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Meet the cast.

Know Your Meme, known by many as the de facto central repository for information on internet memes and culture, is an internet series created by the Rocketboom Institute for Internet Studies, in which resident scientists Kenyatta Cheese (aka Yatta), Elspeth Jane (aka Ellie Rountree), and now-retired Jamie Wilkinson (aka Jamie Dubs) tackle on to provide general history of internet memes as well as to try and explain what exactly makes them memetic.

Older episodes were made Just for Fun and all the research was done by the KYM staff themselves. But over time, the Know Your Meme website was created and most of the research is now done there. On the site, anyone can submit a basic meme article (akin to That Other Wiki), which, if the subject is deemed notable, is subsequently researched and expanded. Later on, the site was bought by the Cheezburger Network.

Also, since entries on Know Your Meme work on an entirely different principle than here on TV Tropes, you can expect them to touch on topics that would otherwise be too controversial or unsafe for us to talk about, making them a good site to get a second opinion from.

And yes, let it be known that they also have a page on us.

Confirmed memes on Know Your Meme that also have a TV Tropes Page:

    Tropes 

    Works/Other 

Know Your Meme Provides examples of:

  • April Fools' Day:
    • On April 1st 2012, you could "buy" memes. Supposedly with real money, but the next day both orders and bills were canceled
    • On April 1st, 2013, the site claimed that the main tubular system was down and that the database could only process memes that predated the Internet. All confirmed memes were still available under a separate "Deadpooled" section.
    • On April 1st, 2014, users could vote to "retire" old memes through the Internet Meme Retirement Program. At the end of the day, 30 pages were deemed "retired".
    • On April 1st, 2015, the Cringeworthy Gallery was reopened (but anyone who posted in it was given a 24-hour "ban" as part of the joke), entries for Don and Super Robo Jesus were confirmed, and the entry for the controversy that shall not be named was Deadpooled claiming that the SJWs have sued the website. The cursor was replaced with the Illuminati All-Seeing Eye triangle and sometimes, the usernames and profile pictures were replaced by variations on Don.
    • April 1 2016 featured "Elect Your Meme" in which users voted on which memetic person/article to elect the first ever Meme President of the Unitinu. The McDonald's Moon Man character was declared the winner. An entry moderator also began uploading articles like those usually churned out by people attempting to "create" memes or generally not putting any effort into them.
    • April Fools Day 2017 featured the release of the Meme Exchange, a stock exchange for memes that could be purchased with KYM-Coins and that flew or crashed based on how many users bought them with the 100 KYM Coins they started with.
    • April Fools Day 2018 saw the introduction of MemeX, a titanium lunar vault designed to protect the dank memes from the normies that people could submit pictures and videos to.
    • April Fools Day 2020 saw the site be completely retooled into "Know Your Pickle", a website dedicated to Pickle Rick Shitposting.
    • April Fools Day 2021 featured the site users "waking up from a nine-year coma" to find that the site had returned to 2012 internet memes.
  • Ascended Meme: Bad Luck Brian's perennial status as a "Submission" despite being one of the more well known memes. Its official image even reads "Submission Forever."
  • The Cameo: "Weird Al" Yankovic appears in one episode to explain how auto-tune gained memetic status.
  • Cleavage Window: the Keyhole Turtleneck article discusses a sweater that invokes the trope and has become popular as fanservice clothing.
  • Cringe Comedy: The (locked) Cringeworthy gallery collects images of examples of this.
  • Fetish: January 2015 saw a rise in the creation of individualized articles for some of the internet's more popular/infamous fetishes, including Body Inflation, Vore, Macrophilia/Microphilia, and Transformation.
  • Fist Pump: "Success Kid" pumps his little fist, celebrating his achievement.
  • Forced Meme: As with above, you get these every now and then.
  • For Science!: The Numa Numa Dance episode starts with one of the researchers saying this.
  • Hurricane of Puns: Some image and video uploads can end up attracting comments that basically become a constant flow of puns of variable quality.
  • It Will Never Catch On:
