this post was submitted on 18 Apr 2024
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Advice Animals were much earlier, in the late 2000s. I remember seeing them on gaming forums before Reddit was even a thing, when SA and Digg still reigned supreme.
Know Your Meme traces them back to 2006.
https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/advice-animals
Well, memes sometimes last longer than the era they starred in.
I remember finding this chart showing the various meme eras (I don't remember where I found it, sadly):
And I definitely remember seeing old memes still being used after their debut "era" - I remember seeing some from the "experimental" era (1995-2004) like the Dancing Banana, All Your Base Are Belong to Us and less-commonly YTMND and Homestar Runner references in the Classic Era (2004-2009), and likewise I saw memes from that era (Pingas, demotivational posters, Leeroy Jenkins jokes/references, Chuck Norris, Over 9000, Keyboard Cat, etc) still being used well into 2012-2013 despite that already being a new "meme era".
And as I mentioned in another comment, Rage Comics and Advice Animals still persisted into 2014 (mostly dying/fading into obscurity around 2015), by which point "dank" memes were already at full swing; and I definitely recall still seeing some Surreal Memes in use around the early 2020s, so I'd say the boundaries of meme popularity are fairly fuzzy.
Ah, forgive my word usage. I meant to say that they first started in that era, not that they were solely used back then. I do appreciate how informative your comment is, nonetheless!