LOLcat fail...

Know what's failing?
LOLcats.
In more ways than one, it appears.

Firstly, the standard of LOLcats on I can has Cheezburger has fallen something stupid.

I remember when I first started seeing them around, they were actually really funny. I mean it too. Stupid, yes. A little annoying, yes. But some of them were just so absurd, and so quirky, they actually resulted in a Laugh Out Loud. Unfortunately, since they've reached the mainstream, and entered popular culture, and since ANYONE can make one using the existing templates and available pictures on the website, the funniness seems to have completely disappeared.

Here's an un-funny example. No trace of a joke, no mandatory cat misspelling.

Here's another.

In my opinion they lack the charm of the earlier versions...
And you know what? I looked to the last few pages of Cheezburger to look for some quality LOLcats, and I couldn't find any. This was the best I could do, before the cbfs hit in. I guess they were only compiled AFTER the meme had taken off. So, at a point when they were already hitting the mainstream, and probably leaving 4chan.

Why did we even choose LOLcats in the first place? Because they're one of the BIG memes that have really entered the mainstream. No longer just something for those in the know, it's been featured on countless news programs, newspapers, and image sharing websites. It was one of the first to have it's own dedicated website...a website which, by the way, was sold for millions of dollars.

Aside from that, it is a perfect example of a meme being completely beaten to death, mostly as a result of the joke getting old, and the mainstream jumping on board after that transition has been made (as in, the joke going from awesome and funny, to definitely old). If you would, notice how there's pretty much no LOLcats on 4chan anymore. While cats are still well-loved, that particular meme is well and truly dead.

Second reason I was referring to at the beginning of this post: where can we take it? How can we make a LOLcat of our own evolve? Think about it - there's not much we can do. There's no use in submitting it to a website in order to see if anyone comments or reposts onto another site in a similar situation to our Neglected photo. The LOLcats have done the rounds of the internet, it's not really funny anymore to anyone who inhabits those sorts of sites. So all that really leaves us is the option of getting one onto the Cheezburger site, and that's going to be fairly difficult considering how much traffic I assume the site gets nowadays.

On the plus side, with all things considered I don't think we'll need a big journey to describe in the videos we'll be putting in our final submitted webspace - we don't want TOO many examples clogging up the video and making it ten minutes long. It's all about bite-sized chunks that are simple for the viewer to digest.

Frankly, I think this blog post is enough to describe to you, the interwebbing public how LOLcats have been beaten to the ground into something that is a rotting corpse of a meme...not even funny anymore.