This Week's Best Memes, Ranked
Here at Digg, we try our best to cover the most important and confounding memes that come across the timeline. But the web is littered with tons of great memes that never quite hit the mainstream, instead bouncing around the weird corners of Twitter or Reddit.
Enter: our recurring feature, Memes, Ranked, where we not only rank the funniest memes each week, we also keep a running top 10 of the best memes of 2019. Skip to that here.
For the week of August 5, we have a handful of contenders: the lunch table, years of academy training wasted, texting your number neighbors and 30–50 feral hogs,
4. Lunch Table Memes
The meme: The poster takes a viral illustration of a cafeteria and labels the tables with different factions of a larger faction, sending it out into the world with the (often abbreviated or implied) caption, "If this were the cliques in your high school cafeteria, where are you sitting?" After that, folks comment and debate in the comments.
The examples:
Verdict: Damn, this meme sucks. It's designed to incite people in the comments to chime in with navel-gazy overshares like "wait, but my preferred option isn't listed! THIS is the table I would be sitting at in such a fictional high school cafeteria!" But, alas, navel-gazy is the name of the game on the internet, and these have been popular this week. It makes the top ten, but just barely.
3. 'Years Of Academy Training Wasted!'
The meme: A classic type of meme. KnowYourMeme actually reports that the first instance of this meme can be traced back to 2012 Tumblr, but only in the last few weeks has there been a flare of up different kinds of posts involving the iconic Buzz Lightyear line.
This is a meme about squandering potential and expertise due to the odd circumstances of life. But it's also at least partially a meme about the way we use memes and how they've changed since the late 2000s where every viral internet image was a screenshot with the same black text over it.
The examples:
Verdict: Popular on Reddit and Instagram, this is the kind of meme that peaks fast and peters out soon after, But it'll never completely die. Enjoy it for its nostalgia and hyper-specificity, and remember that this is what all memes used to be.
2. Texting Your Number Neighbors
The meme: A trend that fires up every few internet years, the act of texting your "number neighbor" — the person whose phone number is sequentially one digit before or after yours — is making viral headlines once again. Of course, a lot of the posts garnering up the most shares and likes are seemingly faked or photoshops to deliver an exaggerated punchline about the absurdity of texting strangers.
The examples:
Verdict: It's hard to tell who's being genuine and who's making things up when you see screenshots like this. But the idea is simple and intriguing: what if connecting with strangers over nine shared phone number digits was a way to make a lasting connection? Everyone can do it — if you've got a phone number, you've got number neighbors — so when this meme slides back into your DMs in 18 months don't surprised. It's a fun, wholesome time online. Good meme.
1. 30–50 Feral Hogs
The meme: This week's number one meme was born on Monday. We rounded up, reported on, and explained the meme then in this here blog post. But the gist is thus: a self-proclaimed rural American responded to a high-profile, widely shared tweet about assault weapons in the wake of last weekend's deadly shootings in El Paso and Dayton. The question this rural Twitter user posed: without an AR-15, how is he supposed to deal with the 30–50 feral hogs that storm into his backyard in just 3–5 minutes while his children are playing?
The odd specifics of the question posed yielded many, many memes.
The examples:
(we rounded up some of the more conventional memes earlier this week. The examples presented here represent the more out-there examples of the feral hog memes)
Verdict: The big one. A perfect combination of a weird, true fact of life, a major news event and a phrase that ricochets around in your brain like a lacrosse ball. The now-infamous 30–50 hogs have spawned literally countless memes on Twitter and Instagram. But beyond that, they've also generated real conversation about the threat they pose to rural Americans. Top quality meme. They rushed into our life in 3–5 minutes and I hope they never leave.
The Official Josco™ 2019 Meme Power Ranking
Click each entry on the ranking to see when it debuted.
- 30–50 Feral Hogs
- Wife/Wife Guy Memes
- Bigger Than Before
- My X Has Unionized
- Texting Your Number Neighbors
- "I Think You Should Leave" Memes
- Hot Girl Summer
- Years Of Academy Training Wasted!
- White Claws
- Lunch Table Memes
There's a new sheriff in town, and it's 30-5- feral hogs.
This tweet sums up the grip these swine have on Twitter's collective brains nicely. The hogs are hogs. We're nobody.
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