Something Awful and Newgrounds were a good place to spawn memes back in the early-ish days of the web. When memes were still flash videos and such.

And even before that (or possibly not before that), I remember going to emule to download what were essentially memes. A lot of them spreading partially via email.

But I think in the least 8 years, 4chan has really become the main birthplace of memes.

4chan was arguably born out of a combination of the FYAD (fuck you and die) and the ADTRW (anime death tentacle rape whorehouse) subforums at something awful.

ADTRW was just the anime forum. The admins called it that to annoy the anime kids. They would all hang out on 2chan, the japanese precursor to 4chan.

FYAD was the forum with no rules. It was (is?) basically /b/ but this is back in the day so it was much smaller, everyone knew everyone else. It was basically a little clique that would sit there making injokes.

I never really went in there, but the notable thing about it was that the mods would constantly abuse the css and js on the forum theme to the extent that it would often crash some browsers. It was pretty funny. Oh, and there was always one mod who was elected from the userbase every month, the "idiot king" who would rule with an iron fist. In short, like online gaming, it would be great in theory except for the fact that everyone else there is an antisocial teenage nerd.

Rage comics are just "MS paint comics" with recurring characters and a set format- which makes sense given that reddit is a less chaotic alternative to 4chan. Of course, the chaotic nature of 4chan is not a bad thing.

Also, the memes that originate elsewhere are still made popular due to 4chan's influence. e.g. "trollface" apparently comes from deviantart but is commonly used in rage comics (I think).

The trollface is from a 4chan comic. The creator posted it to DeviantART too, but it's not really "from" there. http://whynne.deviantart.com/art/Comic-Trolls-98357844

There are a few similar comic artists. Notably 3-Angled-Blue, who drew some amazing MS Paint comics that are slowly being made into rage comic templates.

Thanks. I had done a quick search beforehand to see its origin because I knew it was used in rage comics. Upvoted.

They were made infamous by reddit, due to them starting to beat that dead horse a year after 4chan got bored of it.

When was that? I created f7u12 three years ago.

Yes, that's when.

You can't do the math yourself? Rage comics were a thing in 2008. It was dead and buried by the time redditards decided to fornicate with its corpse in 2009.

How do you figure that?

Figure what? What date it is? I usually use a calendar.