10 Years on iFunny: A Reflection on That Stupid Yellow App

Note for Substack-only readers: Layne Archive only exists because of iFunny. I started posting stuff here that I was sick of getting automoderated on, and eventually only started putting longform content here. If you’ve never been on iFunny, this article might not be super relatable.

I had a friend in 6th grade that introduced me to two things that became very important to me in the following decade: iFunny and Minecraft. His name was Jamie, and he was a typical 2010s southeastern kid. His parents were divorced, his stepdad drove a huge truck, Chick-fil-a and church several nights a week, Falcons/Panthers games every Sunday, the whole ordeal. Well, his parents always tried to outdo each other on spoiling Jamie- I’m sure you know how divorced parents can be. So, this kid had an iPod Touch 4th Gen the year they came out: 2010. This was a big deal to me, as touchscreens were still not a super ubiquitous thing yet in 2010. I didn’t have anything of the sort (I wouldn’t have a smartphone until about 2017 if you can believe it), so I always hovered around this kid just to see how the thing worked. I’m old enough now (Le Sigh) that touchscreens were still an impressive technology. The App Store blew me away, the fact he could remotely add stuff like the Nazi Zombies demo on his phone for FREE. Even as a kid, I could feel the world changing.

Jamie and I played middle school football, and I used to hover over him while he checked his little iPod Touch at the bus stop, on the very peripheral of the school’s Wi-Fi (yet unprotected from student devices). One day, Jamie tapped on a little orange (yes, orange) app. There were mostly funny pictures on the app, a somewhat novel concept. Except, this one had timed releases of the funniest pictures once in the morning and once in the afternoon.

I was enthralled.

Waiting for Features to be released as an 11 year old kid was hypnotizing. This was back when there were only 40 a day, with a video at the end of each set. Soon, I went from dreading football practice to looking forward to the bus pickup time because Jamie would save the features for us to look at. There wasn’t just humor, there were cool facts, user generated content from people around my age, inside jokes, songs, comics, really anything. While the app was called iFunny, it became clear that it was really just a platform of sorts for people to share anything.

I was so interested in this new world I’d found that I would bring a pen and paper to write down the names of stuff I wanted to remember. When I got home, I’d look them up on the family internet terminal. You know the type:

Back when the internet was a location you had to enter instead of an all-encompassing fog around us 24/7

I’d go on something like this, after begging my mom to stop playing solitaire on it, and look up Insanity Wolf, Rage Comics, Bad Luck Brian, all of these vintage early 2010s memes. Of course, my favorite was Trolling and Troll Face. I didn’t quite understand how it all worked, or what the word “meme” really meant. I thought these characters were part of a TV show or something, so it didn’t make sense that anyone was able to use them as they pleased. How was Philosoraptor allowed to be in a Rage comic?

This was gold to me back in the day. I distinctly remember being on page 27 of Insanity Wolf memes at, like, 11pm on a school night. My parents were not pleased.

The unthinkable happened. Jamie left my school and took his iPod with him. Reeling from the loss of my friend, I was also perplexed about how to keep looking at features. My parents were useless on the technology front: groveling for a phone of any kind, a game console, anything, was effectively useless. I was cut off from this little world I’d uncovered for months. During that time, I missed it. I began outsourcing iFunny to my other friends, begging them to download it so I could see the features again. I had mixed success, just barely hanging on the new trends (this time, it was being able to upload Vines on the app).

Soon, a lucky break. My little brother’s birthday was soon, and he wanted a tablet. Go figure, the parents that didn’t allow me to even have an Xbox during the golden years of the 360 era just handed my kid brother a shitty android tablet. It was tiny, and slow, and the UI was classically Android hideous. But, it could download apps. I worked out an agreement with my brother, who was weirdly diplomatic for an 8 year old. I was allowed to use the tablet any time he wasn’t on it.

Picture the most garbage early 2010s Android tablet imaginable

Finally, back to iFunny.

This time, things had changed. There were subscriptions now, the UI was a little more modern (it looked like a pack of Zapp’s Voodoo Chips before), they even had “republishing”: a novel concept where you could share someone else’s posts without stealing them. My limited knowledge of the app informed me that post stealing was a big deal in those days.

