Harambe was a 17-year-old western lowland gorilla shot at the Cincinnati Zoo on May 28, 2016, after a three-year-old boy fell into his enclosure.
Within weeks, "Dicks Out for Harambe" was trending globally. Harambe got more write-in votes than Jill Stein in some counties in the 2016 US election. His name appeared in over a million tweets a day at the peak.
None of this makes sense unless you were there. And even if you were there, you probably couldn't explain it.
Meme.com can.
It's a living archive of internet meme culture — every major meme catalogued with its full origin story, a timeline of when it spread and where, a rating of how culturally significant it became, and analysis of why it worked. Not just the obvious ones. The deep cuts too. The regional ones. The niche ones. The ones that peaked on 4chan in 2008 and the ones that took off on TikTok last Tuesday.
The ranking system is the hook. Every meme gets a classification — Classic, Active, Semi-Active, Dead — and a cultural ranking. You can browse by era, by type, by how viral they went. The top memes read like a timeline of the internet itself. Nyan Cat (2011). Distracted Boyfriend (2017). This Is Fine (2016). Among Us (2020). Each one a snapshot of what the world was laughing at, worrying about, or trying to process through humor at that exact moment.
There's also a game — vote on which new memes you think will become classics, compete with other users, earn rewards when your picks win. The crowd predicts meme culture in real time.
The internet has a history. Most of it lives in screenshots and dead links.
Meme.com is the museum.