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If you’re not on Instagram or you’re just a productive member of society who does not care to spend their time day in and day out looking for funny memes to send to your friends you should stop reading this blog right now. I don’t need to hear about how you don’t have an Instagram account and you can’t relate to this. Anyone who isn’t looking at memes and enjoying the hell out of them in 2019 is a loser fucking narc as far as I’m concerned.
I don’t need any olds in my DM’s coming at me for being a cliche millennial, okay? I know what I am and I’m fine with it. In any case, I spend a disgusting amount of time every day on Instagram scouring the explore page for fresh, organic memes to send to group chats that I am apart of.
Me and my friends will sit on couches in the same room and not speak for long periods of time because we’re on our phones looking for memes to send to one another. It’s sad and hilarious and incredible at the same damn time.
For better or for worse memes have become a big part of my life over the past year or so. I do what I refer to as “verbal memes” with my friends out at the bar on the weekends and I even have a folder on my phone that holds memes which I think are worth holding onto for re-send purposes later on.
For example: Lately I’ve just been standing like this alien (pictured in the meme above) in front of my friends at bars and parties and saying “I just fucking yeeted everywhere.” It’s annoying for anyone who doesn’t know what meme I’m acting out but to the three people with me do know it’s side splitting comedy. This is the shit that drives me to the verge of pissing my pants on the weekends from laughing so hard.
I know it’s sort of pathetic. I know it’s obnoxious and I know that memes are a big reason why older generations despise millennials and our culture. But again, memes are funny to me and in the end that’s all that really matters.
And as a meme connoisseur I’ve started to notice a disturbing trend. I cannot for the life of me figure out why it’s happening. Many of the larger meme pages that I follow and attempt to send to my friends everyday have inexplicably become private accounts.
This means that anyone who doesn’t follow the private account can’t view the meme I’m trying to send without requesting a follow. The problem with this is that even if the friend chooses to follow this private account to view the meme, it’s going to take a few hours for the admin of that page to approve the follow request.
By that time, my group chats have moved on to bigger and better memes, which means that the meme that I had originally sent (which I found to be fucking hilarious) gets lost in the pile, forever to be ignored because of the private setting. My friends and I have found a work around to this dilemma – you merely screenshot the meme so that the private setting no longer matters, but it’s annoying and against everything that memes stand for.
Memes are meant to be enjoyed by all, not just a select few who follow a certain account. I’m sure there is a business strategy behind making a meme account private and then forcing people to request to follow the page, but I have no idea what that strategy is. I thought Instagram was driven by likes and visits to the page. Wouldn’t this naturally mean that the more eyes on any given meme that is posted the better the page does?
Screenshotting memes and then sending them to my group is not how I want to live my life. And plus most people don’t follow the screenshot rule because they’re amateurs, which means that hundreds of thousands of memes everyday are going unseen because of this stupid privatization trend. It’s despicable and quite frankly un-American. .
Image via Youtube
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jduda@grandex.co
At this point, you are 100% the reason I continue to check this site and this article made me so happy. Sometimes I feel like a piece of shit for liking memes so much. But then, my friend will take a meme and spiral it out of control into something we don’t even know what it is anymore but we are still in tears laughing over it.
Nothing more frustrating than “Photo Unavailable” in an Insta DM. I refuse to request to follow the account and instead lament the thing my friends deemed high enough quality to share that I’ll never see.
I’m not 100%, but I believe many of the meme accounts go private because they are having certain memes reported to IG for violations by squiddy little shits and they get deleted or the account suspended. The private account setting is put in place to try and put some level of control over who can see (and possibly report) the memes. Not so sure it’s effective.
They actually are private for the exact reason of this article. People will follow an account due to being tagged in a meme and there’s a good chance they won’t unfollow after viewing said meme. It’s just the current strategy for building a following on a meme page, it maybe a temporary trend. The previous trend was trying to make it to someone’s explore page.
Not sure why this is getting down voted. To add, the reason you have to get “approved” so you don’t add / view / unfollow, and will probably forget to unfollow if you have to wait.
I don’t have an Instagram account and I can’t relate to this.
Just get your memes off the explore page. All those accounts are public. I refuse to follow or acknowledge any private meme accounts.
@nived, I bet you follow one of Whiskey and Rebellion’s backup accounts
Here come dat content
You could take a screenshot of the private meme and send it as a photo.
Read the article before you comment
Of course I post this comment before reading the last 3 paragraphs. *insert facepalm meme* I still don’t see the problem the screenshot method.
If we are going to pile on, you can’t screenshot videos