Bear Update!! :D

And the bear vid has passed another milestone! 3155 views to date! Slowly but surely, our meme is still going strong. And to add, it is still getting some youtube honours as well>>

Honors for this video (2)

#60 - Most Viewed (This Month) - Comedy - Australia

#99 - Top Favorited (This Month) - Comedy - Australia

Cheers to everyone in the group and all those who helped make the project a fruitful one.

A few final words (or something similar to that)

Last post I mentioned that we posted a link to our bear video on 4chan.
It's been an interesting experience, posting on 4chan with the mindset that we have to get responses. Not only that, but our aim of the game's been to get responses to memes, to explore how they grow and evolve. Thing is, that we've made a bit of a discovery - that it really is a matter of luck whether or not a meme becomes popular and grow.
So.
The nature of this little experiment has kind of evolved in itself into something something different. And just a side note, I'm almost thinking I should have chosen something different to analyse to hell and back - I'm hoping it'll go back to normal, but I've found that lately my 4chan-ing experience has changed somewhat due to this project. I guess I can put it down to the way it seems that the more I want a response from something i post, the less likely it is to get one. Then when I think, "screw it" and just start posting for myself, I get replies. Of course, when I do that, what I post has nothing to do with this project, and is therefore unusable. My my, has this ever been frustrating.

I think we gave up on the over ambitious idea of "starting" our own memes (as in, image macros) fairly early on in the piece. And while our bear video has certainly had many more views than we were ever expecting (2702!!), I don't think there's much chance of it becoming a meme sensation along the lines of "Don't tase me, bro!". Like we said much earlier, it's always something completely absurdly funny, or through some unbelievable stroke of luck that one video from the millions on youtube that becomes a phenomenon.

A few nights ago I was on 4chan, lurking and laughing and being grossed out - the usual, really. I tried posted a few replies to random threads, and posted the link to our bear video as detailed in our last post. Like Selwyn had found earlier, most of the threads that become popular are about existing memes, porn, are made by trolls, or are completely absurd and for some reason just become popular for the hell of it. So on a whim, I decided to post this:



Reponse?
Huge.

Like, megahuge.

Not only about a million courage wolf image macros and variations, but also responses of users exclaiming about how much they love courage wolf. Great success.
THEN.
We got a few responses of a mutation of courage wolf...a rather more extreme version. This wolf yells, and yells things that are far more extreme than courage wolf.
Instead of things like, "when you reach the gates of heaven KICK THE GATES OPEN", you get "RAPE HER BOYFRIEND TO SHOW DOMINANCE!"

Oh my. But I guess that's just another example of 4chan bringing memes into existence, then changing them, mutating them, allowing them to evolve through the structure of the community - the very simple formula of anonymous posters submitting images (and text).

So I guess that proves that while it's near impossible to force a new meme onto the interwebbing public, and a chance in a million to leave it up to luck, it's easy beyond belief to thrash something that already exists and is already popular and is already funny into the ground.

One only has to look at how hilariously unfunny LOLcats have become to see how that happens. After a dedicated LOLcat websites appeared, once there were news stories on the phenomenon, once it had truly become part of popular culture, the jokes became terribly unfunny. There's even a "make your own" section for DIY LOLcats. Once it goes mainstream and into RL, there's really no hope for it...

What I've found interesting has been analysing 4chan and /b/ to hell and back. Despite the perverted stuff that often goes on there, it really is the source of a lot of lols late at night when I have nothing better to do. So going into the site WANTING to get a reaction, and for a uni assignment no less, has made me feel as if I'm almost betraying the /b/tards.

Of course, we're breaking rules 1 & 2 : Never talk about /b/ ... whoops.

Bear adventures in the world of the interwebs (away from youtube)

Our bear has gone on a few different adventures, through different websites.

Firstly, we submitted it to Reddit. To cut a long story short, Reddit users are (and this is a bit of a generalisation) aren't too welcoming of meme-related content and comments. In addition to that though, there's a bit of a feeling among users that the standard of the website has fallen a little bit ... and the comments given aren't constructive in the least. For instance, that long articles are downvoted and are unable to get to the front page.

Here's a cool thread from last week sometime - it's interesting to read the different viewpoints of users. Whether or not it was inevitable once the site became mainstream, whether or not it's a bad thing at all, and whether Reddit user were a little elitist in the first place.

Anyway.
The point is, we submitted it. But there wasn't much of a response. I think this can boiled down to the fact that weird, pointless (and let's face it, not very intelligent) content isn't really welcomed. Unfortunate, but expected.

THEN.
We went to submit it onto Digg. Unfortunately (for some incomprehensible reason), we found that someone had already submitted it. Yeah, I know. While this is exciting in that someone apart from us bothered to submit our bear video, it was quite unexciting and annoying in that there were no comments received. The profile was quite new and lame - no friends, not much submitted. So the chances of getting any sort of attention from that was going to be quite slim. The profile is pretty much the opposite of a power user, so exactly NOT who we'd want to be submitting our stuff.

So that was two fails.
Things were looking a little grim.



So it was time for some 4chan.

Here are the results...
and again, they were exactly what we'd expected.





Apologies for the slightly naughty photos of girls at the bottom of the second image. That's 4chan for you.

Like I said, pretty much what we expected.

There's more to be said about 4chan however. But, you'll have to wait until tomorrow for that, I'm very, very sleepy.

Update!

Major update!!
Our bear video is now at over 2480 views! That's right! That's OVER 9000!!!

We've also been getting some interesting comments. The range of comments is pretty much limited to two: firstly, there's the "ZOMG THIS IS SO FAKE. NOT FUNNY. LAME" kind of comment. Then there's the "LOL you suck it's supposed to be fake! Haha bears" type of comment. These was to be expected - you'd be surprised how many people on the interwebs have trouble distinguishing between what's supposed to be a joke and what's serious.

What's been really encouraging though, is the fact that I know that our play count hasn't been a result of myself and my group members sitting in front of the computer screen pressing "replay" over and over again. No, it appears that it has actually genuinely been people watching it and recommending it to people that they know. Woo! Very exciting. Because personally, I know that my friends are pretty lazy. I can't actually imagine them watching it more than a few times. Definitely not over a hundred each!!

The keyboard cat has been doing quite well, especially considering we haven't been plugging it as hard as the original. We've sent it in to Play him off Keyboard Cat, but no sign of our video yet. I'm sure there's a massive backlog of submissions, so that's no surprise. At any rate, it's got about 450 views.

Other stats...
- 230 facebook group members
- 20 ratings, giving is 4 stars
- 20 comments

We're in the midst of editing our videos for our tumblr site, All Your Meme Are Belong to Us, and I think it's come to the crunch time in which we have to stop monitoring our memes and just shut up and gather the information and our findings together. No more posting on 4chan, no more waiting for the view number to climb up.

Stay tuned.

Cats on 4chan

If you don't already know, it is pretty hard getting flooded by alot of comments with a post which is "mediocre". Mediocre meaning it doesn't contain sex, violence, cp(child porn) and other original funny stuff. so i did a little experiment with cat pictures.

this is the first picture i posted which only got about 4 comments.



The next picture i posted is also a cat but a dead and bloody one (peace, i didn't harm any cats, i got these pictures from flickr and reserve-free.) But I think it shows that it is true in a way that gore does help a bit, like 5 replies moar.

Give me back

Click image

Do not look at me!

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