Editor’s Note: This article is part of Know Your Meme’s annual review series looking back at some of the most memorable and popular memes, events and people that defined the Internet culture in 2016 as we know it.

The Year In Review

• A Golden Age of the Meme Culture: Say what you will about the current state of the memescape, but 2016 will soon be remembered as the year when memes broke through another great barrier and stepped into a new realm where no memes have gone before: The Beltway of Washington D.C. About six years ago, we began hearing references to internet memes on network TV shows. In the next few years, we started seeing memes plastered on advertisement, films, and occasionally, headline news. In 2016, we saw President Obama dropping the mic during his speech and the First Lady doing the Mannequin Challenge with star-studded guests in the Blue Room of the White House. If that doesn’t impress, relish the fact that for the first time ever, “memes” was looked up on Google Search more frequently than Jesus and God. So, yeah, memes are sort of a big deal.

• The Dawn of a Post-Factual Era: This year, we saw the Internet getting bought, and getting got, on a scale of efforts and impact that we have never been seen before. Misinformation and disinformation ran amok and spread without a pause, while classified information leaked like a sieve from servers that were thought to be secure, largely driven by endless bouts of clash between the conservatives and liberals on the social media, critical breach and exploits of high-profile email servers by mysterious and highly skilled hackers, and of course, a booming industry of fake U.S. election news manufacturers for-hire in Eastern Europe.

• A Regressive Trend in Quality-of-Meme: In 2016, the self-referential trend of the meme culture (or meta-memeosis as previously referred to in last year’s report) continued to run its course; the steadfast and high pressure winds of “shitposting”:/memes/shitposting not only conventionalized such practice as a norm in the creative process of memes, but they also directly contributed to the regressive trend in quality-of-meme, aesthetics and substance, by lowering the entry barrier under the pretext of being ironic. But as the old wise saying goes, ”it’s still shitposting even if you are being ironic.”

• Politicization of the Meme Culture: This year’s United States presidential election certainly wasn’t the first “social media election” that we’ve studied, but without a doubt, it was by far the most interesting and eventful political spectacle we have observed online in our lifetime. In the heat of the political showdown between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, quite a few memes were openly endorsed and condemned by the two major political parties, most notably Pepe the Frog and “This Is Fine” Dog, while others were enlisted by web-savvy partisans to craft a cult of personality for their candidates in what became known as the Great Meme War of 2016.

• The Wave of the Early Aughts Nostalgia: It is only logical that our nostalgia of the past also ages with passage of time. This year, Smash Mouth’s late 90s hit “All star” and Santana’s Grammy-winning “Smooth” spearheaded the wave of 90s nostalgia, while other one-hit-wonders and hits from the early 2000s began popping up on the social media.

Memes of 2016

Check out our annual review series to get in the know with the rest of must-see memes from 2016. Be sure to check the homepage this weekend for more reviews by categories, including this year’s most notable events, people, apps and sites, and fandoms.