Profile of Know Your Meme, a website and video series that has been documenting viral online content and internet meme culture for over ten years
Kaitlyn Tiffany / The Verge : Tweets: @kait_tiffany , @claire_mcnear , and @mikerugnetta Tweets: Kaitlyn Tiffany / @kait_tiffany : i love love the gorgeous pics by my hero, @Holowaty and the lil meme-within-memes by genius @GarretBeard http://twitter.com/... Claire McNear / @claire_mcnear : “The internet doesn't actually love cats,” he says. “But there is this very dense, highly connected internet cat industrial complex.” http://www.theverge.com/... @mikerugnetta : “To stay relevant, the editors at Know Your Meme can't continue to just reflect the internet back at itself if they want to believe they're helping. Luckily, they know it.” http://www.theverge.com/...
Context & Ripple Effects
Know Your Meme has spent over ten years turning the internet's inside jokes into a documented archive, and The Verge's profile lands mid-arc: months earlier, the New York Times had profiled the site's volunteer moderators, the unpaid labor force behind its entries. The piece also captures the site's own stated tension — editor Mike Rugnetta argues the team can't simply reflect the internet back at itself if it wants to stay relevant.
The profile matters because it documents an institution at an inflection point between fan labor and professional media, a transition later confirmed when EIC Don Caldwell described a staff of ten full-time editors in a 2022 Q&A. It sits alongside other Verge reporting on how meme formats themselves keep mutating, including the text-heavy, low-fidelity meme posts Gen-Z accounts spread through Instagram.
First-order effects
- KYM's editors face immediate pressure to document viral formats faster than they mutate — the profile quotes Claire McNear on the 'dense, highly connected internet cat industrial complex' the site has to map in real time.
Second-order effects
- As meme formats shift toward the absurdist, text-heavy style spreading via Instagram accounts, KYM's sourcing and explanation workload moves with them, straining a model built on volunteer moderators.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, internet-culture documentation consolidates into small professional editorial shops — the same durable-model path Techmeme took across two decades per its own anniversary profile — while preservation efforts like the Atlantic's 'Remember the Internet' series treat meme archives as cultural record worth institutionalizing.
The trend: Internet-culture archiving is professionalizing, moving from volunteer-driven wikis to small paid editorial teams racing to catalog formats that mutate faster than they can be documented.