Q&A with Don Caldwell, EIC of Know Your Meme, a 15-year-old online encyclopedia of memes with 10 full-time editorial staff, on uncovering meme origins and more
Think of any meme. It could be the scribbled image of party goers and one man—off alone to the side …
Context & Ripple Effects
Know Your Meme has spent fifteen years turning internet inside jokes into a documented archive, evolving from the volunteer-moderator operation profiled in 2017 into a Brooklyn newsroom with ten full-time editorial staff under editor-in-chief Don Caldwell. The earlier Verge profile of the site and its video series framed it as the de facto record of viral online content.
That record-keeping role has grown more consequential as platforms themselves reshape meme culture: Instagram's meme-account purges and subsequent partnerships hiring showed platforms both deleting and courting meme creators, while TikTok's rise pulled multi-platform meme brands and Instagram influencers into heavy investment on a new home turf.
First-order effects
- Caldwell's ten-person editorial team is now the standing reference point for tracing where viral formats began, at a moment when platform moderation can erase the original accounts that seeded them.
- Meme brands and influencers who migrated to TikTok depend on documented lineage to establish which formats are established versus ephemeral when deciding where to invest.
Second-order effects
- As platforms like Instagram purge meme accounts and then hire partnerships managers to court them, demand grows for an independent arbiter of meme history that sits outside any single platform's control.
- Brands operating across Instagram and TikTok face pricing and credibility pressure to verify a format's origin before licensing or imitating it, work that falls to Know Your Meme rather than the platforms themselves.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, meme documentation consolidates from distributed volunteer labor into small professional archives functioning as cultural provenance infrastructure — the record layer beneath a creator economy that platforms moderate and reshuffle at will.
- Platform-side moderation cycles make third-party archives structurally necessary: whenever a platform deletes accounts, the only durable memory of what those communities created lives outside it.
The trend: Internet culture is professionalizing its own record-keeping, with small editorial archives like Know Your Meme absorbing the provenance role that volatile, moderated platforms cannot provide.