
Collecting and the age of memeing - exolymph
http://www.ecns.cn/news/culture/2018-09-19/detail-ifyyehna1446070.shtml
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PhasmaFelis
> _Chen Mei, 25, from Jiangsu province, trawls Taobao, an online shopping
> site, for antique memes. She explains that the selling price of memes is
> really cheap, less than 4 yuan ($0.6) for over 500 images, or around 9 yuan
> for 4 gigabytes of memes._

Most of the article sounds like someone took
[https://www.reddit.com/r/MemeEconomy/](https://www.reddit.com/r/MemeEconomy/)
seriously. Someone's getting trolled here, I'm just not sure if it's the
author or us.

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ayy_lmao
10/10 would trade my rare Pepe and subtle merchants for some dank Chinese
memes.

~~~
praptak
It's a tough market, with strong evidence that it is being manipulated:
[https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=rdhNkv4ryuM](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=rdhNkv4ryuM)

~~~
tw1010
That's a joke right? Those subtitles are fake.

~~~
praptak
Yes, as is the original article. "Valuable collecible memes" is a (long-)
running internet joke.

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CPLX
This entire article is deadpan troll. A mildly amusing one in fairness.

~~~
stonewhite
But apparently people really did need moar jpeg.

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BurritoAlPastor
This is a little tangental, but I was surprised to see Hearthstone rendered as
“Hearth Stone: Heroes of Warcraft”. Does anybody know if Hearthstone is
localized phonetically or semantically in Chinese markets? Was this a round-
trip translation quirk, or did they re-localize the game name and not check it
against the English name, or what?

~~~
kristianov
Hearth（炉）stone（石） is localized semantically.

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mrob
This seems strange to me. In Western culture, I've always seen the higher
quality copies valued more. Value of cultural artifacts like this usually
depends on rarity, and the degraded copies are more common, so why would they
be more valuable?

~~~
a_t48
Look up “Deep Frying” - this is totally a thing in Western net culture, too.

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saagarjha
Deep frying is satirical, as far as I'm aware.

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eat_veggies
Deep fried memes are satirical ("ironic") but they were created as a response
to memes that were getting fried naturally through screenshotting and
transcoding/compression

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sincerely
Nitpicking here but I think the "deep fried meme" phenomenon (as opposed to
just images naturally becoming lower quality) is a result of the screenshot ->
instagram filter pipeline.

~~~
hi5eyes
theres bots/sites that df memes most people arent adding filters to memes to
post on ig/twitter/sc

~~~
sincerely
I agree that thats how they're made now but the phenomenon started as people
parodying memes that were screenshotted and instagram filtered with structure
-> 100 and sepia -> 100 etc

~~~
hi5eyes
oh yeah I remember when ig first came out and people were cross posting to
twitter and Facebook/reposting/compressing the memes even more

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krustyburger
This is a silly article.

~~~
amelius
The article contains a surprisingly small amount of images for an article
about images.

