Every card can be checked

The archaeology — the internet, decade by decade

Every bar is a decade of the internet’s own memory, counted from the cards’ own years. Press one and the desk opens narrowed to those years, ready to coin.

What the shelf is about

Where a card came from is provenance; what it is about is what a launcher browses by. A card without a category is absent from this list rather than guessed into one.

Where it comes from

The rules

• A name and a picture are one post. The name comes from that post’s own comment, its own subject (opening posts only) or the upload’s own file name — never from anywhere else.
• A card that cannot be proved does not ship. Every card records which string its name came from and the two strings it can be proved against; the passport prints them with the source post.
• The picture becomes ours. The moment a picture is accepted it is copied to our own storage — the archives prune their old files, and a card whose picture lived only on somebody else’s disk would vanish the day they clean house.
• A picture whose words were lost is not shown as a meme. It is kept, counted, and hidden until its post can name it — a card whose title does not describe its picture is worse than no card.
• Nothing that lands here is ever deleted to make a number look better. The shelf only grows.

The same facts are at /api/launch/meme/<id> as JSON, and the ledger itself at /api/launch/archive.