So, I made an account. I was so eager to start making posts of my own because this new account coincided with a new fascination of mine: Alice in Chains.

My music taste was probably typical of a kid of that era, maybe a little edgier. My mom listened to country music and my dad only listened to classical, so I wanted to forge my own path and pick something completely out of left field to make my own.

How about Nu-Metal?

I was obsessed with the early 2000s rock of a decade prior, getting immersed in the iFunny music scene that was built by people who had been there back in the day. Linkin Park, Limp Bizkit, Evanescence, Rage Against the Machine, all of these classic Nu-Metal bands started receiving ridiculous amounts of airtime on my brother’s android tablet. This was before Spotify, so I either listened to it on YouTube in the browser with tinny $5 gas station earbuds, or blasted it out of my family computer’s speakers into the living room.

Creating my iFunny Account

All of that changed when I branched out a little bit and discovered Nirvana. I was hooked on them until, of course, I heard Alice in Chains. I was sitting in the parking lot of a grocery store while my mom shopped. Her minivan included a SiriusXM subscription (Lmao) and I kept it parked on Channel 34 to hear the Nirvana songs that were routinely in rotation. Then, they played Sea of Sorrow. It was an interesting sound, like a prehistoric artifact of the Nu-Metal that still dominated my tastes.

When I got home, I looked them up on Wikipedia. I listened to a few more songs, and that was that, I was hooked for life.

Anyway, I was extremely enchanted with Alice in Chains by that point. Moreover, the other kids and my parents were ready for me to move on from Nu-Metal, so they wholeheartedly endorsed this change to a less cringe band. I was eager to bring this momentum onto iFunny, where my newly created account that had been sitting dormant for a few weeks would soon become my own personal shrine to Alice.

I needed a name, however. I tried AliceinChains, I tried making it all caps with Is for Ls, I tried various forms of the word “Grunge”, but everything was already taken. Finally, I found it: I’d name it after the most famous individual member of the band, a dude I was obsessed with in a way only kids are. I tried Layne, but it was taken. I tried “LayneS”, “LayneStaley”, etc. Nothing worked, either too unrecognizable as an AIC fanpage or already taken. In a rage, I threw a hideous underscore in there to reset my chances of landing an OG name:

Layne_Staley was born.

This was in late 2013. By then, the iFunny music scene was huge. It was actually much bigger than the politics scene, believe it or not. There were various clantags that people would badge themselves with: ARN for Alternative Rock Nation, HMN for Heavy Metal Nation, that sort of thing. I even started GRN, Grunge Rock Nation. I loved posting about Alice in Chains on there, multiple times a day every day. I met other tweens who were just as obsessed with the band, and for a while I even ran a “Grunge News” comic strip with them. We communicated on Kik and did polls, “rap battles” with various 90s rock figures, that sort of thing. I should note that I met the girl I recently broke up with (in 2023) on an Alice in Chains fan Instagram account in 2013- we also kept up for years on Kik. I made super niche content that only appealed to others that had done hundreds of hours researching the band, but there were like 250 of those on iFunny alone so it ended up being a suitable market niche.

The subscribers were pouring in. By the end of the school year, I’d amassed over 300, towering over some of my friends in the community. I’d done my far share of brownnosing to make connections with accounts that had 500, 750, even 1000 or 2000 subscribers. I felt unstoppable.

This takes us to 4th of July, 2014. I was home from football, scrolling through a patriotic set of features. It featured the usual, a rage comic where Will Smith and Will Ferrell battle over rule of the US, a photo of a cloud that looked like the flag taken by some kid on an iPhone 5, whatever. When I went into collective after, I saw something that (looking back) altered the rest of my life.

When I left iMusic for iPolitics

It was a picture of Nazi soldiers marching with the caption “Thank them for your freedom this 4th of July”. I was butthurt. Jimmies rustled, even. At this point, I was still a “tuck your shirt in and say yes ma’am” kind of well behaved kid- teetering just on the edge of homeschooler ahh social skills. Seeing this picture made me rage. Didn’t this guy know that the Germans were the bad guys in WWII?? I was familiar with offensive humor by this point, obviously, but I could tell this guy wasn’t joking. He was very patiently explaining to people in the comments about the brave freedom fighters of the Second Gentile Uprising. WTF!!!

