>>1230655Memes aren't dead.
You see.
At the core, a meme is just a shared thought, idea, memory or association within a group of people. These people can decide who belongs in the group and who doesn't based on if they share those thought patterns. It's a tribalistic psychologial phenomenon and for that it's very powerful and effective, and from a psychological standpoint a meme can be any idea a group shares in such a way.
And in that vein, it's understandable why 4chan was the place where most internet memes originate. These boards lack general user identification features most forums and other communication channels have, there are no post histories, member-since dates, usernames, perks, user classes, signatures, karma or post counters. This leaves the userbase of anonymous boards with no software-enabled way to identify who is in the in-group and who isn't.
Instead, anonymous groups create memes. If a poster understands and replies in kind to your meme, he is one of your own and safe to interact with. If he doesn't understand a meme you call him a newfag and tell him to GTFO. You can tell who belongs and who doesn't.
Now, with the meme heavy culture of 4chan and outside attention, some unfortunate idiot mistook the form of identification on 4chan for the main content of the site. This is easily the saddest moment of internet culture, because the ones thinking that memes were the main content exported them to those memegenerator sites you have the full right to hate and made them useless for group identification. You know very well how memes went to shit over the years when they became popular outside your group, and the tribal funtion of memes is the reason your opinion went that way.
So, it isn't so much that memes are dead, it's just that the ones your groups used to identify with are and the group is under constant survellance making it impossible to create any new ones.
Also, remember that the process of verifying people by memes is entirely subconscious.