    • Many comments posted on the Bad Luck Brian entry when the meme was first taking off were of this nature.
    • Conspiracy Keanu as well. Just check out the disparity between the first and second top voted pictures.
  • Kangaroo Court: The journey to getting a meme confirmed can go from smooth to very skewed. For example, the Nope! Chuck Testa page has gotten boatloads of research, over 1,000,000 views, 10,000,000 views for the commercial itself on Youtube, and its own video from the site admins, but went unconfirmed for three months anyway because of its recent release.
  • Let Us Never Speak of This Again: The general attitude towards the Cringeworthy page and the rather messy history behind it.
  • Mascot:
    • Deadpool has become the site's unofficial one, since the term for rejecting false memes is "deadpooled".
    • KYM-tan (the girl on the NSFW and Spoiler banners) has become another mascot. She has even been declared the site's official waifu.
  • Memetic Mutation: The website helps people know their memes. That should be quite obvious. (There are lots of other places where people can go to know their memes, but this is one of the few SFW ones.)invoked However, there are a few site-specific memes that show up from time to time.
    • Deadpool, to the point where he was deadpooled even though he was actually confirmed (and is, in fact, listed in the confirmed memes section).
    • Super Robo Jesus. The users love it when this trends, but they make the moments special by not forcing it to happen.
    • Don, the site admin, whom the site-goers love to poke fun at for "meme-ing everything he sees."
    • Particle Mare, one of the more well-respected members, for constantly creating articles related to the various pony memes roaming the internet.
    • The Cringeworthy gallery gave way to some in-website memes during its run on the website, such as an MSPaint drawing of an alien with long fingernails saying "Time to killed people", a picture of two Sonic the Hedgehog OCs with one tiredly saying "I need blood" as the other OC insists that they take hers, and the infamous "Herculoon", a drawing of Hercules with the proportions of a beach ball. However, the closing of the Cringeworthy gallery saw the popularity of these memes plummet, as they became symbols of how much of a mess the website became during the Cringeworthy period.
    • The scoring points system noted below is rather ubiquitous among site users, due to its easy way of keeping track of user opinions of a particular submission.
  • Network Decay: People in the comments have been concerned that the site is starting to drift too much into a news site, especially in relation to the Occupy Wall Street movement and the United States election, or into a fads website displaying every trend on Reddit, Tumblr, and hashtags that trend on Twitter. For a more literal example, many on the userbase have pointed out the drastic decline of many older users in recent months, a commonly-made point being that it might relate to all the previously stated points.
  • Nice Job Breaking It, Hero: An article trends based on the amount of users commenting on it. If the article is something horrific or disgusting, users will complain about the article trending... by commenting on it, therefore keeping the article trending. This is often lampshaded, and has reached a point where article writers openly ask commenters to comment about the content of said articles rather than the fact that they're trending.
  • Scoring Points: "+1 confirm", "+1 wait", or "+1 deadpool" are the commenters' terms for approval, hesitance, and rejection of an article. Note though, that these points don't actually do anything. They're just the commenters' way of voicing their opinion. Sometimes they'll be even something nonsensical, like "+1 potato".
  • Self-Demonstrating Article: Many of the videos about a meme would also demonstrate the meme in question. Deadpool's page is also deadpooled.
  • Serious Business: Memes. Especially Internet memes. Because Internet is Serious Business.
  • Shaped Like Itself: Deadpool's page is deadpooled. The humor of this has not gone unnoticed. Deadpool's page has been listed as "Researching" despite still being Deadpool, and it even has a pretty nice new page header made by Marvel execs themselves. It would seem even the site admins noticed as well.
  • Shown Their Work: As the result of trope above, Memes are RESEARCHED AND CATEGORIZED!
  • "Well Done, Son" Guy: The KYM community tends to be this towards 4chan, simply wanting to be loved by them. Reddit likes them, but only a fair number of users care. It does happen, from time to time.

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