Every Meme Format Dies the Same Way, and You Can See It Coming

I watched several hundred meme formats pass through one community over six years, with timestamps, which is an unusual vantage point. They follow the same four stages with remarkable consistency, and knowing the stages makes it possible to tell, quite early, whether something has a month left or a year.

Stage one is the specific joke. A format begins as one post that is funny about one thing. At this point it is not a format; it is a joke. Most jokes stop here and that is the normal outcome.

Stage two is the recognition of structure. Somebody sees that the joke has a reusable shape — a contrast, a substitution, a particular rhythm — and makes a second one about a different subject. This is the moment a format is born, and it is the funniest period, because each new instance is a small discovery of what the shape can hold. The pleasure at this stage is genuinely about surprise: you know the frame and not the content.

Stage three is the point where the frame becomes the joke. Instances start being funny because they are the format rather than because of what is in them. Volume goes way up. Quality goes down and nobody minds yet, because the format itself is still carrying a residual charge. This is also, invariably, the stage at which it escapes the community it started in and shows up somewhere much larger.

Stage four is the reference to the format. People make jokes about the format being overused, and then jokes about those jokes, and at that point it is over. I have never seen anything recover from stage four.

The whole cycle used to take four to six months in the place I moderated. By the time I left it was more like six weeks, and I do not think that is nostalgia — I could see it in the posting data. My best explanation is that the recognition step in stage two used to require a person to notice something, and now the noticing is distributed across a much larger audience much faster, so the format is exhausted before most people have seen a good one.

The practical use of this, if there is one, is in knowing when a thing is worth participating in. If you are seeing a format for the first time and it is already everywhere, you are in stage three and anything you make will be volume. The interesting window is stage two, which is short and which you are only in if you are close to wherever it started.

The other observation, which I would offer to anyone who has felt something go stale and wondered if it was them: it is not you. The charge is a real property of the format and it does deplete, and the feeling of “this was funny two weeks ago and is not now” is an accurate perception of a change in the object, not a change in your sense of humour.