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I don’t think anyone is designing these apps to make the kind of weird post-dank memes that are being made now.” “It’s funny that there’s been this regression to something that’s actually less efficient because the style of memes has changed. “You’d only use one of those now to be ironic about how terrible they are,” Terry says. Unfortunately, as memes have evolved, the majority of top meme-making apps in Apple’s App Store have failed to adopt to more modern formats, rendering them semi-useless. Years ago, when classic macro-memes with Impact font-like Success Kid, Condescending Wonka, and Business Cat-became popular, there were tons of easy online meme generators. “You know the term bricolage? It’s basically making due. “It’s ad hoc,” says Terry, who runs the page socialpracticemafia and has used a slew of photo- and video-editing apps to make memes. “There’s not one app I can go to for everything I need, not even close.”
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“I use four apps to make a meme,” says Andy, who runs the Instagram meme page heckoffsupreme. As memes become increasingly visually complex, they’re forcing meme makers-from professionals who run massive pages, to amateurs, to those just starting out-to rely on a patchwork of unreliable photo-editing tools. Many large accounts on Instagram treat Twitter as a content-management system for laying out images with text, but that comes with huge limitations.
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“But for people who care enough about having memes perfect, it makes a difference.” (Like all members in this story, Alex runs her pages anonymously, and asked to be referred to by her first name only to protect her privacy.)Īs memes have increasingly dominated social platforms like Instagram, the methods for making them remain largely rudimentary. “I don’t want to say it’s a competitive edge, because at the end of the day that’s not really what determines if a meme does well,” says Alex, whose pages have 5 million collective followers. She spent $3,000 on the project, which she says has saved her hours of time and frustration. Last year, Alex, a 19-year-old in California who runs a network of Instagram pages dedicated to publishing memes, became so frustrated with the current apps for making memes that she hired a developer to build her own.
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