Will Now Have Stories

Submission 43,480

About

Will Now Have Stories is a photoshop meme featuring pictures of various objects with "Stories" icons from various social media platforms superimposed on top of them.

Origin

In October 2013, Snapchat launched a "Stories" feature on the messaging app, allowing users to post video segments accessible to others for only 24 hours. On August 2nd, 2016, Instagram launched a similar "Stories" feature, allowing users to share slideshows of images and videos taken throughout the day as a single post, which also expire after 24 hours. In January 2017, Facebook introduced its own "Stories" video sharing feature for iOS and Android devices, which allows users to post videos that expire after 24 hours. On April 3rd, 2017, Twitter user @memeprovider^[5] posted a picture of a calculator with Facebook Stories superimposed at the top, along with the message "calculators in 2017 now have stories" (shown below). Within 48 hours, the tweet gained over 107,000 likes and 77,000 retweets.

Spread

On April 4th, the @FreeMemesKids^[4] Twitter feed tweeted a picture of a banana with Instagram Stories pasted across the peel (shown below, left). Meanwhile, Twitter user @MattPostSaysHi^[2] tweeted a picture of a pregnancy test with Instagram Stories photoshopped over the results (shown below, right). Within 24 hours, the posts gathered upwards of 8,000 likes and 4,000 retweets.

That day, the @WillHaveStories Twitter feed began posting variations of the photoshop meme. The following day, a screenshot of the @MattPostSaysHi tweet was submitted to /r/MemeEconomy,^[3] along with speculation that the Will Now Have Stories memes were "on the rise" but had a "high risk of normalization." Meanwhile, the KFC United Kingdom Facebook^[6] page posted a Will Now Have Stories photoshop along with the message "KFC 2017 will now have stories," which gathered upwards of 4,700 reactions and 4,400 shares within eight hours (shown below).