Why are memes so popular in 2019?

They’re jokes; they’re language; they’re ways to make friends, tell stories and explain (or criticize, or satirize) society. Lucky for us, then, that 2019 has given us no shortage of meme material and plenty of memes that have trended virally, infiltrating the way we communicate and becoming part of our contemporary slang.

How difficult is content based popularity prediction of memes?

The difficulty of content based popularity prediction of memes is also illustrated by the memes where the model prediction does not match the true class label (see Fig. 12 ). It is a difficult task to tell the true class of these memes both for humans and machines. In this paper, we analyzed image-with-text memes collected from Reddit.

Can machine learning predict meme popularity?

Using machine learning methods, we also study what incremental predictive power image related attributes have over textual attributes on meme popularity. We find that the success of a meme can be predicted based on its content alone moderately well, our best performing machine learning model predicts viral memes with AUC=0.68.

Do social network features predict memes with merit?

While content based features could predict memes with merit, social network features determine which among those with merit actually go viral. It is also fair to acknowledge some limitations of this study.