YMMV / Know Your Meme

• Broken Base:
  • When the site saw a rise in individual articles pertaining to well known internet fetishes, there were some users wondering if the creation of the individual pages was necessary when the general "Internet Paraphilia" page already existed, and others defending the pages by stating that said fetishes have a significantly large enough presence in places like online art communities to justify individualized articles.
  • When Joel of the streaming group Vinesauce got a page on the site, he later voiced his displeasure at the article by saying it was "really shitty." Users on the site who are fans of Joel tried to then apologize for the quality of the article, while others said that, while Joel has every right to voice his displeasure, the way in which he was voicing said displeasure came off as needlessly hostile towards the site itself (even some of the site's own mods felt Joel wasn't handling the situation well, with one mod pointing out that Joel sent an email to the admins that was nothing but complaining with no suggestions on how to fix the article).
  • Many articles pertaining to feminism, or general social justice activities. The admins understandably want to stay neutral, but a number of comments from either side seem to want to start a Flame War.
  • An article regarding "controversies" relating to the game Fire Emblem Fates has been met with many different responses. Some simply don't care about the entire thing, some think the controversy is a big enough deal to try and resurrect a certain specific subset of the userbase that's been rather controversial on the site since late 2014, while some others mock the latter group for things like creating strawman arguments and for generally blowing the entire subject in question way out of proportion.
  • Controversies themselves have become a major point of contention, primarily between the moderators and users. Those in support of controversy-related entries cite how KnowYourMeme is meant to catalog notable internet phenomenon, of which controversies are a part. Those against the articles, however, describe them as forced and as a sign of Network Decay (as the site's name is "KnowYourMeme") and point out the correlation between the increase in controversy-related articles and a steady drop in site visitation.
  • The website's reaction image gallery was later closed after too many users ignored a rule stating that reaction images relating to a movie/tv show/video game/meme that had an entry on the website (such as Pokémon or Ed, Edd n Eddy) should be put in the appropriate entry rather than the reaction image gallery. Some users understood the reasoning behind the gallery's closing and owned up to any rule-breaking they had caused. Others thought it was Disproportionate Retribution and accused the mods of making a mountain out of a molehill. Similar debates also exist to some extent with the Ruined Childhood gallery and other popular galleries that closed as well.
• Fandom Rivalry:
  • Due to the Vocal Minority opinion on feminism or social justice topics, a number of commenters have little tolerance for the social justice spheres on Tumblr or Twitter and other such sites.
  • Due to the elsewhere-mentioned dislike for soyjak memes, KYM has a rivalry with the now-defunct /qa/ and its Spiritual Successor website soyjak.party (a website that's exactly what it sounds like). The board often prepared raids against KYM where they would spam soyjak memes, to the point that /qa/nons are practically The Usual Adversaries for KYM gallery moderators.
  • At least on KYM users' end, there seems to be an attempt as fostering one with Reddit, with several trending posts mocking the stereotype of Reddit users being incompetent neckbeards. Reddit however very rarely talks about them, so there isn't much attention coming from Reddit to further that rivalry yet.
• Fan Nickname: "Know Your Fetish" and "Know Your Trump", phrases that users jokingly throw around to make fun of the site's wide amount of articles covering fetish and 2016 Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump, respectively. "Know Your Controversy" is also popular in regards to the number of articles covering online scandals.
• Friendly Fandoms: Due to their focus on memes, the site gets a lot of overlap with the various Imageboards, Imgur, and other such sites. This Very Wiki being among them. Tumblr seems to be on-and-off, but it's leaning more towards the "off" side.
• Growing the Beard: There's usually a substantial increase in quality before an article is confirmed.
• Memetic Mutation: While the site attests that it only documents memes and doesn't create them, the community has developed a number of in-jokes over the years:
  • Goat-tan^Explanation The community-given name to the goat protagonist of a bestiality hentai that came to prominence on the site following the posting of several pages edited to make the goat unusually enthusiastic about Battletoads rather than... you know. The sheer absurdity of the edits caused them to stick with the site's users, leading the goat to be frequently brought up in jokes revolving around bestiality or Battletoads.
  • Super Robo Jesus^Explanation A notoriously poorly-made article made in an attempt to create a Forced Meme; the article has become the site's de-facto example of bad article writing, and has become so iconic for its poor quality that the site has reached a consensus to leave it untouched.
  • KnowYourMeme is a softcore porn site^Explanation The site sees a rather large amount of sexually suggestive images uploaded onto it on a daily basis. While there are regulations that prevent users from uploading anything actually explicit (i.e., tits or genitals) or bordering on such, the NSFW material on the site is frequently suggestive enough to qualify as light erotica. Obviously, this hasn't gone unnoticed, and jokes about KYM experiencing Network Decay by focusing more on erotic material aren't uncommon.
  • KnowYourFetish/KnowYourControversy^Explanation Common joke names given to KYM, in reference to the high number of articles regarding weird online fetishes and sociopolitical controversies
  • Cortex the Forbidden One^Explanation A Running Gag among site users that started to gain traction in early 2020. Originally a picture of Dr. Neo Cortex (specifically from Crash Twinsanity) with a shit-eating grin and his giant N on his forehead fully visible, it started being used as a euphemistic implication for an infamous racial slur starting with the letter N. Then, people started editing the N on Cortex's forehead with different letters, and subsequently using those edits and the original image to spell out words, whether they be the aforementioned bad word, or something else entirely, like "ginger" (complete with Cortex getting a ginger hair color makeover). The gallery containing the images ended up trending on the top of the site's top galleries for quite a while, and it currently remains a fan favorite.
  • Poochyena^Explanation A notorious former user of the site infamous for their contrarian arguments with other users, which frequently entailed them repeatedly derailing conversations by arguing about minor semantic discrepancies. This, combined with their apparent Creator's Pet status among the site's administrators, led to Poochy gaining so much infamy that when they finally got banned in 2020 for vandalizing articles to complain about the site's policy against pornographic content, they instantly turned into a punchline among other users as the archetypal bad KnowYourMeme user.
• Replacement Scrappy: Twitter fads and hashtag movements eventually began replacing Advice Animals as the run-of-mill "meme" of the week, to the point some users expressed less hatred toward the few AAs that did appear.
• Rescued from the Scrappy Heap: Any meme that manages to get itself un-deadpooled has achieved this. Bad Luck Brian and Marauder Shields are two good examples.
• They Changed It, Now It Sucks!:
  • After KYM changed hands from Rocketboom to Cheezburger, a good portion of the userbase reacted negatively.
  • Similarly, the site's ground-up redesign at the start of 2021 was met with so much contention that the official Discord server added a channel specifically to track recurring issues people have with it.

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