[Coda]

Originally Posted by daikokunyo

what is that website? is it like, everyone can make their own sub-website on it or something?

They're called "sites" but in modern terms we'd more call them "pages." You upload an image or animation, and you upload a sound clip, and you add some text that gets that gradient zooming effect applied to it, and that's literally all there is to it.

As simple as it is, people did some massively creative stuff with it back in the day. Its simplicity and short-form nature are the reasons it works: to be good, you have to make something clever that can deliver its whole punchline in a super short amount of time, which lead a bunch of creative people to do witty things.

Of course, it's also one of the predecessors to modern memes. This was one of the earliest things you could have called an image macro generator.