When, precisely, did "meme" go from meaning something more amorphous than a picture with words on it, to a picture with words on it?

I remember visiting memepool.com daily, back in '99 or 2000. It was kind of a proto-BoingBoing or something -- it seemed to curate smartly whatever was happening on the webbernet at that moment. A lot of links to metafilter iirc. Whether it was a video, an image, a story, or just a weird web page, these were all considered "memes". I wonder how memepool would have defined the term at the time. What did the word mean to you?

I guess the shift came shortly after FB exploded, and the pic-with-words that you'd find on 4chan and reddit starting making it onto FB walls. So 2008-9?

One question is, what do you call a meme, these days, that isn't a picture with words on it??

Facebook circa 2012? 2013?

when the Decepticons invaded?

honestly today's concept of memes are just so horrible that I tend to spend more time laughing about some bullshit I saw on Herman's Head years ago, that way nobody has to laugh with me.

You call it a meme. You just have to tell the kids you're not talking about an image macro.

Lolcats were the first pic + words memes that I remember through an ILE thread from May 2007

I yelled at so many clouds when I first started seeing meme used this way

I remember when a meme was an idea that spread throughout society.:(

lolcats were def the inflection point

xp Sund4r otm

it's a richard dawkins joint

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meme

it's reverting back toward its original meaning

now it's a turd that spreads throughout society

I taught 8th grade French last year, and at one point a student quoted back to me something mildly funny I'd said a few months before. I was startled that she remembered it and she said it was one of the big memes of her grade that year.

when I was in a production of High School Musical, I was the second oldest person in the cast, and everyone was whining that this show had less "memes" than previous shows that most of the performers had been in. I didn't know what they meant, but then I started reading the posts in the FB group that I'd been summarily been ignoring and almost everything was just some shitty GIF that someone lazily posted white block text over with some stupid catch-phrase that was probably some in-joke that only two people found funny.

I think some people think meme actually means "bite-sized, inside baseball joke that isn't really funny that you'll call back to in 9 years because this is comedy now"

my least favorite version of this now is I guess screencaps of stupid Tumblr/Reddit convos where someone comes up with a mediocre pun and three hypemen go nuts over it in response

FWIW, the search term "meme" has very little traction on Google until about 2010, when it starts to rise gradually, and then there's a more obvious jump in traffic around the beginning of 2012.

peaked in late 2016 and basically flat since then

the picture with text in impact font format used to be called 'image macros' back in the day

Always thought a meme was when a video or image is used and altered in a way to fit other situations on the internet. The key part is that the vid/image is always used differently, but keeps it's original abstract theme so to speak. Hence then the vid/image becomes a meme because every time you see it on the internet it's been changed in a unique way. That's a crappy long way to describe how I thought a meme was.

It's seems now that a meme is just a 'joke', that happens to be on the internet.

for instance, remember the image of arshavin that ilx used to paste onto other images? In my mind that was a good meme.

the only good meme iirc

karl malone otm. the original question would have been an accurate description of... 2010 maybe? harlem shake was 2013. 'meme' now is just any small snackable #content that is jumping on a particular format popularised elsewhere

https://i.telegraph.co.uk/multimedia/archive/02539/arshavin_2539197b.jpg

^^ a Ken C. original iirc