I Can Eat Glass was definitely a thing, but in the late 1990s or perhaps very early 2000s. Sites such as knowyourmeme.com don't go nearly as far back.

The website was first picked up on the Internet Archive in 1999. I had no trouble finding memes from 1994-1996 on KYM, such as "Dancing Baby", "Ate My Balls", and "Goodtimes Virus".

In fact, clicking that "year:1994" turns up 108 results, so they're pretty comprehensive, although they only cover Web-based memes, usually with images, and not Usenet.

The Everything2 entry is dated April 12 2000.

Knowyourmeme is very late to the meme game. Entire civilizations of memes flourished and decayed on 4chan, fark, Slashdot, YTMND, and the bare metal internet long ago.

Bonsai Kitten is lost to the ravages of time.

"Ah, you think dankness is your ally. But you merely adopted the dank; I was born in it, molded by it. I didn't see the memes until I was already a man, by then it was nothing to me but BLINDING!" -Fark, probably

I suppose if by "lost" you mean "extremely well documented with 457 thousand views" then yes, Bonsai Kittens are lost forever?

> Bonsai Kitten is lost to the ravages of time.

https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/bonsai-kittens

I liked it better when the internet was made of cats. Now there are too many dogs and it's not as fun.

Some external links in that article were mildly disturbing to me, bonsai babies in particular, I do not recommend clicking randomly.

Ah, back when people believed things they saw on the Internet.

What is the bare metal internet? Is it a series of tubes?

An information superhighway, if you will.

Is that what it was like before it was (re-)made of cats?

https://youtu.be/zi8VTeDHjcM?si=ZSQ7tFjidj0BlZhf

In the before times it was once sunny and warm; then the clouds came.

> Entire civilizations of memes flourished and decayed

Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,

And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,

Tell that its sculptor well those passions read

Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,

The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed:

And on the pedestal these words appear:

"ALL YOUR BASE ARE BELONG TO US"

I was millimeters away from responding w/ the pure inanity of "So can I. Once, anyway." But, your citation of OG meme-master Shelley inspired me to do better (18th century, and already prognosticating the rise of "CATS" - legend).

I refrained. ;)

You can help to complete the archives.

KYM is super biased in what ends up there, as it leans heavily towards 4chan and Reddit content, with heavy amounts of Twitch and certain genres in YouTube. It's missing a lot of memes popular among girls, especially from Tumblr. Similarly, it doesn't have a lot of TikTok trends & tropes that I'd consider to be memes.