this post was submitted on 16 May 2024
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Antique Memes Roadshow

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Giving you the backstory and appraisals of vintage memes!

Submissions should be vintage memes or commentary about vintage memes. Commenters are advised to appraise the internet value and provenance meme antiquities.

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[–] Hegar@kbin.social 38 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (7 children)

'Going Viral' wasn't a term yet and 'Meme' didn't yet mean what it does today, but as someone who was a nerdy teen in the geocities era, this is the first thing I remember that started on the internet and reached a truly mass audience.

Can anyone think of any earlier example of an internet meme going viral?

[–] TheFriar@lemm.ee 17 points 5 months ago (1 children)
[–] Dasus@lemmy.world 15 points 5 months ago

Hampsterdance is from -98, dancing baby is -96.

[–] mydoomlessaccount@infosec.pub 11 points 5 months ago (2 children)

Back when meme transmission was "hey, did you get that e-mail? I'll forward it to you the next time I log on"

[–] Anticorp@lemmy.world 5 points 5 months ago

Back when your grandma would print out an email chain letter and bring it to your house.

[–] dditty@lemm.ee 4 points 5 months ago

When I got this back in the day the subject line was something like:

Fw: Fw: Re: Fw: Fw: ad infinitum

[–] danc4498@lemmy.world 7 points 5 months ago (1 children)

This was from a time when people would send actual video files to random people over email and they would open it with no concern about viruses.

[–] deranger@sh.itjust.works 7 points 5 months ago (1 children)

This feels a bit anachronistic. Email attachment size limitations were strict in the 90s, bandwidth was limited, and video codecs sucked. I don’t have strong memories of people forwarding realplayer videos. I don’t consider gifs and flash to be video, maybe that’s it?

[–] danc4498@lemmy.world 1 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Doesn’t matter what format the file was in, people did not question opening attachments back then. And computers did very little to protect against malicious emails.

[–] deranger@sh.itjust.works 3 points 5 months ago

Those were the golden days of infecting people with Sub7. No antivirus, no firewalls. I’d get someone on AOL instant messenger by social engineering them to try out my “screensaver”, then pull their AIM login and buddy list, hit up someone from their buddy list, rinse and repeat.

[–] Rolando@lemmy.world 5 points 5 months ago
[–] sxan@midwest.social 3 points 5 months ago (2 children)

Badger Badger was 2003, and it was the first thing I saw escape the confines of internet nerd-dom and go viral in office spaces. Dancing Baby was mid-90's, so several years earlier, but I never saw it referenced out of the community of the terminally online. Heck, the web was still in it's infancy in the mid-90's.

[–] mark3748@sh.itjust.works 10 points 5 months ago

It was on Ally McBeal and then in other mainstream media for years. It was the origin of the term “viral video”.

[–] Anticorp@lemmy.world 2 points 5 months ago

Dancing baby made the news and I think it was even in a movie or two.

[–] MonkderDritte@feddit.de 1 points 5 months ago (1 children)

The trumpeting skull was later?

[–] samus12345@lemmy.world 2 points 5 months ago

Created in '99, went viral in 2011.