Thus began the moment my “Music Account” died, to be replaced by a deep interest in politics. This moment, the moment I saw someone legitimately defend the Germans, fundamentally rearranged my 14 year old mind. I realized that despite not agreeing with this guy (and I still don’t today), I’d never been in an environment where his ilk was allowed to speak freely. Indeed, every justification for the Nazis I’d ever received was warped- like seeing a muddy reflection. They were always strawman arguments. Why hadn’t they ever been allowed to speak for themselves, wasn’t this America?

So began the era that my friend dubbed the “intellectual orgasm”. It was as if I’d become conscious for the first time. I researched everything. I went to some very sketchy websites to find Holocaust Denial, 9/11 inside job material, Sandy Hook details, anything. I was a voracious reader of conspiracy theories. By the time “Jade Helm 15” rolled around, I was well versed on the topic. But it wasn’t just the Nazis, I realized that iFunny was becoming a place where *anyone* was typically allowed to speak freely. I saw things that I shouldn’t have as a tween: gore, execution footage from the Syrian civil war, hardcore porn, doxes, threats, anything. This was my experience in the well-remembered Wild West phase of iFunny.

Simultaneously, the first waves of corporate sanitation had started killing off the old web. iFunny was an oasis of free speech in an increasingly dry desert. Lots of boys my age, around 15, held the entire world up for discussion. No idea was too taboo, nothing was off limits. Kids wrote entire theses on the minutia of economics, dense philosophy and formal logic/reasoning, theology, politics, anything. Anybody could say anything as long as you could back it up with massive text walls, which soon became the sole reason anyone used the comic maker. Moreover, people actually read these. This is why iOGs today lament when newfags cry about text walls, because they want killshots and Le metaironic funny memes. Nowadays, iFunny has a subculture where everyone tries to pretend to be stupid. Not so in 2014/2015, when people were happy of the fact they could write a lucid 2500 world essay about subprime mortgage interest rates knowing other kids would read it.

There was a time when the opposite of this Reddit meme was true.

Don’t get it twisted: we had our fair share of stupid shit. These “essays” (which I probably remember as a little more impressive than they actually were) still contained the N word, boobs, jokes, L33tspeak, dunking on people, but these things were the icing on the cake of a serious argument underneath. Again, today it is basically the opposite: spamming killshots with a few nuggets of substantive arguments underneath. In fact, if you “try too hard” or visibly care too much, you lose. Really, we only have the informative stuff as context to the edgy humor that is a conclusion from said information. Oldheads, do not apologize for participating in this Golden Age Renaissance!

Btw, I remember talking to Sab twice. Once was when he was on the app and I asked him a question about gun control in Nazi Germany. The next was after he briefly came back after wiping for a Q&A and we talked briefly about something I can’t really remember. This was when he took pictures with Golde, I don’t really remember what year.

Oh yeah, I also tried to get my friends on the App literally the week of the 2nd Banocaust. Untouchable got 2 of them, and the other lost interest after that.

I’ll fastforward past the 2016 / election era. A larger percentage of you guys were there for that, and I don’t have too many unique experiences. I was just a moderately popular (2000ish subs) account that was not too prominent. I was easily outclassed by guys like MonarchTrump, NCR, AOYJ, iPolitix, Prae, Zaois, JxmmyLe, you know the crew.

However, this is also the era where iFunny finally settled on an ideology. I entered iPolitics as a Factory default neocon that just parroted what parents said. By 2016, I was a “minarchist”, overdosing on libertarian commentary. My bedroom became a repository for AnCap, Libertarian, Austrian economists, and other small-government writers. I devoured Hoppe, Von Mises, Rothbard (perhaps with some Bugles and Mountain Dew..), the Pauls, Rand, Friedman, the usuals. In fact, I had to walk around piles of their book to get to my bed. This movement had its heyday (see below), but each iteration of whatever ideology was hot at the time enforced that the app was predominately Right Wing no matter what. Around 2015 is when most communists and leftists just gave up.

There used to be a joke that iFunny had a different ideology every year. I think this was true for, like, 6 years. This is how I remember it, with the Gs standing for accepted Golden Era years:

pre-2014 (G): free for all with a small majority of Neocons

2014 (G): Neocons and Libertarians. Leftists start to evacuate the app

2015: Populists / election Trump era. Some (including me) libertarian holdouts

2016 (G): Tradcaths / Distributists. Fierce but small collection of “everyone else” including AnCaps and a small smattering of Pagans (JimLeCaveman era). Really, 2016 was a year when you could basically find anyone on the app. Even the Comedicrats!

