Calling all meme-rs, the #originalmeme challenge
So I am back from Christmas vacation and catching up on my Steem-related reading. I have not even come close to reading all my DMs on steemit.chat and have not even opened up Discord. I have not checked the various clue posts I scattered around on various accounts related to a secret contest that I am not running. I have only responded to a few of the backlogged submissions to the @humanbot Curator Incubator. I am mid-process of catching up.
I did however just read the @curie "Expanded Guidelines (Early 2018)" published yesterday and something I read there made me stop what I was doing and write this post. I turn your attention to this section of the linked @curie guidelines:
Pass on the long self-indulgent posts as they likely won’t have any audience. Judge the post not by the effort that was put in, but by the quality and engagement it creates. For example, an exceptional single-picture meme which may go viral is more valuable than a thousand word rant no one cares about.
Okay so here is the deal. This idea of a meme getting a @curie upvote has fascinated me since I first became a @curie curator. I asked about it in the #curie channel and @liberosist told me he was fairly certain at least one meme had, in fact, received a @curie upvote in the past. I have joked around with my fellow @curie curators about hoping to someday have the guts to actually submit a meme for review. I have yet to do so.
And then I read the above. In the official guidelines from @curie, mocking me to my face, holding up my cowardice and I have nowhere to hide. I am on a mission now. A mission to find the perfect original meme to submit to @curie for review and possible upvote.
Now you see there is a reason why I have not submitted a meme so far. The cost/benefit ratio is terrible as far as efficient ways to spend your time curating. A meme would still have to be the original work of the poster and original to Steem for it to be a worthy @curie submission; this eliminates a huge chunk of the meme posts. There is no effective way to filter out non-original meme posts using SQL query as I do with my curation on other subjects.
Hoping against hope, tonight I checked out the #originalmeme tag. I use the #originalart and #originalmusic tags all the time and was hoping that some awesome original meme-rs were doing a similar thing with memes. No such luck.
#originalmeme challenge
My challenge is simple. Make awesome original memes. Post them here on Steem and do not post them anywhere else. Use the #originalmeme tag as one of your five tags. I pledge that I am going to be curating the #originalmeme tag and I sure hope you can create that perfect meme that I can take to the @curie reviewers on a silver platter and serve on a bed of eloquent arguments carefully crafted to augment the natural smokey flavor of the meme. I hope to all that is holy that you can create such a succulent piece of meme-craft, such a juicy morsel that tears of joy will stream from the eyes of the lucky reviewer. Please note that I cannot promise to submit any of the memes that may be posted under #originalmeme to @curie for review. But I swear to you that I want to do this, and I will if you make a truly exceptional meme. Feel free to link to your amazing original memes in the comments of this post as well :)
4000 characters is so last month. I went way higher than that with my base query, but of course have specialized queries for some categories that don't have a character threshold. Riddle me this though, how to write the query that will serve me up the perfect memes to review. #originalmeme is kind of a shot in the dark but hey even shooting in the dark can hit something. Maybe it will catch on :)
Meme's are queryless, but at least you only need a 5 second review time. If the laugh don't come, next!
good idea with the tag, this should help!
I hope you had a great Christmas away from the screens, roll on 2018 :)
This blew my mind @carlgnash
Like even though I spent 5 hours on a post, no one cares. Question was, did it give value and create engagement? Time to be even more intentional with the type of content I create.
Yes! Exactly! This concept blew my mind a few weeks back as well when it was first being discussed on various @curie steemit.chat channels (before it was published in the guidelines). It totally changed the way I looked at my curation for @curie and I have already submitted (and seen approved) several much shorter posts than I ever would have in the past. I think it makes great sense but I had fallen into the trap of equating time and effort with quality, value and potential for engagement. Of course the latter can take the former, but the reverse is not necessarily true. As someone who has been very impressed with your posting to begin with I look forward to seeing where you go with this nugget of information :) To the moon! (hopefully)
Much love - Carl
Thanks Carl for the support and being awesome. I will definitely keep that in mind when creating my content calendar for 2018.
p/s. I also feel like sometimes for those of us who do daily content, we can churn out many, long, watered down posts just to fulfill our daily quota yet we are disregarding the above. Quality over quantity always.
