This a real question. Who features memes? What happens then?

This is the process, as I understand it.

Because I've had memes that got featured but get zero upvotes. Do all memes go to the latest page or just featured ones?

There are two sections: "Latest" and "Hot". If your meme is 'Submitted', it's in limbo until a Moderator decides to change it to 'Featured'. Among other things, they have to determine if your meme violates imgflip's TOS.

Once 'Featured', all memes go to "Latest" in the order that the Moderators change it's status from 'Submitted' to 'Featured'. If a lot of users are submitting memes at the same time, many pages worth of memes can appear at once, and yours could end up anywhere in the many, many, many pages of "Latest" memes, your clever humor and expert photoshopping forever lost in a seething crowd of angry political rhetoric, non-sequiturs, and astounding examples of unintelligible stupidity that is 70% of what gets submitted on this site.

"Hot" memes are listed in the order of those which have the most upvotes and/or comments. I think it's some combination of both, because I've seen memes on what locals call the "Front Page" (page 1 of 'Hot') with lots of comments and relatively few upvotes, and vice-versa. I cannot tell you which weighs more, comments or upvotes, or if they weigh the same.

Upvotes and comments are acquired through a combination of dumb luck (someone happens to bump into your meme, and in true needle-in-a-haystack fashion, also happens to think it's clever or comment-worthy), and being so notoriously famous for making good memes, that many people regularly visit your Profile page because they know they'll find funny stuff there.

Each batch that gets released into Latest is by when the moderators change the status from 'Submitted' to 'Featured,' but within each batch, the memes are ordered by when they were generated. That's why it's helpful to always generate your meme immediately before you submit it, to make sure it doesn't appear lower than it needs to be.

In 'Hot,' upvotes count more than comments, but I'm not sure of the proportion. Another important factor is time, hence why memes can appear on page 1 of 'Hot' with fewer upvotes than other memes around them.

'Hot' and 'Latest' both contain all the featured submissions that are currently on the site. They're just in a different order.

Good one. Lol.

The more you comment and upvote other people's work, they will come to know you and look for your work as long as you are polite.

I need to follow this

When I make fun of liberals it takes forever to feature . I'm also being trolled by a jealous , juvenile alt-using troll , some of my memes will never feature .

Although the terms of use don't specifically forbid political discussions, they tend to be very divisive in this day and age. Lighthearted escapism earns points, cynicism doesn't. Take a look at some of my stuff and you'll see that I've largely laid off the political stuff since the election. But of course, I'm only at 80K, so take this with a grain of salt.

Stick to comedy. Especially on what is suppose to be a comedy site.

You hit it on the head. It's not just limited to liberal and conservative, either. Both groups spend a lot of time stifling the other group's message. Instead of intelligent discussions, it boils down to each faction yelling at one another.

Since I returned, I've kept my political posts to a minimum, and push the humor aspect more than the point and cry.