Hey everyone.
I'm from Ukraine, and I'm honestly tired of staying inside both the Russian-speaking and Ukrainian-speaking internet.
I know English well enough (learned it in school), but I've never really lived in the English-speaking internet. Like, sure, I know who PewDiePie, IShowSpeed, and Asmongold are, but I don't actually understand the culture around them or the wider online space.
I want to start consuming English-language content properly, but I have no idea where to begin. I want to understand the memes, the drama, the ongoing discussions, the personalities basically the whole ecosystem.
The problem is... I don't even know how to define what I'm looking for. If I knew exactly what I wanted, I'd probably be able to find it myself. Since I don't, I'm asking here. Sorry if this is kind of vague.
For anyone willing to read a wall of text, here's why I'm looking to leave the internet spaces I'm used to.
The Ukrainian internet is extremely focused on itself. Most discussions revolve around domestic politics, the war, or urgent social issues. That's understandable, of course, but it also creates a very tense atmosphere. It feels like almost everything is political. Most of our biggest YouTube channels are political channels, and there's relatively little entertainment content. Living in that constant state of tension gets exhausting after a while. I also just want to get outside of this relatively small cultural bubble.
The Russian-speaking internet has almost the opposite problem. It's largely apolitical not because politics don't exist, but because most people seem to actively avoid talking about the country's crises, the war, or domestic problems. That's true for everyone, from average users to huge creators. There are political bloggers, sure, but in my opinion they're usually terrible. One group keeps saying Russia is about to collapse any day now, while another mostly talks about Ukrainians as a way to distract from internal issues. And people who seriously discuss politics often end up being treated like weird fringe figures.
There's a ton of entertainment content in Russian, but there's another problem: mainstream internet culture is absolutely saturated with far-right "edgy" humor. Endless jokes about feminists, Black people, minorities, etc., along with a constant stream of misinformation built around those topics. The whole environment just feels incredibly toxic. It seems eager to sneer at almost everything. That general misanthropy has seeped into almost every corner of entertainment, and I've reached the point where I just don't enjoy being around it anymore.
So... where should I start if I want to get into the English-speaking internet?
P.S. One thing I've struggled to find is something similar to what I used to watch in Russian. There were Twitch streamers who'd casually talk about philosophy, history, politics, literature, or other "intellectual" topics, but in a very informal and funny way. Not university lectures or serious debates.
More like: "lmao, did you know Nietzsche supposedly drank his own urine out of a boot?" That kind of vibe. Half entertainment, half genuine discussion. The intellectual part came from all the references and the fact that serious ideas were mixed with jokes instead of being presented academically.
Does that kind of content exist in English? If so, who should I check out?
While you're diving into this, you're very likely to run into memes that seem impenetrable. A lot of the memes posted here will make no sense to someone who is not familiar with some socialist figures, world history, or current events. I don't really recommend browsing this regularly, but if you come across a meme without context that you want to make sense of, you can try looking it up on https://knowyourmeme.com/ and it might help you get some context within the wider internet space. Such as if it's based on another meme or comes from a specific subcommunity.
Where do memes in the Western internet actually come from? Back in the day where I lived, most memes came from VK. There were dedicated meme pages that made original stuff, and then a bunch of other pages that just reposted it. These days, pretty much all new memes come out of small Telegram communities. So where do they come from on your side of the internet?
All over the place, really. Reddit, tumblr, 4chan (these are the more right-wing/racist ones), YouTube communities, Twitch/Youtube streamers, Twitter, Bluesky. They always start somewhere like that, then everywhere else reposts or transforms them, like you mentioned. The ocean is vast and the smaller the site, like Hexbear, the less chance you'll come across their memes organically. But every once in a while, they 'break containment' and get the attention of a mainstream audience that normally wouldn't create something like it or be exposed to the niche community it came from.
Every fandom has their own in-jokes and self-perpetuating memes. Sometimes you get combinations posted between communities, like people making edits of scenes from The Sopranos but referencing events from the video game The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind. Or one streamer interacting with another, then having their communities and memes cross-pollinate.
Old memes were based on early forums or YouTube videos, or even television commercials and flash animations.
Reddit or tumblr