4chan is the America of the internet, the only reason it has outsized influence is because ideas were allowed to incubate.

Most memes and ideas went no where but some had a chance to multiply without getting stamped out by the censors.

I wouldn't bet much on KYM's provenance research. Memes spread so far so fast on the information superhighway, those that started on some Korean photography forum or Russian anime newsgroup, you'd never know if you weren't there ... or know where to look. KYM often cites 4chan because it's popular, in English, and well-archived (ironic indeed) and KYM editors will take the earliest hit from the third-party archives as provenience, when the archive itself might be younger than the meme.

You can find discrediting examples in the mid-2000s thread collection the internet archive recently released ("archive ten billion"): memes appear in the chanological record years before they anywhere Google knows of. But how can you know that's the real origin? Even "Know your memes" first appears in there as a /b/ catchphrase in April 2006, but you must notice that's also when the /b/ posts in the collection begin.

Edit, another example:

4chan is also known as a Mongolian basket-weaving forum, among other things: corruptions descended from the meme of referring to anime as "Chinese cartoons". An old 4chan saying, as KYM finds? No, it came from that Russian anime newsgroup, ru.anime.chainik, after its parody FAQ from 2002 was translated by users of an associated LiveJournal group and added to a since-deleted Uncyclopedia article.

  Q: Что такое аниме?
  A: Китайские порнографические мультфильмы.

The full FAQ is on the author's website, which is still online, shounen.ru/anime/tech/afaq.shtml But is it entirely original to that newsgroup? Some of those terms seem to have come from FIDO...

Thanks for your reply and examples, very informative. I agree it's an awful metric but seemed it might hold water when I first typed it. Full disclosure, I have never actually visited 4chan despite ample opportunity.

This is exactly why it's so famous; everyone knows of it but is scared to visit (or admit they visit) so it's a perfect "source of anything".

(This post originated on 4chan)

"Underwater basket-weaving" was a derogatory term for impractical university classes back in the 70s (?)

and Mongolian is a stand-in for mongoloid, which fell off the euphemism treadmill as a descriptor for people with Downs syndrome.

So "Mongolian basket-weaving forum" means "place for r*, useless people"

a mirror of the uncyclopedia page https://mirror.uncyc.org/wiki/Onime

the livejournal stuff is also still up https://ru-onime.livejournal.com/71601.html

(2005)