In September I saw a meme on a friend’s Facebook page that made me chuckle.
I copied it to my photos app and promptly forgot which page it was lifted from. A few days later, I was looking through my photos for another meme, and saw this. I thought, “Twitter needs to see this.” I posted it after dinner on a Saturday night when I was incredibly tired. I had worked a full shift at the food pantry and was plain tuckered out. I thought that five—maybe ten people would like the tweet and one person would retweet. Just after I posted it I remembered that it was the twentieth anniversary of 9-11, and I lowered my expectations to three likes, no retweets. I closed Twitter and went to bed early, because I had to work at 9 a.m. on Sunday morning.
I woke up, cleaned myself, ate a breakfast, then opened up the various social media apps, I was prepared to give Twitter just a cursory glance while I waited for the bus to appear. Somehow amidst all the 9-11 NEVER FORGET!!! AMERICA!!! USA!!! tweets, my little tweet struck a comedic nerve. Instead of three likes, I had thousands of them, hundreds of retweets, dozens of replies, and a handful of quote tweets.
I have 883 followers, 800 of which are bitcoin scammers, so it was clear that the tweet was being seen by people way outside of my normal pool of influence. I told Jennifer what was happening and even she was impressed—she has over 37.5k Twitter followers and regularly has tweets that post really high engagement numbers. She had not even liked or retweeted my tweet at this point, so the usual Captain Awkward dot com boost to my tweets had not been taken into account. Over the the next few days, the number of engagements doubled, then doubled again, and then grew until I had 20,000 likes, then 40,000, then 60,000, 80,000 and then it finally plateaued at 100,000. Two months later, it currently sits at 107.7k likes. Almost every day since that first week, someone likes it or retweets it. A trickle of engagements compared to the first few days, but considering that my second most popular tweet has 383 likes, it’s still a torrent. Here is where the tweet stands as I write this piece:
The truly insane number to me is that Twitter’s algorithm pushed this into over 4.5 million feeds, which means that this very well may be the most popular thing I ever do. Humbling to think that a stolen meme is the most cultural impact that I will probably ever have. I’m hopeful that I have something a bit more lasting to share with the world.
It really bothers me that I don’t remember where I found this meme. Before I sat down to write this, I decided to find out where this meme came from. The best I can tell it was originally a meme in a Facebook group called, “Dank Recovery Memes” from 2017. And it looked like this:
There is probably an older version than this somewhere, but I cannot seem to chase it down. Know Your Meme dot com does not have it in their archives, so it’s not going to be easy to find its history. If anyone knows, drop me a line. I want to credit the original poster—even better—the original graffitist. Especially if they are on Twitter.
I thought that it would be fun to share my little taste of internet clout with y’all. I never understand why some tweets get millions of likes while others get very few. I do not feel that I am any closer to understanding this. Now here’s a tweet that deserves to go massively viral:
On a more serious note, I’m thinking of leaving Substack. It has a real Nazi problem. I realize that WordPress and other blogging sites also have a Nazi problem, but Substack is run by a very small team, and their founder Hamish McKenzie could de-platform the Nazis easily, instead of coddling and promoting them. I have a very bad taste in my mouth about this site. It’s not just the Nazi problem—there are practical problems as well. I won’t go into all of them, but the built-in text editor is just abysmal. I am sure that they think that it is streamlined, but it is utterly stripped of utility. There is not an undo button for goodness’ sake! I have paid subscribers, so I’m not jumping ship just yet, but if anyone has suggestions on how to get out of this place cleanly, I’m all ears.
Thank you, as always, for reading.
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