Notejak / Soyjak Extending a Note

About

Soyjak Extending a Note or Notejak is an exploitable meme format in which a Soyjak is extending a piece of paper towards the viewer, with a short message written down on the note. Based on a photograph of a bartender shared in 2021, the Soyjak format saw spread on Twitter in 2023 as users edited various messages onto the note.

Origin

On June 13th, 2021, Twitter^[1] user @trinityallie tweeted a photograph of a bartender passing her a note offering help if a patron who was talking to her was bothering her. The user wrote^[2] that the patron was indeed bothering her and her friend, and that the bartender ended up forcing him to leave. In a separate tweet,^[3] @trinityalle wrote that she asked the bartender to pose for the photo after the situation was resolved. The tweet accumulated over 42,000 retweets and 207,200 likes in two years (tweet and image shown below, left and right).

Spread

The image saw viral spread online in the following week. For example, on June 16th, 2021, Twitter user GuacamoleFanatic posted it to the /r/pics^[4] subreddit, where it gained over 66,000 views prior to being removed.

On March 30th, 2022, an anonymous Soyjak.party user posted the earliest found edit of the image, a Janitor meme that was archived on Soybooru^[5] that day (shown below).

On April 21st, 2023, an anonymous Soyjak.party user posted a Soyjak based on the photograph, adding the message "Tip: $0" to the note extended by the bartender. On that day, the image was archived on Soybooru^[6] (shown below).

In the following months, the Soyjak gained virality as a meme format on Twitter, with users adding various drawings and messages onto the note, as well as onto the original photograph.

Various Examples

Template

Search Interest

External References