Memes and virality comparison: what to know and why

Five different things get called the same word, and the confusion is not pedantic. A trend, a format, a catchphrase, a hoax and a challenge behave differently, need different evidence, and fail in different ways. Calling all of them memes means every claim made about one gets applied to the other four, which is how most bad writing on this subject happens.

This page separates them by class and difference, gives the diagnostic that distinguishes each pair, and says what evidence would settle a disputed case.

What to take away

• The distinguishing question is what a participant produces: a copy, a purchase, a phrase, a belief, or an act.
• Two of the five carry real risk to people, and they should never be described in a way that helps anyone run one.
• Most disputed cases are objects that changed class partway through their life, which is why the arguments are unresolvable as posed.
• A claim about spread means something different for each class, so a number or an assertion carried across classes is meaningless.

The five, by what a participant does

Class	The participant produces	Spread depends on	Ends when	Evidence that identifies it
Format	Another copy, varied in a defined slot	Copying being cheap and the slot being unfilled	The slot is exhausted or the fixed part goes stale	A set of copies sharing structure, differing in one place
Trend	An adoption: a purchase, a style, a habit	Visibility plus availability	Availability spreads far enough that adoption stops signaling anything	Adoption without a shared artifact
Catchphrase	An utterance	The phrase being useful in ordinary speech	It becomes unmarked and stops being noticed	Use in speech with no reference to a source
Hoax	A belief, and often a repetition	Plausibility and emotional charge	Correction reaches roughly the same audience, which it rarely does	A factual claim that is false, spreading as true
Challenge	An act, usually recorded	Social pressure and visible participation	Participation stops being praised, or harm becomes visible	An instruction to do something

The general study of how an adoption moves through a population, under the heading diffusion of innovations, was worked out for products and farming practices long before any of this, and it fits the trend row much better than it fits the format row.

The rows are not degrees of the same thing. A format asks for craft, a trend asks for money or effort, a catchphrase asks for nothing, a hoax asks for credulity, and a challenge asks for an act. Those are five different demands on a person, and the same population responds to them at completely different rates.

The pairs that get confused

Format against trend. A format leaves artifacts that share structure. A trend leaves adoptions that share nothing but a category. If you can line up ten instances and point at the part that is identical, it is a format. If the only shared thing is the description, it is a trend.

Catchphrase against format. A catchphrase can be spoken. A format has to be made. The test is whether the thing survives being said aloud with no image, no timing and no tool. Many formats leave a catchphrase behind when they die, which is why the two are so often reported as one object with a long life. It is two objects, and the second outlived the first. Vocabulary that comes loose from a format and keeps going is covered under social media slang.

Hoax against format. A format is understood as constructed by everybody making a copy. A hoax is not. The difference is not the content, which can be identical; it is whether the participants know. That makes the same artifact one class in a room that gets it and another class in a room that does not, which is the reason the misinformation argument is genuinely hard rather than a matter of labeling. The families of that argument are set out under critiques of social media.

Challenge against trend. Both are adoptions. A challenge names a specific act and carries an expectation of proof. That expectation is what makes it dangerous: it converts social pressure into a recorded, escalating act. Coverage of challenges also has a shape of its own, the one described under moral panic, where the reporting supplies the instructions it is warning about. This site describes challenges only at the level of the class, never as instances and never with instructions, and there is no version of the subject where a description of the act is required to explain the mechanism.

Where the classes cross

Objects change class, usually in one direction. A format becomes a catchphrase when the phrase detaches. A hoax becomes a format when enough people learn it is false and start copying it knowingly. A trend becomes a format when someone invents a shared artifact for it. A challenge becomes a trend when the proof requirement drops away.

This is why arguments about "what it really was" go nowhere. Both people are right about different phases, and neither has dates good enough to say when the change happened. The honest form of the claim names the phase: it worked as one thing in one period and as another thing later, and the transition is not precisely datable. The general reason nothing here is precisely datable is set out under platform timelines.

What a spread claim means in each class

Spread is measured differently by class, and the measures are not comparable.

• For a format, spread means the number of distinct makers. Copies by the same person are one adoption.
• For a trend, spread means adopters, and adopters are usually invisible unless they announce themselves, so almost every trend figure is a count of announcements.
• For a catchphrase, spread means speakers, which cannot be counted at all, because the majority of speech is not recorded anywhere.
• For a hoax, spread means believers, which is different from repeaters, and the difference is the whole question.
• For a challenge, spread means participants, and the recorded participants are the ones who chose to record.

None of these has a good source, and none of the sources that exist measure the same object. That is the reason this site states no figures for reach, and the reasoning behind that refusal is set out under benefits of social media, which deals with the same problem from the other side.

Common questions

Is the distinction useful outside writing about this?

It is useful to anyone deciding how to respond. A format needs no response. A hoax needs a correction aimed at the same audience. A challenge involving risk needs something else again, and the something else is not a description of the challenge.

What about something that was never copied by anyone?

Then it is not any of the five. A single artifact that got a lot of attention is a single artifact. Attention is not spread, and treating one heavily viewed thing as a movement is the most common error in this subject.

Can a thing be a format and a hoax at once?

For different audiences at the same moment, yes, and that is exactly the hard case. The useful description names both readings rather than picking one.

Why not just accept that everyone uses the word loosely?

Because loose use imports claims. A statement about how fast formats spread gets applied to hoaxes, where it is false and where being wrong costs something. The classes are worth keeping apart for that reason alone.