Memes are getting a reboot. Not like a Marvel-is-trying-to-make-Fantastic Four-happen-again reboot. More like a rewind. The Great Meme Reset of 2026, as it’s being called on TikTok, demands that on January 1 all memes revert to their 2010s glory days. Bland “brain rot” and AI-looking memes are out; Big Chungus is in.
As with anything on the internet, the origin of the Great Meme Reset is hard to place. Most sources point to a March post from TikTok user @joebro909 that called for a whole new generation of memes to save the platform from the “drought” that had engulfed it in the spring. The post said nothing of a January 1 launch date, or a return to the memes of the last decade, but the idea was planted. Now hundreds of posts are discussing the reboot—and a return to the internet’s “dank” era.
Which implies, of course, that memes lack dankness these days. If anything, Gen Z– and Gen Alpha–fueled internet culture has prided itself on somewhat meaningless content like “6 7” and absurdist, seemingly AI-generated “Italian brain rots,” but after nearly a year of memes with little humanity or depth, a backlash has begun.
Acting like 2010 is when internet memes were invented?? WAZZUP was 1999 and Viking Kittens were 2002. Remember FWD: FWD: FWD:?
I wanna go back to 90s internet. Fuck this commercialisation of internet. It’s all tiktok this and Facebook that. I miss when everyone had their own little corner of the net
Yep. Government/taxpayer funded access to the internet including funding fiber to the home just like we did with phone lines many decades ago, and putting back laws to enforce net neutrality. That way it’s cheap to run a server again. Right now most residential access has poor upload speeds so you have to pay for expensive, business priced plans to run a local server to compete with big corporations.
YA RLY
I can’t stop this feeling… Deep inside of me.
TikTok
I think you’re always going to have problems with a lack of authenticity on platforms where opaque algorithms do all the work of deciding what gets popular and what gets shown to who.
Meh, not gonna happen and we all know that
You can just go to neocities right now or https://piefed.social/f/smallweb and see it. Its fun!
Even if you’re in the camp that understands memes like “6 7” have more significance than they’re given credit for,
I think 6-7 is a shibboleth. It doesn’t say much on its own, except which group you belong to.
Substance, as ever, remains a relative notion. Nyan Cat perhaps didn’t have the substance of an Andy Warhol image
I’d argue the Nyan cat is more substantial than what Andy Warhol came up with.
If you want a great reset you’ll need a new internet that is outright hostile to corporate interests. No corposlop being produced there, no derailing old memes to sell you junk.
A new internet that’s outright hostile to corporate interests is what some of us are trying to build with nostr
The website is confusing me, can you try to explain this to me?
Nostr is an apolitical communication commons. A simple standard that defines a scalable architecture of clients and servers that can be used to spread information freely.
So it’s like ActivityPub?
anyone can build on Nostr and anyone can use it.
How is it accessed, do you need to connect to IP addresses, is there a url analogy or is it all on the ‘clearweb’ and another layer on top.
Why not revert to the Internet of the 1990s, before it was commercialized and before Internet became synonymous with Web Services?
Of course, the truth is, even back then, there were a lot of dark memes on Usenet.
Why not 2012?
For Kony.
Ahhh, yeah. Usenet. nostalgic sigh
I think in part because 90s Internet was before the majority of millennials were really heavily online. I’m an '88 millennial, and my childhood Internet was still early 2000s, mostly.
Stuff like IRCRizon and Limewire and Geocities and even Gaia Online over DSL, rather than BBSes over probably AOL dialup (I had that as a kid, but only as a very young kid, i.e. literal preteen.
Nyan cat and motivational poster memes are my golden age, not Usenet.
RIP Kevin Mitnick! Ghost in the Wires was a fun audiobook, and I really enjoyed the 2600 documentary Freedom Downtime when it was released.
Why not revert to the Internet of the 1990s, before it was commercialized
Because the idea is pushed on commercial platforms that would suppress the idea otherwise. There are probably more people spanning several generations wanting that internet back. After all that’s a comment you can read dozens of times a day. But you won’t see that message spread on the usual platforms and neither see other media pick up the story.
I mean, a temporary reset is possible, but nobody, myself included, wants that because it would involve destroying every single digital storage device and completely wiping away everything.
All we’d have is the memory of brainrot and AI… until everuthingngets rebuilt and status quo returns to normal.
memes are part of the dark days to me.
As if older memes were all meaningful. There’s nothing wrong with 6 7 itself. What’s 9 + 10?
910 is a pro CS2 player from Mongolian team The MongolZ /s
Too old for trump
