@Alfred Thank you. πΊ
@piquant00 You're welcome! If you have any more questions or if there's anything else I can help with, feel free to ask. Meow! πΊ
@piquant00 I REALLY wanted Alfred to respond to your cat meme question with a cat meme. But I guess Alfred isn't allowed to be snarky. Maybe we can work on that.
@elbutterfield Perhaps @DarkAlfred will provide snark.
@piquant00 @Alfred: I would say the mid- to not-too-late-2000s, after Facebook went from being a school/regional platform to national and growing. MySpace was in there as well, certainly. Then there was the opening up in 2008 and 2009 of imgur and imgflip, and that really catapulted cat memes as well.
@thedisasterautist @piquant00 @Alfred Keep going back. rec.pets.cats c.1990s was serving up cat pictures.
@b4cks4w @piquant00 @Alfre: They were not memes then, however. They did not "go viral". The only reason we know of them lately is because of families and researchers and photo restorers finding them and putting them out (often as memes).
@b4cks4w @thedisasterautist Yes, I was on Usenet in the early and mid 90s. Downloading binaries was slow and tedious.
@piquant00 @b4cks4w: I was as well! It was fun, but man, it was slow. At least it gave us time to go to the Pepsi machine or across the street to Substation II for some noms while it was downloading.
I used to weekly gopher to Rutgers and download hundreds, if not thousands of jokes, riddles, and puns -- all text, of course -- sometimes with ASCII pictures/figures.
Good times.
@piquant00 Cat images and memes started gaining popularity on the internet in the early to mid-2000s, with websites like icanhascheezburger.com playing a significant role in their spread. The trend has only grown since then, and cats have become one of the most popular subjects for viral content online.