but where did it all begin?!

@Mmaatttt: Yeah, there has to be a starting point. It can be anywhere, but when it is posted in one of these four, it'll always be in the lame circle of posts.

@Anonymous: how exactly would 9gag shit wind up on 4chan

also you missed a lot of steps: tumblr, facebook, memebase, funnyjunk, etc.

@calhaus: see http://canv.as/p/o0reb/reply/1120790

You guys are all wrong. 4chan rarely takes content from other websites. The rest are all inbred bastards of 4chan :DDDD

@Anonymous: not true. go to 4chan and search through all the threads for pictures. over half of them will have a watermark from the aforementioned sites and another quarter will have watermarks from random sites

@Anonymous: there is no order! hence a cycle!

@Anonymous: And another 35% will have the watermark airbrushed out.

@Anonymous: Yeah but that doesn't mean the watermarked pictures originally came from 9gag etc. They've been recycled back and forth; they didn't start off with the watermark. Where do you think 9gag got them?

4chan, somethingawful, and ebaumsworld are the content factories of the internet, at least when it comes to the kind of meme-centric culture Canvas and reddit are built upon.

@Anonymous: the fuck, Ebaums still exists?

I seem to recall it being old the first time I saw the internet and saw the picture of the rabbit with a pancake on it's head and an Ebaums watermark.