Hindsight is 20/20, you’ve probably heard many times over the course of your life. And it’s true! Over time, you’re supposed to change and grow, and that oftentimes comes with realizing mistakes or missed opportunities you’ve had before. But nowadays, it also comes with a terrible curse: cringy internet posts and cringy memes! Many times a year, I’ll get a Facebook memory with a super cringe post that I made that I instantly go to delete, shaking my head and burying it in my hands immediately. So I figured why not make a list devoted to cringe? So get your face ready to grimace as we go through the past and waste some time with these old cringeposts!
I’m trying a newish format for this, adding titles/captions to each. This will probably not be the format going forward, but for some reason I felt like this list needed it. Let me know how you feel about it, ideally refraining from rudeness!
Rage Comics
Back in the early 00’s and 10’s, rage comics were, well, all the rage. But with the combination of “derp”, misusing “le”, and various tropes (oftentimes sexist or otherwise), these posts died out for a reason!
Justin Bieber Memes
Whether you like his music or not, it’s actually kind of crazy when you think about this. A kid happened to strike gold in popularity and millions of people bullied the hell out of him & his fanbase. Sure, his whole persona and attitude at the time was cringy, but I’m sure he feels the same way now, too. But to relentlessly bully a kid on the internet is like…messed up dude.
Ninja Memes
There are ninja memes around today that are good/funny, but there was a period in the early 10’s that was just stuff like this. Add in a title of “Epic LOL” for these kind of memes, and well, thank god times have changed.
Gamers Never Die, They Respawn, etc.
As a video game enjoyer, when this phrase started its popularity in the late 00’s, my young self thought it was badass. Now when I look back, it’s super cringy. Borne out of this notion that gamers are constantly bullied or mistreated via a big victim complex, this and other posts were meant to offset that feeling.
Inspirational Joker Posts
Sadly these are still around thanks to the Joker movie, but they were really, really prominent before it. Whether it was the Joker or some other antagonist “against society”, these are usually matched with some sort of shallow quote or edgy thing.
Eminem/Stan Memes
Though celebrity stan humor has gotten better, and more accurately targeted, these posts were all over Facebook before. People desperately trying to gather audiences with their fanbases with bad usages of lyrics and so on…it still happens, but not near the amount it used to.
Acting Out/Edgy “Come Take It” Posts
Much like how libertarians like to post, these teenage-angst posts are just…bad. Whether it’s creating a victim complex out of nothing or taking something shallow to make it “inspirational”…some of these have been replaced by “fancams” or stuff like that, but another trend that thankfully has died down.
Cringy Batman Memes
That’s right, both the Batman and the Joker are victims of internet cringe. This was especially noted when I made a Batman meme list in 2023, when it took me way too long to find 10 usable memes. I remember some of these being funny to me when I was young, but when I look back now almost all of them are just cringy and bad. It’s mainly because this era of humor was really prevalent when the Dark Knight Trilogy was released, while also being one of the most successful franchises at the time.
Cat Meme Posters
Cats have run the internet for a long time. And everyone knows the “haz cheezeburger” cat, a tolerable icon. But many tried to mimic the success of the “haz cheezeburger” cat. And lemme tell ya, combined with the black-border motivational meme poster format, they did not age well.
“Like a Boss”
Originally I was looking for cringy “Like a boss” memes with the stick figure, but then I was reminded that it was incorporated into a commercial by Wendy’s, so I had to put that there instead. People no longer do anything “like a boss”, and while it’s not inherently cringy, a large bulk of “like a boss” memes end up being cringy, usually following the same format as the aforementioned rage comics.
