Ask Lemmy

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.