But That's None Of My Business

It's broken in the sense that leaderboard users can rely on their leaderboard rating, rather than the quality of the meme.

I had a meme that went viral elsewhere, getting 500 likes in 1 day on a Facebook page. That same meme is currently staying at 130-some views and 5 likes after 1 week, here on Imgflip.

But I'm not really talking about that meme only, I'm seeing plenty of inconsistencies in other people's memes. But if I'm the only one who is noticing this, then it is what it is.

Humor is all relative.

Facebook has a larger community than imgflip, so just because your meme was popular on one website doesn't mean it will be the same on a different website. You have to remember: These are 2 different types of communities

As I said, my meme was just an example and not evidence. I don't believe in anecdotes.

I think I understand where you're coming from, but the imgflip audience is exponentially smaller than facebook. Do you link your memes to your facebook page?
On a similar note to what you were saying, I made a meme in February that had maybe 100 views + 2 upvotes on imgflip. A couple of weeks ago, a friend posted on fb (he had no knowledge it was mine). I traced it back to a popular public figure on fb. On their page alone, it had something like 42,000 shares. But again, it bombed on imgflip. There is no accounting for taste. If you comment frequently on other user's memes, you will become better known here. People will look for your memes and you will get upvotes. I hope that this is helpful.

I didn't just post the meme "on Facebook". I posted it inside a community page on Facebook.

The community has 62k members. I'm not sure how many members IMGflip has.

I think your claim about leaderboard users relying on their leaderboard rating for their memes is false.

It does seem to get us views by other active members, which is an advantage, but it doesn't get us upvotes that people don't want to give.

5 upvotes for 130 views isn't that bad on here. People on facebook like everything because it tells people who clicked the button. Around here it's different, a view is when somebody "likes" your meme enough to click on it so they can copy it and share it. An upvote is when you cracked somebody up and they loved it. That's how I look at it at least ;)

Yeah, that's definitely a point too. Likes on Facebook is also related to things that people don't necessarily like but want to get more noticed.

People like everything on facebook lol. This site is about interacting with other flippers and having a good time. I've submitted over 400 memes and only a small percentage of those have made the front page. I've rarely missed any submissions so that is pretty close to the max I could submit in the amount of time I have been here. However I have created over 5,000 memes commenting back and forth with people. I think that makes it pretty obvious that I simply enjoy making memes and sharing them with people regardless of how my few submission memes do. I've always said if a meme makes one person laugh it was worth making, anything else is just added gravy on that biscuit ;)

One more thing to add. It's not that higher ranking users like Raydog or Socrates are relying on their popularity to get popular memes, in fact if you look through their meme history right now your gonna see some failed memes. They know what is trending on imgflip ( Hillary Clinton memes) what will get upvotes

Our popularity gives us more views, which gives our memes somewhat of an advantage. For example, if I make a similar quality meme as an unknown user, it's more likely that my meme will get seen than theirs.

But you're right - if you look through our meme history you'll see memes that never really took off. Popularity doesn't mean people will upvote things they don't want to upvote.

Well, things aren't black and white, but popularity is known to have an impact on things. For instance, a video game that sells millions of copies is almost always a good, solid game in some respect, but not necessarily in every respect. The sales numbers are directly linked to how visible the game is to people, and visibility isn't purely a function of quality.

Either way, I don't wanna sound jelly or anything, but I keep seeing some weird things on Imgflip that I find a bit odd. But I could simply be wrong, as well.

I agree with you that popularity has an impact on things - that's part of what I was describing in my comment, about the views. It seems to me that leaderboard users consistently get more views on their memes than unknown users. All other things being equal, a meme with more views will get more upvotes than one with fewer views. I also agree with what you wrote that "visibility isn't purely a function of quality."

But I don't believe that popularity creates a situation where leaderboard users can rely on their rating.

I think it's pretty hard to assess whether the system is completely broken or not, since I don't know what to compare it to.

I think that in general, most memes that make the front page are there because the general imgflip community liked something about them and wanted to see them there (I can think of memes I didn't like that made the front page, but that could just be an individual preference on my part).

I don't think the memes making the front page are the very worst memes of imgflip (which is what I would expect if the system were completely broken).

Spot on.