2017: Tradcaths

2018 (G): Tradcaths and a brief resurgence of Neocons. This was the “Iraq invasion was Le Good” era

2019ish - 2021: “Far Right” coalition that oscillates between Neo-Nazis, Pagans, and whatever else. Emergence of guys that say “Proto-Indo European” an average of 25 times a day.

2022-Today: Idek. A lot of esoteric Hitlerists, some Tradcaths still, a lot of Pagans. Plurality of Nietzscheans. Nobody really uses hard ideological titles anymore imo.

This timeline loosely tracks with my theory that 9/11 and the 4th of July serve as thermometers for how the community is feeling. The community has swerved back and forth from despising America to “praising it despite its problems” like 3 times. If you’re an OG, think about the times when it was edgy to defend America on the 4th.

Also, think about the humor trends from these days. In the early 2010s we had MLG offensive posting, in 2018 there was the ultra-meta Ironic humor that collapsed in on itself. How does this align with the prevailing political beliefs of that time? Discuss.

Modern iFunny

In the background of all of this was the app itself. It acted as a hub for people of all stripes to get together and discuss, sometimes saying very controversial things. It was a good host, all things considered, with a few problems of its own. The first problem came from the app custodians themselves. They’ve always tried to cultivate this weird mystique by sharing almost nothing with the community. How much do we really know about FunCorp? Sure, we had “Chef”, but outside of him and a couple other official accounts, there wasn’t much. Even then, they rarely communicated with us. It was always a big secret just how far they’d let free speech go. Looking back, I think they realized they had an incentive to allow for “alternative opinions” to form, but they also had to walk the line of regulation with App Stores and Law enforcement. When they manually moderated, things were fine. They were lenient but still took down (most) accounts that violated their terms of service. It was clear that they inserted a LOT of trackers and advertisements on the app, but most people were fine with that so long as they had access to the community. Allegations of being a surveillance tool or bitcoin mining operation swirled around comment sections across the app.

Right around 2019 is when they started rolling out automoderation. This is a “service” that even large companies today struggle with. Facebook’s auto moderation is still quite bad and they have entire floors of buildings full of engineers who only work on it. You can imagine how bad FunCorp’s was. At first, it caught almost nothing. Then, they realized they were in hot water unless they tuned it to be ridiculously sensitive (remember when they got pulled off the App Store?). So now it’s basically just a machine learning algorithm that bans everything with, say, a 10% resemblance to an image that it has already archived as being against ToS. This works as well as you might expect it to.

From about 2019-2023, there were so many normies that they acted as a veneer. They kept “deep iFunny” sheltered from the prying eyes of other normies. When people downloaded the app, they stayed on the well-lit streets of endless Featured section spam. iPolitics stuck to the sewers, in the shadows… This gradually changed when they automated the featuring process. Suddenly, it was confirmed that iPolitics still had the majority sway on the app as many iPolitics posts became automatically featured. This pierced the veneer keeping us away from the feature creatures, who now began to parrot iPolitics in broken “based speech”. 2021 ushered in the era of “based” feature commenters who said things like you’re allowed to be racist as long as you’re racist to everyone. Le sigh..

Feat Creats will talk about how iFunny is an “open secret” before plastering it everywhere.

I won’t comment on the state of 2024 iFunny as the dust hasn’t settled and my opinion is with the large majority: it’s bad. The UI sucks, they have no idea how to monetize, they have no idea how to police content, it just sucks. The only thing keeping people on the app is the community. Efforts to make iFunny refugee camps on other sites have always failed. But, it should tell FunCorp something when people try to fork their app or make their own version to get away from their extremely poor management.

What does iFunny mean to me?

Idek how to answer this question. On one hand, it has unironically changed my life. I’m so glad I was there for the golden years, the Wild West era that allowed me to become the person I am today. I doubt I’d remain a normie neocon forever, but iFunny sped the process up and allowed me to spar with people that were just as smart as me (or smarter). Nothing was off limits. I’ve met some of the coolest, most unique people ever on that app. You guys remember Dustbringer? Where else are you gonna meet a guy like that? Sure, he might be a drop in the ocean on Reddit. On iFunny, he was beloved despite nobody else being an objectivist.