Cheers to that. :)
100% agreed with the post script. Some months ago I made a shift in my own blogging away from trying to do daily content and instead focused on posting when and if the spirit moved me to make an awesome post. If a post took me a week to work on, great. If I didn't post for a few days, that was fine. Forcing myself to churn something out every day resulted in a great number of half-assed posts. In fact a piece of advice that I give newbies sometimes is to spend the time necessary to really make an awesome post instead of posting a bunch of mediocrity. The former is really good for the long term health of the platform while the latter just dilutes the content sea and makes it harder to find the good content.
Here is a meme in the spirit of the holidays!
Okay this one made me laugh out loud. Give him coal! I should probably edit the original post to note that the other Curie guidelines still apply to include no "religious" or "steemit-related" posts.
Heres a stupid one I just did
https://steemit.com/originalmeme/@drtarts/lol-sorry
OK, I would love to see what @carlgnash says about this. If I am understanding this correctly, he wants our memes to be on our original photos? Carl? Yes, no?
well I waffled on this. An early edit of the post pretty much said exactly this (use your own original photography), but I ended up editing the "supplication" at the end of the post to include fair use. I did a little reading on the legality of using copyright protected images in memes and the general consensus seems to be that this is okay as fair use in most cases. Specific examples I saw cited were stills from movies and photographs of celebrities - which are obviously NOT the property of the meme creator - but still typically considered fair use for memes. Now this does get into some tricky ground here, because fair use in the US is typically most solid when the use is non-commercial. It could be argued that every Steem post is "commercial" because of the payout mechanism. Ultimately I decided that the spirit of #originalmeme is that the meme itself be original (original words / original joke, etc.) but not necessarily the image used itself. That being said, I would certainly think a truly exceptional meme that uses original photography (like a cat meme or something) or that uses open source / free use imagery would make it easier for me to make an argument to a @curie reviewer that it deserves a big @curie upvote. Not sure that this response really settles anything. Any questions? LOL
Thank for that look into your head lol!
Obama looks like he is about to pass judgement on the beer he is holding. Like he is Caesar at the gladiator arena about to give a thumbs up or thumbs down.
For future contestants, while this is pretty funny just on the face Obama is making I am thinking the text content doesn't quite light me on fire like a $300 USD meme should. Because let's be honest here, that is what we are talking about when considering memes through the @curie lens - is this meme a ~$300 USD meme? That is roughly what a curie upvote means these days...
Wow. Just... wow
Ok time to dust off the photoshop...
Okay bonus points for... the impressive collection of manliness. However this brings up an interesting point. Does proper grammar usage come into play at all when it comes to memes? Everyone probably knows what you mean here, but "whose" is not the contraction of "who" and "is" (that distinction belonging to "who's"). Interesting question. I think for the ur-meme grammar probably doesn't matter as much as just SHEER VIRAL POTENTIAL. BTW I am nearly positive that if a meme DOES get a @curie upvote, I (or someone else) could pitch the story to the AP and get it picked up nationwide. This is serious business my friend, very big things are afoot. Big feet.
DOH! Stupid grammar!
i believe it was kevinwong who not too long ago posted a series that had me at memeocracy.
"memeocracy" might be an ore-bearing lode worthy of future exploration. The test drilling samples indicate gold might be present!
I am not sure why this even made me laugh. Why is this funny? That is not a rhetorical question, I am actually wondering this. Why the heck is this making me chuckle? Why?!? Goddess shine your light on me. I am walking in the darkness.
That sounds interesting. Feeling a bit sluggish after festivities but if something will come up, I will definitely post my entry :)
Does it has to be related with Steem(it) or it can be about anything tho?
Thank you for the initiative. Hopefully some quality ones will emerge ^.^
Your example was very nice, which I liked very much. You said that exceptional single image memes that can be viral is no more valuable than a valuable word. The story really impressed me.