Early 2000-2010

I keep thinking that maybe it's me who has changed, but then I look at content from that period and I get the same feeling for that era. You know how there are eras in our history like the romanticism, the renaissance etc? Well maybe that has carried over to the internet, and because it's the internet and not an asocial world we're seeing rapid change between eras?

I think we should name them

These are just placeholders:
Era of lolcats (early internet)
Age of dank memes 2015-?

Examples of the two eras' content:
Alternatively ever since about 1900s the times have progressed so fast we're seeing the annual change in the course of a decade (think 80s vs 90s vs 00s). Or maybe every era has had these sort of checkpoints but we're only aware of the 1900s because of better documentation.

Boxy died, and with her our cultural identity perished, so now we must inject dank ironic maymays to cope, and like any addict, our tolerance rises and we must find new layers of irony as we try to appease the lord Kek to return our queen to us.

What will be the next step tho?

Things don't stay the same. First we have stupidity "I can haz cheezburger?"
Then we have ironic stuff
Then it shifted slightly and we're currently having serious stuff like depression being at the centerlight

What's next? Could it be that the next thing we're gonna have is straight edge content?

ignoramus->smartass->sadboy->Straight-edge?
I mean, let's face it, Verbatim is kickstarting the next step of the interwebs

We've moved into a new era of post-post-ironic content. People may find it difficult to spot, but we're here. Some have even ascended to post-post-post-irony.

Memes as we knew them died in the late 2000s because they became more widespread in mainstream culture. What was funny to /b/tards in 2004 had only become funny to normies four or five years later, long after the meme's expiration date. No one likes that one guy who arrives late to the party and starts telling old jokes--it's lame. Or, to the Internet, "cancerous."

But the damage is done--the bastardized perception meme culture by normalfags has been marinating in the normie zeitgeist for several years now, which has brought about the perpetuation of Facebook-tier image macro abuse (the exact point at which "meme" lost its original meaning), Minions, and beyond-cringeworthy shit like "Damn Daniel" and other godawful crap.

We're at a point where "normie" memes are becoming normier, and 4chan memes are becoming more ironic, cynical, and abstract in counterpoint. The sick sense of irony in memes like Pepe, dat boi, etc. are a testament to that, and I predict that they're only going to get worse and worse.

I just hope the idea of an "internet meme" dies soon. They're just jokes now. Funny pictures. That's all they need to be.

The internet much like major cities has joined the globalised world therefore no culture exists

post ironic movement that went against the memes found funny by social media normies

i believe that internet culture is recursive, as evident by the increasingly blurred line between irony and non-irony in memes

The memes have betrayed us, we must go underground.

Only when the normies have moved on can we return to the promised land.

I'd say meme culture as we know it today started around 2012-2013 when everything started to become ironic. Though with the advent of Kek and meme magic I think we may be entering the realm of post-irony.

Dude, use a spoiler to contain large images

Thank you

I remember internet culture in the mid-2000s being much more abrasive, juvenile, and centered around obscene trolling pranks (e.g., Habbo Hotel pool blocking, raids on other sites, sending pizzas and limos to people's houses late at night, prank calling into radio stations). That kind of stuff seemed to define internet culture in the past.