• Hegar
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    6 months ago

    ‘Going Viral’ wasn’t a term yet and ‘Meme’ didn’t yet mean what it does today, but as someone who was a nerdy teen in the geocities era, this is the first thing I remember that started on the internet and reached a truly mass audience.

    Can anyone think of any earlier example of an internet meme going viral?

      • @Dasus
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        156 months ago

        Hampsterdance is from -98, dancing baby is -96.

    • @[email protected]
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      116 months ago

      Back when meme transmission was “hey, did you get that e-mail? I’ll forward it to you the next time I log on”

      • AwkwardLookMonkeyPuppet
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        56 months ago

        Back when your grandma would print out an email chain letter and bring it to your house.

      • ditty
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        46 months ago

        When I got this back in the day the subject line was something like:

        Fw: Fw: Re: Fw: Fw: ad infinitum

    • @danc4498
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      76 months ago

      This was from a time when people would send actual video files to random people over email and they would open it with no concern about viruses.

      • @[email protected]
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        76 months ago

        This feels a bit anachronistic. Email attachment size limitations were strict in the 90s, bandwidth was limited, and video codecs sucked. I don’t have strong memories of people forwarding realplayer videos. I don’t consider gifs and flash to be video, maybe that’s it?

        • @danc4498
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          16 months ago

          Doesn’t matter what format the file was in, people did not question opening attachments back then. And computers did very little to protect against malicious emails.

          • @[email protected]
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            36 months ago

            Those were the golden days of infecting people with Sub7. No antivirus, no firewalls. I’d get someone on AOL instant messenger by social engineering them to try out my “screensaver”, then pull their AIM login and buddy list, hit up someone from their buddy list, rinse and repeat.

    • Badger Badger was 2003, and it was the first thing I saw escape the confines of internet nerd-dom and go viral in office spaces. Dancing Baby was mid-90’s, so several years earlier, but I never saw it referenced out of the community of the terminally online. Heck, the web was still in it’s infancy in the mid-90’s.

      • @[email protected]
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        106 months ago

        It was on Ally McBeal and then in other mainstream media for years. It was the origin of the term “viral video”.

      • @samus12345
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        26 months ago

        Created in '99, went viral in 2011.