I think that “spread” in that definition is meant to be past tense. Posting an image, at least originally, didn’t make it a meme. What made it a meme was people resharing over and over to the point it was like an icon that most people knew. Like Rick rolling was a meme. Whereas the billions of other posts that year which weren’t popular, were not.
I think people now think memes are simply any image with text on it, which is not accurate.
Technically it wasnt a meme till I uploaded it to lemmy. The definition of a meme is:
I think that “spread” in that definition is meant to be past tense. Posting an image, at least originally, didn’t make it a meme. What made it a meme was people resharing over and over to the point it was like an icon that most people knew. Like Rick rolling was a meme. Whereas the billions of other posts that year which weren’t popular, were not.
Almost like a memetic virus, eh?