Welcome to your IWSMT wrapped 2024! Copying a tradition that now many places are doing, and following up from last year’s, I figured it would be a good opportunity to take a look back at the year we’ve had together! This year has seen new things come to the site, good memes, great chats, and the community come even closer together. To me, not only as the host of IWSMT but also as a part of the community, I’m super pumped to be able to celebrate that! While the new generation doesn’t use search engines to look for “meme websites” anymore and the older generations get more and more busy with less time to waste, sometimes it feels small. But everyone comes here for the same purpose and to celebrate funny memes, wholesome memes, or any of the other various things that get shared here! So take some time to look back and reflect on the funniest memes this year, the boringest, or other -ests!
Stats for Individual Posts
1. Gold Star
4. Bunny Buddy
5. Win or Lose
Category Breakdown
To be fair for this section, I didn’t have the ability (read: time) to see the amount of posts per category and then divide them by their reactions. These are some of the more commonly categories used, so they’re more likely to have higher totals. I would imagine that “WTF” probably has the highest amount of “WTW”s per post, for example. If you guys want me to do the math, I’m down! Just…don’t have time probably until after the Holiday season 🙂
Stats per Meme List/Longform Content
Should I just create a “top 10 wholesome meme lists” instead?
Forums & Community
The introduction of the “Forums” earlier this year gave me more work and thinking to do, both in posting and in moderating/community engagement, but I’ve really enjoyed it. I know it’s not for everyone, but I really feel like it’s been good for the tighter community. Whether it’s sharing your art or pet, giving suggestions for music or reading, or even just talking about your childhood, there’s been lots of great stuff coming out of it!
I know that the change from Disqus to OW did a number on the community of IWSMT. Especially because communication around it was way less than subpar. I know there’s still gripes with it, too. But thank you for your patience with it, as well as your feedback. While I have like, no power to tell OW anything, I note down your frustrations (and count the amount of times I see them pop up, and yes, I’m sure I miss some) and have a document full of them. Even on my end, things aren’t perfect, but the fact that I can moderate an entire site alone with minimal time is really awesome. More & more, I’m also seeing OW on many other sites as well, so I’m assuming across the board its replacing Disqus. So in a way, IWSMT community members have got it “early” compared to some!
No, we’re not changing back to Disqus, for various reasons. This site has already seen its communities’ comments and stuff completely erased. I’m not putting you guys through that again.
Maybe I should do another AMA.
The merch store launched late November, and I by no means expect anyone to make any purchase and I genuinely feel bad almost any time I bring it up. It all started with a forum post asking if there would be interest, as well as what that interest would be in (designs, products, etc.). You guys were super helpful in that, and although I wanted to launch it back in August, I was incredibly moved at the support that came to it when it did launch a couple weeks ago! What moved me even more was not only the audience request for Ember-related merch, but that you guys actually proved to want it!
There’s only been a handful of sales, it’s not like its making hella money. But it has made more than all of the IWSMT Facebook posts this year combined (which isn’t much, we’re talking like, “yay, it beat $100 net”, but still!)
Whether or not the store stays or not, you have my promise that I’ll try and take in your suggestions and update the products (while keeping ones people still have desire to purchase) according to the community. This is a weird way of me giving back to you for giving to IWSMT, and if you’re going to do anything like that to support the site, I want your guys’ input!
That’s almost the population of Tunisia!
If you stacked 7.8 Million pennies on top of each other, you’d make a stack 7.4 Miles high (11.9km)! That’s about 1.5x the height of Mount Everest.
A healthy human heart beating at 57 bpm would beat about 30 million times a year!
(More reason to say that YOU are the beating heart of IWSMT 🤍)
Guy’s Stuff
Copied from above for those who would rather read plaintext/for accessibility:
The IWSMT community has been a constant positive presence in my life. 2024 threw at me many challenges, life-altering and life-threatening issues, family loss, etc..
And well many of these things will continue to effect me or happen again, one constant throughout the year was how excited I was to share memes with you guys. Especially the wholesome lists.
I know there will come a day where I’m no longer the one running the site, but I promise that even then, I’ll still be around on it.
Words cannot possibly convey the relationship I have with this site and how deeply I care about the community here.
Keep wasting time here.
I’ll keep trying to give you reason to.
With love, Guy
And that’s it! That’s IWSMT’s 2024 wrapped! I gathered all the data on December 10, so technically there’s still room for other posts or stats to be raised. But I wanted to get this done at a time where you guys still have time before the Holidays and all that, and I didn’t want to wait till January because usually there’s a huge user falloff from December. I’m assuming that’s to do with new years resolutions or something.
