideas the rest of the time.

The left rots from them and the right becomes more extreme and everyone is losing all the time. Meme-banning sites like HN and stackoverflow look brilliant in hindsight, to me, with them knowing what they were doing all along; and now there are so few havens from them.

I know this is also a trope, but id always hoped the human race would be consumed by something more sophisticated. But it seems like memes was all is took.

[dualvariable]

Yeah, I'm on a gaming Discord where the 30+ year-old game modders who run it had to ban memes. If you don't, you'll end up with 15-year-old kids spamming memes into channels because that's just how they "talk" online.

And the "meme police" who will complain about misusing meme formats seem really regressive and anti-creative to me. Some satirist should skewer all the young adults who think that meme formats need to be defended.

[I also read The Selfish Gene back in the 90s, long before memes were just jokes]