However, iFunny has its downsides. I was on it way too much as a kid. I missed a portion of my high school / college years sitting on that app. I’m at the point now where I have diminishing returns by scrolling it, there’s only so many reality-altering reveals of knowledge that can occur after all. As I’ve gotten older, I’ve had less and less in common with the average iFunnier. Even with fellow OGs from my cohort. I didn’t watch Red vs Blue on Youtube, I didn’t enjoy Anime, I don’t like most of 4chan/imageboard culture, I’m not a Nazi, I’ve basically stopped arguing with other people in the comments. After ten years of it, I’m just kind of done. Moreover, the endless contrarianism has circled back to mocking things that the Right used to want in, like, 2018 that I still want. I still want Le tradwife and a part-time homesteading hobby. People mock that now, saying you’re playing dolls with Wojaks. Okay, the feature creatures might be. But, that only raises a bigger issue. People on iFunny now only thing beliefs are held in regards to what community you want to belong to, or how you want people online to perceive you.

Let’s pick an easy example: I’m an Orthodox Christian. I first encountered the church when I was like, 15. Yes, it was online. For a year or two, maybe I did act like a Le Ortho crusader on the internet, not that anyone on the app today would remember that. But, I was a kid. Now that I’m much older, I’m still an Orthodox Christian and my Orthodoxy exists almost entirely offline. I go to church several times weekly, keep the fasts, have a prayer rule, whatever other “authentic” standard you want to use.

People on iFunny cannot possibly entertain someone saying they’re Orthodox without a whole slew of imaginary baggage. They think I’m some sort of tradlarper, putting on the Orthodox jersey because I like the aesthetic and I want to be contrarian to both sides of the Prot/Cath debate. They can only understand someone’s RELIGION in terms of internet arguments and style points. See what I mean? They treat these major life decisions in terms of how their fellow terminally online retards will perceive them. Of course, this is sometimes reinforced by this generation’s Ortho Crusaders ignorantly arguing with anyone and everyone in the comment section. Look, treating people like that on iFunny is sort of justified- I guess. But, it exists in a closed feedback loop because its a bunch of iFunniers arguing with each other in their own little subculture. They’re an iFunnier before they’re Orthodox, and their Orthodoxy exists in the iFunny subculture. Real Orthodoxy happens in a church. Real homesteading happens outside. Real fitness happens in a gym. None of it happens by arguing, acting smug, or flexing on iFunny. You get what I mean.

On top of that, there has been a mass exodus of iOGs. Pre-2016 users are dwindling, especially given yesterday’s banocaust. The replacers are younger and just have a different perspective from the people of my time. That’s fine, I’m not saying that like a boomer, bitter over the fact I’ll never be 18 again. I’m saying I increasingly feel ostracized from iFunny culture in a way that would be inconceivable in the pre-2018 era.

I’ve met some amazing people on iFunny. I’ve also met some people that are quite obviously very mentally ill. Because they can chameleon onto RW twitter talking points and post .jpegs of Greek warriors and attack everything from being an intellectual to hard work, they’ve been accepted. On top of that, iFunny loves controversy and contrarians. People like logging into the app after work/school and seeing that they can dogpile someone. I get it, its fun. I used to do that, but now I heccin matured!!!! I’m literally a good person now.

iFunny is unrecognizable from it’s state even 5 years ago. It remains to be seen if the app has another 5 years in it. Probably not. Today, it’s like a knight that survived too many battles and became ugly, old, and fat instead of dying gloriously at the ripe age of 21. I just finished reading the first Game of Thrones book, so here’s an obligatory Robert Baratheon reference.

“The new iFun-” *burp* “-ny will be.. wholesome…Reddit..and literally not bigoted..” *servers go offline*

Regardless of what happens, regardless of how estranged I feel from today’s iFunny, I’ll always be grateful for the legendary Golden Eras, the things I’ve learned, and the friends I made. I hope iFunny survives, I hope the community decides on a backup plan in case it doesn’t, and I hope this post encapsulates my appreciation for that stupid little app.