Profiles of three current and one former volunteer moderator of KnowYourMeme, a Brooklyn-based website explaining the internet's inside jokes
Jonah Engel Bromwich / New York Times : Tweets: @nytimesbusiness and @nytstyles Tweets: @nytimesbusiness : The website KnowYourMeme is a mostly reliable, crowdsourced translator of the internet's inside jokes. http://www.nytimes.com/... NYT Styles / @nytstyles : Know Your Meme, a wiki for memes, is run with the help of a dedicated group of moderators called the Meme Council. http://www.nytimes.com/...
Context & Ripple Effects
KnowYourMeme has spent over a decade documenting viral content, and its editorial backbone is partly unpaid: a dedicated group of moderators known as the Meme Council. The New York Times putting four of them — three current, one former — in print is a rare look at the human layer behind a crowdsourced reference that most of the internet treats as ambient infrastructure.
The profile lands mid-arc for the site: a 2022 conversation with editor-in-chief Don Caldwell would later describe KnowYourMeme as a fifteen-year-old encyclopedia with ten full-time editorial staff, meaning the volunteers profiled here sit atop what became a hybrid volunteer-plus-professional operation.
First-order effects
- The Meme Council gains mainstream legitimacy: moderators whose work is usually invisible get named, individual recognition from a national outlet, raising the public profile of KnowYourMeme itself.
Second-order effects
- The story normalizes volunteer moderation as reportable labor, putting a spotlight on similar unpaid crews elsewhere — like the thousands of TranscribersOfReddit volunteers writing accessibility transcriptions for memes and videos.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, internet-culture archives consolidate around hybrid models where small paid editorial teams curate large volunteer workforces — making the sustainability and burnout of unpaid moderators a structural question for any site built on crowdsourced knowledge.
The trend: Internet culture is being preserved by hybrid operations that pair small professional staffs with volunteer moderator communities, and mainstream outlets are starting to cover that labor force directly.