I want to start off by saying that I am going to shamelessly steal memes for this channel, and there are a couple of reasons supporting my decision.
1. This is already the status quo in the Telegram meme community. The whole thing is an incestuous web of forwarded or resaved memes in the first place, most of which are lifted off of other sites like Reddit and Instagram.
2. It is often impossible to determine who the original creator of a meme is. By the time that it is posted to content aggregators, it could have already had names added or removed, or any number of edits made. I have seen some try to track down the origins of memes using google or twitter to establish a timeline, but these methods are unreliable given that many memes are originally shared on transient image boards like 4chan or in private group chats. So essentially, unless you are personally aware of who created a meme, it is basically anyone's guess where it came from. And even if someone does claim to have that knowledge, they could easily be fabricating their story. The exception to this rule is that of comics made by well known artists, but those live on the boundary of what might prototypically be considered a meme (a good topic for another time).
3. Anonymity isn't all missed opportunities at fame for meme creators. It also provides the freedom to crap out low quality work with poorly articulated opinions while still getting your ideas out into a public forum. This is the ultimate enabler of political discourse for the masses, and that this is such an integral part of online culture is something that I see as a huge positive.
To be clear, I still intend to credit original artists when possible, but this was an opportunity to rant about the nature of modern memes that I couldn't turn down. Does it sound pretentious? Probably, but I don't care if I sound cringe because I'm comfortable that my opinions aren't actual dogshit.
1. This is already the status quo in the Telegram meme community. The whole thing is an incestuous web of forwarded or resaved memes in the first place, most of which are lifted off of other sites like Reddit and Instagram.
2. It is often impossible to determine who the original creator of a meme is. By the time that it is posted to content aggregators, it could have already had names added or removed, or any number of edits made. I have seen some try to track down the origins of memes using google or twitter to establish a timeline, but these methods are unreliable given that many memes are originally shared on transient image boards like 4chan or in private group chats. So essentially, unless you are personally aware of who created a meme, it is basically anyone's guess where it came from. And even if someone does claim to have that knowledge, they could easily be fabricating their story. The exception to this rule is that of comics made by well known artists, but those live on the boundary of what might prototypically be considered a meme (a good topic for another time).
3. Anonymity isn't all missed opportunities at fame for meme creators. It also provides the freedom to crap out low quality work with poorly articulated opinions while still getting your ideas out into a public forum. This is the ultimate enabler of political discourse for the masses, and that this is such an integral part of online culture is something that I see as a huge positive.
To be clear, I still intend to credit original artists when possible, but this was an opportunity to rant about the nature of modern memes that I couldn't turn down. Does it sound pretentious? Probably, but I don't care if I sound cringe because I'm comfortable that my opinions aren't actual dogshit.
I think this is actually hilarious on an even deeper level than what was probably originally intended, because your IP address is like, the least revealing thing someone could leak about you. Unless you specifically set a static address, it changes every time your router reboots, and it doesn't even tell someone where you live with any more accuracy than like which half of a state you're in. And that's assuming that you're not using a proxy or a VPN either. At best maybe they could determine if you had recently been active on some other site, but that would also require having access to their records, which are likely to be more secure than your information
So basically it's a display of just enough technical literacy to understand what an IP address is, but not enough to know that it's basically useless for doxxing. Or maybe the author was aware of that and choose to do this ironically. Or maybe it's just so fucking funny because a corporate account spitefully posting a string of numbers in response to a childish insult is so surreally online that it comes way out of left field. Whatever the case, this joke is definitely no longer funny, and I am glad to be the one to kill it