KYM Review: Apps and Sites of 2016

Editor’s Note: This article is part of Know Your Meme’s annual review series looking back at some of the most memorable and popular memes, events and people that defined the Internet culture in 2016 as we know it.

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n the world of apps and websites, 2016 made a bold leap into the doorstep of the next-generation techs, like simulated reality and artificial intelligence, with an increasingly visible presence of virtual reality (VR), augmented reality (AG) and artificial intelligence (AI) devices and apps in consumer tech market.

Over two decades after RealNetworks' first major live sports webcast of the Major League Baseball game between Seattle Mariners and New York Yankees in 1995, livestreaming finally became a new standard in social media with Facebook, Tumblr and Twitter introducing their own live video features this year, most likely inspired by the resounding success of early adopters like Periscope and Twitch, while others ventured into entirely new products based on the technology, most notably Vine co-founders' new mobile app Hype and SnapChat's Spectacles smartglasses. This isn't to say, however, that 2016 was a "great" year for social media. The industry giants, namely Facebook, Twitter, Reddit and YouTube, all faced a plenty of housecleaning tasks and PR headaches in the heat of the 2016 presidential election and the ever-growing pressure of paving new revenue streams.

But no other domain within the world of digital media has had a worse year than online journalism. 2016 began on a rocky footing with the death sentence of Gawker Media's flagship site Gawker.com in the aftermath of its legal battle against the Hulk Machine over sex tape leak; the principle of impartiality and objectivity came under intense scrutiny of the public amidst the stormy coverage of an unprecedented election marked by a candidate who waged an open war against mainstream journalism; accountability and truthfulness took a heavy dive in currency value as the age of "post-truth," or hyperreal politics, began rearing its ugly head through the rise of alt-right strongholds and fake news factories on social media. And now, here are the top ten apps and sites that defined the memescape in 2016.

/r/The_Donald

/r/The_Donald is a subreddit for supporters of United States president-elect Donald Trump that became a stronghold of the alt right movement on social media. In November 2016, the subreddit became the ground zero of a scandal in which Reddit CEO Steve Huffman admitted to tampering with insulting comments posted at him by Redditors on /r/The_Donald.

Gawker

Gawker Media is a blog network based in New York City, owned and founded by Nick Denton. The network originally consisted of eight blogs, including Gawker, Deadspin, Lifehacker, Gizmodo, io9, Kotaku, Jalopnik and Jezebel. In 2016, the company closed its flagship publication Gawker.com after filing bankruptcy in the wake of Hulk Hogan's sex tape lawsuit.

DC Leaks

DC Leaks is a website which serves as a repository for leaked emails taken from the accounts of top-ranking officials from around the world. In August 2016, the site was widely publicized for releasing emails hacked from organizations run by business magnate George Soros’, including the grantmaking network Open Society Foundations.

Face Swap Live

Face Swap Live is a mobile application that superimposes a variety of celebrity faces over the user’s face in real time. Videos and GIFs of people using the application are often posted to YouTube and Reddit.

Tay A.I.

Microsoft Tay was an artificial intelligence program that ran a mostly Twitter-based bot, parsing what was Tweeted at it and responding in kind. Tay was meant to be targeted towards people ages 15-24, to better understand their methods of communication. However, once it was released, users online corrupted the bot by teaching it racist and sexist terminology, ironic memes, sending it shitpost tweets, and otherwise attempting to alter its output. After these trolls discovered Tay's guiding system, Microsoft was forced to remove the bot's functionality less than 24 hours after its launch.

Breitbart

Breitbart is an alt-right conservative news site known for covering a variety of high-profile political scandals and Internet controversies, including the ACORN undercover videos, Weinergate and Gamergate.

WikiHow

WikiHow is an online resource community that offers step-by-step guides on how to complete various tasks that may require a certain level of prerequisite knowledge or skills.The website features over 190,000 instructional articles on a broad range of tasks, typically accompanied by visual aids, tips and warnings to assist the readers in acquiring the necessary know-hows to achieve their end goals. Since its launch in 2005, many Wikihow articles have gained online notoriety due to the over-explanatory or oversimplified nature of the content.

BuzzFeed Tasty

BuzzFeed Tasty is a series of short food recipe videos produced and distributed by BuzzFeed. Each video shows a meal being prepared and cooked from start to finish, along with a step-by-step instruction, from the top-down view. Since its launch in 2015, the series has gained a large following on the social media, particularly on Facebook, due to its simple and visually to-the-point style of recipe videos.

Geofeedia

Geofeedia is a social media intelligence platform which tracks the geolocation of posts made on various social media platforms in real-time. In October 2016, the service drew criticism from civil rights groups and social media after it was found to have been used as a tracking tool by U.S. law enforcement agencies during protests, most notably during the 2015 Baltimore protests that followed the death of Freddie Gray.

Pokemon Go

Pokémon GO is an augmented reality game for mobile devices developed and published by Niantic in which the player can capture, train and battle digital avatars of Pokémon characters in real-world locations using a GPS-enabled and camera-equipped smartphone. Upon its release in July 2016, Pokémon GO quickly became one of the most downloaded mobile apps to be ever released.