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Websites, products, technology, people, media, games, memes, slang and timeline events, all with sources.
The front page of the internet, before it was
In 2010 Reddit was a spartan, text-heavy site owned by Condé Nast, far smaller than Digg at the start of the year. Digg's disastrous August redesign sent a wave of users to Reddit, and subreddits...
FFFFFUUUU, Trollface, Forever Alone, Me Gusta, Y U NO
Rage comics were crude, four-panel MS Paint strips about everyday frustrations, drawn with a shared cast of stick-figure faces. Born on 4chan in 2008, they peaked in 2010 and 2011 on Reddit's f7u12...
A paparazzi photo of Keanu Reeves eating a sandwich, Photoshopped everywhere
A May 2010 paparazzi photo of Keanu Reeves eating a sandwich alone on a New York bench became Sad Keanu in June, when Reddit and 4chan users cut him out and pasted him into paintings, film stills and...
Philosoraptor, Socially Awkward Penguin, Courage Wolf and friends
Advice Animals were image macros with an animal's head on a colour-wheel background and a two-line joke in Impact font. Advice Dog started it in 2006; by 2010 Philosoraptor, Socially Awkward Penguin,...
tl;dr: Too long; didn't read. A complaint about a long post, or a one-line summary placed at the end of one. Example: "tl;dr Digg v4 sucks, we're all on Reddit now"
Social news, and the redesign that broke it
Digg let users "digg" stories onto a front page that could crash a small website with traffic. In August 2010, Digg version 4 removed favourite features, let publishers auto-submit content, and...
"I'm on a horse."
Wieden+Kennedy's Old Spice advert, starring Isaiah Mustafa in a single unbroken shot, was posted to YouTube in February 2010 and became the year's most-shared commercial. In July the campaign...
vBulletin, phpBB, signatures, post counts and the ban hammer
Before Reddit and Discord ate them, forums were where the internet talked in 2010: vBulletin and phpBB boards for every hobby, game and band, with avatars, signature images, post counts, moderators...
The face for enjoying something you should not
Me Gusta, a bulging-eyed face drawn by Matt Oswald in March 2010, was the rage comic reaction for guilty pleasure. It spread through Reddit and Tumblr through the year and, with Trollface and Forever...
From Hyperbole and a Half to every to-do list
In June 2010, Allie Brosh's blog Hyperbole and a Half published "This is Why I'll Never be an Adult", with a crudely drawn figure shouting "CLEAN ALL THE THINGS!" The panel became the template for "X...
Books, Kindle, and a store that sold everything
Amazon in 2010 was the everything store with a cluttered tan-and-orange homepage, two-day shipping for $79-a-year Prime members, and a Kindle business so successful that the company said Kindle books...
Flash videos, viral clips and content wars
eBaum's World was a 2000s viral-media site that collected funny videos, Flash animations and images, often without credit, which made it notorious among creators. By 2010 it was still busy but...
Sunglasses drop, argument over
The "Deal With It" GIF, a pair of pixel sunglasses sliding onto a face, originated on the Something Awful forums in 2010 and became the standard way to end an argument on Reddit and Tumblr. It was...
Captain Picard, hand over face
The facepalm, especially the still of Captain Picard with his hand over his face, was the standard forum and Reddit reaction to stupidity in 2010, along with the double facepalm and the word itself,...
Digg's founder steps down after the v4 revolt
Kevin Rose, the founder of Digg and a Web 2.0 celebrity, oversaw the August 2010 Digg v4 redesign that drove users to Reddit, and stepped down as CEO in September. He remained one of the era's...
A strutting cartoon and a shrug at criticism
"Haters gonna hate", paired with an image of someone strutting obliviously (often a cartoon character or a walking pigeon), spread across Tumblr and Reddit in 2010 as the universal response to...
Over two days the Old Spice team filmed nearly 200 short video replies to questions from Twitter, Reddit and YouTube users, one of the most celebrated social-media marketing...
Verified Supported Editorial Labels show how well each record is documented; open any result for its sources.
Digg's redesign removed favourite features and let publishers auto-submit stories; users flooded the front page with Reddit links, traffic collapsed, and founder Kevin Rose...
