Forever memes of the early 2010s lasting years vs 2025, where a trend is everywhere for two weeks and then called cringe. The For You Page (FYP) with little to no effort, like 6-7, ballerina cappiccina, niche baby, aura farming and more. There are also trends like wabi sabi or “rare aesthetic,” which starts as an audio or photo slide but ends up causing conflict and even bullying.
Furthermore, the wabi sabi trend started as a way to show people that insecurities are beautiful, just different than everyone else. It was used for slander and taken out of context, which ended the trend shortly after.
Additionally, creators, pressured to stay relevant for views and likes, are forced to constantly invent or adapt to new social media trends. This forces content to be under 15 seconds to maximize viewership. This shifts from creative work to a quick-paced, meaningless joke.
“As a content creator, I don’t try to keep up with most trends; I just say or do whatever comes to mind, differentiating myself from other content creators.” Anne Wehrell (10) said.
Popular memes and trends are increasingly produced by AI. The low effort required to put in prompts for AI to generate creates nonsensical content that requires minimal human creativity. Trends like “Ballerina Cappiccina” are the direct result of technology, since AI can fill the media with countless, slightly different versions of a trend in minutes, the original creative effort is devalued.
The acceleration of trend cycles affects digital culture. When a trend saturates and is discarded in 2 weeks, it doesn’t have time to mature into a widely recognized cultural moment. While specific jokes and audios achieve enormous popularity, they are quickly forgotten, leading to the creation of new cultural markers.
The results are a fragmented online experience, where some users might understand sub-niche memes that others find completely unintelligible. This changes from the shared cultural language of previous generations to being replaced by countless mindless memes and trends.
“I can never keep up with all the different trends.” Valeria Brieba (10) said. “It’s exhausting, something is funny one day, the next day if you use it, it’s called overused or unfunny. Sometimes I say an online joke nobody gets, and it gets annoying to not have the same trends on my FYP as everyone else.”
The cycle of these memes and trends is driven by financial algorithmic models dominating social media platforms. A fast cycle prioritizes quantity over quality; if a trend lasts only 2 weeks, users must constantly return to the app to find new trends and remain relevant.
Each scroll presents an opportunity for a social media platform to insert an advertisement, more content, more scrolling, more ads, more money. This incentivizes the burnout of meme and trend culture, treating attention span as a finite resource to be consumed and replenished at maximum capacity.