> Chen Mei, 25, from Jiangsu province, trawls Taobao, an online shopping site, for antique memes. She explains that the selling price of memes is really cheap, less than 4 yuan ($0.6) for over 500 images, or around 9 yuan for 4 gigabytes of memes.

Most of the article sounds like someone took https://www.reddit.com/r/MemeEconomy/ seriously. Someone's getting trolled here, I'm just not sure if it's the author or us.

10/10 would trade my rare Pepe and subtle merchants for some dank Chinese memes.

It's a tough market, with strong evidence that it is being manipulated: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=rdhNkv4ryuM

That's a joke right? Those subtitles are fake.

Yes, as is the original article. "Valuable collecible memes" is a (long-) running internet joke.

This entire article is deadpan troll. A mildly amusing one in fairness.

But apparently people really did need moar jpeg.

This is a little tangental, but I was surprised to see Hearthstone rendered as “Hearth Stone: Heroes of Warcraft”. Does anybody know if Hearthstone is localized phonetically or semantically in Chinese markets? Was this a round-trip translation quirk, or did they re-localize the game name and not check it against the English name, or what?

Hearth（炉）stone（石） is localized semantically.

This seems strange to me. In Western culture, I've always seen the higher quality copies valued more. Value of cultural artifacts like this usually depends on rarity, and the degraded copies are more common, so why would they be more valuable?

This comment brought the following quote to mind: "The fake is of far greater value. In its deliberate attempt to be real, it's more real than the real thing."

Imagine a painting which is locked away from everyone in order to help preserve it. Someone then shows up and creates a replica, and they share it with the world. Which one is more valuable?

Look up “Deep Frying” - this is totally a thing in Western net culture, too.

Deep frying is satirical, as far as I'm aware.

A lot of memes have an aspect of satire.

Deep fried memes are satirical ("ironic") but they were created as a response to memes that were getting fried naturally through screenshotting and transcoding/compression

Nitpicking here but I think the "deep fried meme" phenomenon (as opposed to just images naturally becoming lower quality) is a result of the screenshot -> instagram filter pipeline.

theres bots/sites that df memes most people arent adding filters to memes to post on ig/twitter/sc

I agree that thats how they're made now but the phenomenon started as people parodying memes that were screenshotted and instagram filtered with structure -> 100 and sepia -> 100 etc

oh yeah I remember when ig first came out and people were cross posting to twitter and Facebook/reposting/compressing the memes even more

The target is making them look older, because images created long time ago usually have less quality and resolution.

It is similar to antique furnitures being made to look old and crappy

> because images created long time ago usually have less quality and resolution.

It's more because of this

https://xkcd.com/1683/

I'm not sure I'd take anything in the article at face value.

This is a silly article.

The article contains a surprisingly small amount of images for an article about images.

Year of the Moon Rabbit - bit like our April Fool's Day, to be taken with a pinch of salt.