/r/Memes

About

Reddit's /r/Memes is a subreddit where users post and comment on both mainstream and dank memes in exchange for karma, awards and designation as one of three "memes of the week." memes from /r/memes are some of the most frequently reposted to other subreddits, Twitter meme accounts and Instagram meme pages. The subreddit is the largest meme-oriented community of its kind on the site and is a frequent source of new formats, as well as reposts.

History

The subreddit was originally created on July 5th, 2008. As of July 2021, it is the most popular meme subreddit with over 16 million members.^[1] In comparison, the other top meme subreddits, /r/dankmemes and /r/adviceanimals, have approximately 5.4 million and 9.4 million members, respectively. At the time, it helped expand upon the internet's definition of meme, which was often perceived to be more rigid in early years due to the popularity of template-reliant Advice Animals. The subreddit's description is as follows:

Memes! A way of describing cultural information being shared. An element of a culture or system of behavior that may be considered to be passed from one individual to another by nongenetic means, especially imitation.

Highlights

At first, /r/memes consisted almost entirely of external links to memes and YouTube videos, most of which have since been deleted. By 2011, the first salvageable memes can be found on the subreddit. Posted by u/BeanoFTW^[2] on December 28th, 2011, this meme (seen below) is one of the first and received 46 likes and 12 comments in six months (at the time, this was a large number setting it apart from other posts on the subreddit).

The most upvoted post of all time on /r/memes is this meme (seen below) posted by u/rextraneous on June 7th, 2020.^[3] It received over 303,000 upvotes and 3,060 comments in six months and also became one of the top awarded comments on the subreddit, with over 2,000 Reddit awards given.

Conflicts with Instagram Memers

Similar to /r/dankmemes and its war in 2019, /r/memes is notorious for its conflict with Instagram meme pages due to the widely held belief that they repost its memes without credit to the original posters. This also spawned the Reddit I Stole It Watermark in 2019.

Before 2019, this was a particularly hot topic where Redditors would accuse these pages of causing new meme formats and templates to go normie by exposing them to a more mainstream audience. Between the years of 2016 and 2019, meme wars were common on the subreddit, creating memes that were made to specifically call out Instagram users. Many memes on /r/memes were also watermarked with anti-Instagram messages to prevent "meme stealing." For example, this 2019 meme (seen below) by u/ZenWuz^[4] received over 21,800 upvotes and 88 comments in six months.

Search Interest

External References