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Part of Benefits of social media, in six rules: how to test any claim
What makes a social media trend spread, drift in meaning and eventually die out
How the 2014 Ice Bucket Challenge and 2013 Harlem Shake spread, shifted in meaning, and faded from view across Facebook and YouTube.
The thing that spreads is not the joke. It is the empty slot.
A format that travels has a fixed part and a variable part. That is the whole of what makes an internet meme a class of object rather than a list of jokes, and the archetypes it produces are set out under memes and virality.
The fixed part is recognizable instantly; the variable part is cheap to fill and invites you to fill it. Everything else about how internet culture moves follows from that structure. That is why the anatomy of a template is more informative than a list of the ones that took off.
The ALS Ice Bucket Challenge is a clear case: it spread on Facebook and other social platforms in 2014. Participants posted videos of themselves having ice water poured over them and challenged others to donate to ALS research or take part. The ALS Association’s account of the challenge provides a dated record. Its visible action and easy-to-copy structure make the abstract “slot” concrete.
What to take away
- Go back to the earliest versions of almost any long-running format and they seem clumsy compared with what came later.
- A format carries its structure with it and leaves its context behind.
- Describe the slotwhat is fixed, what varies, what a good filling of it does.
What makes something reusable
A visible slot. Looking at it should make it obvious where your contribution goes. Formats without an obvious gap get admired and not copied.
A tight constraint. Counterintuitively, a restrictive form spreads better than an open one. When the shape is fixed, everyone's version is comparable to everyone else's, so a small variation reads as wit rather than as noise. Unlimited freedom gives you no way to be cleverly different, because there is nothing to be different from.
Low production cost. If a version takes minutes with tools people already have, there will be thousands of versions. If it takes skill or expensive software, there will be a handful, and a handful is not a format.
Legibility at a glance. Most things are seen small, in motion, with the sound off, while someone is scrolling. A format that requires close reading or audio to parse loses most of its audience before it starts.
A low entry price. Understanding it should not require having followed the last five things. Formats that demand deep background stay inside the group that has it, which is sometimes the point, and is also why those formats stay small.
Why the original often looks weak
Go back to the earliest versions of almost any long-running format and they seem clumsy compared with what came later. This is not nostalgia failing; it is a real difference in how they were made.
The first version was made unaware it would become a template and solved one specific problem for one specific audience.
Later versions were made by people who saw the format and knew which parts got a reaction and optimized for a known audience, with earlier attempts at hand. The descendants are better: they had the ancestor to work from.
This has a consequence for how you write about it. The interesting object is the template, not the first instance. The first instance is a historical curiosity; the template is the thing that did the work.
Meaning drifts, and sometimes inverts
A format carries its structure with it and leaves its context behind. As it moves away from the group that made it:
- Irony flattens. A layer of distance that was obvious to the original audience is invisible to the next one, which reads the thing straight.
- Sincere reuse appears. People start using it to mean exactly what it appears to mean.
- The audience shifts and the target shifts with it. A format built to mock one thing gets repointed at another, sometimes at the group that made it.
- It becomes a marker. Eventually the format signals who uses this, and using it says something about you that has nothing to do with what it originally said.
The Harlem Shake is a case of meaning drift. In February 2013, YouTube users copied a recognizable video pattern set to Baauer’s track: a lone dancer is followed by a cut to a group dancing. As schools, offices, and other groups remade it, the template’s punchline became sudden collective chaos more than the original clip. Know Your Meme’s “Harlem Shake” entry records the format’s chronology.
Ordinary semantic change happens to a picture, not a word, and runs in the same directions social media slang sets out for vocabulary.
By the late stages, a format can mean the opposite of what it meant at the start while looking identical. Anyone writing about it dates their description either way, so say which stage you are describing.
How formats end
They rarely die. They become dated, which is a different thing.
Five ways formats end
Ending
- Exhaustion
- Every obvious filling used
- Saturation
- Volume outruns attention
- Group flip
- Tied to unwanted audience
- Absorption
- Becomes ordinary usage
- Revival
- Enough time passes
Mechanism
- Exhaustion
- Familiar, not clever
- Saturation
- Arrives from too many directions
- Group flip
- Sudden abandonment, reach steady
- Absorption
- Stops registering as a format
- Revival
- Datedness becomes the joke
How it looks
- Exhaustion
- Saturation
- Group flip
- Absorption
- Revival
| Ending | Mechanism | How it looks |
|---|---|---|
| Exhaustion | The slot has been filled every obvious way | New versions read as familiar rather than clever |
| Saturation | Volume outruns attention | The same format arrives from too many directions at once |
| Group flip | It becomes associated with an audience the original users do not want to be mistaken for | Sudden abandonment with no drop in reach |
| Absorption | It becomes a normal way of saying something | It stops registering as a format at all |
| Revival | Enough time passes for it to be funny as a period reference | Reappearance with the datedness as the joke |
Absorption is the most interesting and least noticed. Some formats stop being remarked upon because they succeeded completely and became ordinary usage.
These examples also make an ending mechanism concrete. The Harlem Shake’s wave of YouTube videos in 2013 illustrates saturation and exhaustion: once the reveal was familiar, another copy carried less surprise. The Ice Bucket Challenge’s high-visibility 2014 campaign later faded as a social-feed trend, while its fundraising purpose remained distinct from the viral format. Fading from feeds is not the same as total disappearance.
Writing about a format rather than an instance
Describe the slot: what is fixed, what varies, what a good filling of it does. Describe the constraint and what it makes possible. Describe the audience that finds it legible without explanation, and the boundary where explanation starts being necessary. Note which stage of drift you are looking at, and date the observation.
Do that, and the description outlives the specific instances. It avoids resting the whole piece on the images and people the format was built from. For that second point, see benefits of social media risks.
For broader context, see the benefits of social media. The dated examples above show how trends move through specific platforms rather than an abstract timeline.
Common questions
Do some formats simply have better content?
Content matters at the margin. Structure matters more: a mediocre joke in a well-shaped template beats a good joke in a shape nobody can reuse.
Why do variants get better and then get worse?
The good period is when the slot still has unexplored positions. The decline is not a fall in quality so much as a rise in the audience's familiarity, which raises what counts as a surprise.
Is a format with no obvious slot still a format?
It can still spread as a fixed object that people forward unchanged. That is a different mechanism with a different life: it saturates faster and leaves fewer descendants, because forwarding is not authorship.
