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from the more-reason-for-cats-to-hate-you dept.
Cats on the internet are over. Done. "Cheezburgers" are off the menu. Play yourself out, Keyboard Cat.
While in years past we've perhaps welcomed the charming cynicism of the likes of Grumpy Cat, it seems people of the internet are now, in stranger times, longing instead for the unconditional and unwavering love of dogs - and I [the BBC's Dave Lee] have the highly subjective data to prove it.
[...] Socialbakers is a company that monitors social media for trends and stats relating to things that are most popular. I got in touch with them about this, and within hours they came back to me with the goods.
For starters, the runaway champion of most popular animal on Facebook is a dog named Boo. He's got more than 17.5m likes, more than double that of his closest competitor, Grumpy Cat.
In third place, Nyan Cat - who isn't even a real cat, for crying out loud.
On Instagram, fine, I'll admit, the top celebrity is a cat. But 2nd, 3rd and 4th place? All dogs. All good dogs.
When it comes to searches on Google, dogs .
But more significant was the historic moment on 3 January 2016, when, for the first time, the term "cute dogs" overtook "funny cats" in global searches.
[...] You could say there's plenty of data out there to suggest that I'm wrong, and that cats are still very much in control. And you'd be right - I found plenty evidence which completely disproves the theory I've outlined here, but I've left it out as I don't care.
There was one piece from Gizmodo in 2015 that suggested there were scientific reasons to why cat memes were more popular online - but to that I say WRONG. Fake meows.
For my part, I tend to prefer pictures of Lego figures or stick people.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 23 2017, @04:05PM
I think they're derivative from an overbearing culture of relentless marketing. They certainly bear a immediate physical relationship to advertising: Often-unrelated picture, low content text.
A lot of them aren't funny. A handful are outright hilarious. Maybe you're just too enlightened. Maybe that last part was sarcasm on my part.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by GreatAuntAnesthesia on Monday January 23 2017, @04:52PM
I also think it has something to do with information saturation and collective social knwoledge. When you see the same arguments going around and around again, and when the arguments and counter arguments (or the pieces thereof) are all so well known by all parties, there seems little point retyping a your well-reasoned rebuttal in full. It sometimes pays to have an quick "shorthand" to express complex ideas in a more compact form. Also, a picture paints a thousand words, as they say, and sometimes an image of Captain Picard doing a facepalm, or of Inigo Montoya with the caption "I do not think that means what you think it means", or an amusing "KILL IT WITH FIRE" pic can express in one img tag what it might take two paragraphs to type - particularly for those who lack the literary skills to express exactly what they are thinking or feeling[1]. Many memes (or image macros, to be more specific) fill these niches nicely.
Fark, when it was at it's rotten stinking zenith, was a great example of image macros used effectively.
[1] Though that's not to say that the use of image macros necessarily indicates a lack of writing skills.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Phoenix666 on Monday January 23 2017, @08:18PM
I used to think that we would eventually be reduced to communicating with successors to emoticons, but then I watch old Dennis Miller sketches and say, 'nah, nobody will ever get all the references.'
Washington DC delenda est.