>>2820060First off, memes as they manifest on anonymous boards are a way for the members of an anonymous community to recognize each other. There are no usernames or member-since counters, so the same purpose is filled by testing the memory and associations of the people around you. People who get your memes are your people. This is also why a meme will be considered dead if it becomes too widespread, it loses it's utility.
So when an outsider comes to a community that signals by memes, it's easy for them to mistake the memes as the primary content of the website. They copy what they see elsewhere, so the websites they create are primarily for ``memes''.
There's a little issue here though. The memes don't actually have any content to them. They're a signaling method for their host community.
Luckily, there is a trend that's traded seemingly similalry to memes on this anonymous websire. Or a couple of them. Image macros, and demotivational posters, comics, among others. While they might fill that meme definition in part, they often carry a more literal idea in them too. The text is important, because it can communicate things to people unfamiliar with the origin culture.
So these things get smashed together to form the memegenerator definition of an internet ``meme". To the outsider who seeked to capitalize on the humor traded on these boards, the things seemed like the same in the first place. So shop is set up to generate these image macros while calling them memes, and what do you know...
The internet really likes dumb shit like that. The internet is also far too large for a homogenous community where actual memes can survive or be useful. And most of them have never heard of the terms 'meme' or 'image macro' before. The latter they'll probably never hear either.
And that's how and why that happened. The larger internet has no use for actual memes, and because that prevents them from understanding the nature of memes, they don't know they're abusing the term.
