Reddit's Top “Meme Of The Decade” Contests Conclude After Months Of Voting

As the decade came to a conclusion in 2019, two of Reddit’s most popular meme-oriented subs decided to take a trip down memery lane and hold contests with their several million members to see which iconic image would become the “Meme of the Decade.”

On December 3rd, 2019, r/DankMemes launched their extensive Meme of the Decade contest within the subreddit to their 3 million+ members. Entirely based on votes from the community, the two-month-long contest recently came to a conclusion.

Launching on December 4th, nominations for the contest were collected in four different rounds covering two to three years each (2010-2012, 2013-2015, 2016-2017, 2018-2019) where each round consisted of its own 32-place bracket poll. From these brackets, the winner of each poll was then placed into a four-way battle to determine the Meme of the Decade.

Beginning with the first bracket between 2010-2012, members of r/DankMemes ultimately selected Rick Roll with nearly 13,000 votes. The second bracket containing memes from 2013-2015 concluded with Spongebob at just shy of 11,000 votes. For the third (2016-2017), Pepe heavily dominated with 14,364 votes, which was the highest total in any bracket. The fourth and final bracket (featured below) came down to Robbie Rotten’s We Are Number One and Tom and Jerry with the latter taking the last spot at 11,536 votes.

With the initial rounds concluding to provide a final four, members of the r/DankMemes subreddit held one last poll between Rick Roll, Spongebob, Pepe and Tom and Jerry that ultimately concluded on January 30th, 2020, with the announcement that none other than Pepe the Frog had claimed the no. 1 spot. If you’re curious to see how this result was decided, check out u/dicemaze’s post here for a full breakdown of how Pepe won.

Over on the r/Memes sub, their “Meme of the Decade Tournament” kicked off on December 14th, 2019, after numerous users requested a contest. Also using polltab, r/Memes held a two-week nomination contest with the three highest voted memes from each year selected before settling on 32 different meme templates and themes that competed in a single-elimination, majority vote, tournament to determine a final winner.

Each round in the final 32-meme bracket (shown below) lasted two days and members whose nominations made it to this phase were gifted with various Reddit prizes/awards (the top selection was given nearly 20,000 Reddit coins).

Jumping up to the semi-finals, members of the sub selected Rick Roll, Press F , Pepe and Woman Yelling at a Cat as their final four. From here, Press F inched past Rick Roll by roughly 100 votes as Pepe dominated Woman Yelling at Cat with over 1,000 more votes. The finals between Pepe and Press F were surprisingly un-close with Pepe losing by nearly 3,000 votes. Coming to an end on December 31st, the r/Memes Meme of the Decade was finally decided with “Press F to Pay Respects” claiming first place.

Check out KYM’s own Meme of the Decade contest here to see how these two competitions compared to our results.