A Group Of Redditors Have Created A ‘Stock Market’ For Memes

The meme is something of an internet phenomenon and it’s something that’s hard to explain, but most people still get it anyway. Of course over the years we’ve seen the rise and fall of all kinds of memes, where a meme that used to be considered popular last year is suddenly no longer cool to be used.

Basically there seems to be some kind of “value” attached to these memes, and this is something a group of Redditors are trying to find out. According to a report from The Verge, a group of 12 Redditors led by Brandon Wink and Ron Vaisman have created a fake stock market called the NASDANQ that expands on the idea started by the r/MemeEconomy subreddit.

There is no real money involved and people trading on the NASDANQ won’t actually lose or win real-life money, although we guess there is a certain amount of pride of being able to predict the value of memes and “cash” in on it, even if it is all entirely made-up. Speaking to The Verge, Vaisman said, “The idea is to give this usually intangible thing a value, so that people can feel like they’re earning something when before they could not.”

So how this works is that traders can sign up for an account and will be given 1,000 units of NASDANQ currency (we reckon doge dollars would have been cooler). Using this account, they can then trade on memes or even submit memes for consideration to be listed. We’re not sure what the end goal is here, but both Wink and Vaisman are seeing it as more of a sociological project.

The NASDANQ has yet to be officially launched as the team is still working on it, but it is expected to exist in both web and mobile app form when it does go live.

Tyler Lee
Categories: General
Tags: reddit