It's just nostalgia. In 2010 reddit was nothing but image macros and le rage comics, and it was 99% garbage.
It's still barely limping along. For a while, if you wanted some quality cringe content, you could get it by scraping the bottom of the barrel there.
There cannot be people who still find those entertaining in 2023 can there? I don’t want to go on reddit to check
I have to disagree. Zoomers are freaking wild and a hoot!
I am however thoroughly concerned for the attention span of the next "generation" (even though there's no big population boom creating these generations anymore) since they seem to devour content involving 2 unrelated videos plus an unrelated audio track, or if it is a single video it's so fast paced and bombastic it honestly makes me need a nap afterwards. They take in such a firehose of content it's scary
Old memes weren't better, you're just getting the ones people liked so much they saved. It's distilled meme content, only leaving the best, most flavorful™️ memes
That's how I heard someone describe watching reboots of old TV shows and movies.
New content, but require less mental energy to get into.
...also probably why our parents listen to "golden oldies" radio stations.
I don't think either is "better" they are just different and it's OK to like one over the other.
This is a really good point, and I'd like to add that older memes, such as the ones that we are revisiting as a community, seemed to be more cohesive and less fracturing to the entirety of the internet community once upon a time. As the internet grew and became more diverse in platforms, so did the memes, creating fractures. It's almost like the internet became the Tower of Babel with meme, these olds ones just remind us of a more unified internet.
AdviceAnimals was the place where it all started for me. It was definitely better than what we have had for quite some time. I bet older templates were used so much that people didn't have new ideas of how to use them anymore. So the quality of the captions went down, more and more people used them incorrectly and they were dropped altogether for f@#d%g screenshots
Memes got overly political. I liked when it was all jokes, but around 2016 the world split into extremes, COVID pushed that even further, and now we can't talk about anything else on the internet
I'm with you. I enjoyed older memes much more than what's coming out now. Maybe I'm just getting older and set in my ways....