Glossary

Meme Economy

Easy

Meme Economy is a satirical online subculture in which memes are addressed in financial language as if they were commodities or capital assets with varying prices.

What Is Meme Economy?

Meme Economy is a satirical notion and online subculture in which memes are addressed in financial language as if they were commodities or capital assets with varying prices. It has generated a number of spin-off ventures built around the fake meme market infrastructure since its creation as a Reddit sub, /r/memeEconomy, in 2016.

What Is /r/memeEconomy?

/r/memeEconomy is a Reddit “subreddit” dedicated to memes. As the name implies, the group combines memes and economics in an ideal way. Memes are portrayed as a possible investment on the subreddit, with members able to "invest" in them depending on their likelihood of becoming a top meme on the platform.

What's the catch, then? Is it possible to make money by generating dank memes? No, not at all. You can earn as many memecoins as you want, but that's about it. Although some new members of the community may accuse the meme community of taking itself far too seriously, the subreddit is a satirical take on how real-world financial markets work. The fact that the subreddit's automatic bot has its own GitHub page demonstrates this.

The subreddit's business model, on the other hand, is rather obvious. If someone discovers a relatively new meme with a few upvotes, they may invest their memecoins in it and expect it to go viral, resulting in maximum profits. This expectation also corresponds to the psychological pleasure derived from a meme when it is still new on the internet. It becomes a dead meme as soon as it becomes popular, and the person who shared it runs the danger of slipping down the meme social ladder.

What Is NASDANQ?

Darkpitt registered the site NASDANQ.com on September 29th, 2016, and announced ambitions to transform it into a meme trade marketplace on the /r/MemeEconomy subreddit. On February 22nd, 2017, Redditor AchillesDev, one of the NASDANQ project's volunteer developers, posted an update revealing that the team has officially formed a company under the name NASDANQ LLC and the alpha version of the platform would be ready for launch within two weeks, with basic functionality such as buying and selling memes and setting firms. NASDANQ started its closed beta on April 12th, 2017, giving testers access to the site's basic functionalities. Icedog68, a Redditor, shared a snapshot of his site profile that day.

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