- Massive political cultural shift. Britain votes to leave the EU. Trump wins. The alt-right becomes a serious threat and conservative start to grow in size and regain their power and influence whilst the left loses power thanks to these events. It becomes really trendy to "bash the librulz" as conservative politics permeate into meme culture, etc.

- Mainstream memes radically change to resemble what they are today. Early 10s was the era of rage comics and top text bottom text. 2014-2015 was a sort of filler experimental period for memes. 2016 was the start of the new templates and models for memes. Drake template, image captions representing things, deep fried memes, those iconic twitter memes with text in a white background at the top and a reaction image, post irony humor, etc. Generally speaking memes got a lot weirder and complex.

- Memes become more commonplace whereas before a lot of normies refrained from posting them on social media because they looked cheesy. They were fairly common before but have now fully permeated youth culture

- Youtube content starts to feel a lot more corporate and formal

- The "Dab" becomes the first Zoomer dominated fad.

- A plethora of new youth slang/phrases are birthed or becomes mainstream such as "On fleek", "Bae", "-Goals", "Lowkey", etc

- Music starts adopting similar production elements. Work from home started this trend I believe even though that's a late 2015 song. But in 2016 onwards a lot more songs started having the same "vibe" and felt similar because of the production elements they used.

- The cross gen transition period between 7th gen(PS3/XBOX360) and 8th gen(PS4/XBOXONE) gaming comes to an end as 8th gen finally becomes the standard. Developers stopped releasing games and last gen ports for 7th gen this year when last year 7th gen still got plenty of support like DB Xenoverse, AC:Rogue, Cod BO3, etc releasing on those consoles and their successors(using the previous examples, Xenoverse 2, AC Origins, Cod Infinite Warfare) in 2016 releasing solely on next gen.

- A plethora of celeb deaths

- Windows 10 becomes commonplace

You also had some other stuff which got big that year like Pokemon GO and the cringe culture circle of YT(Leafy, Pyro, H3H3, etc) which made it feel more transitional at the time although they died out by the end of the year. I wouldn't really count it towards the transition though.

Now that I think about it this is probably bigger than the 2013 shift.

I've always felt like 2016 was the first year to start shifting towards how things are now, I'd pin point the change to around the killing of Harambe, that's when I felt like we started to shift culturally. Closer by The Chainsmokers being the first song off the top of my head to go into that era of drony sad sounding pop music, that being big at around that time.

I've always felt like 2016 was the first year to start shifting towards how things are now, I'd pin point the change to around the killing of Harambe, that's when I felt like we started to shift culturally. Closer by The Chainsmokers being the first song off the top of my head to go into that era of drony sad sounding pop music, that being big at around that time.


I'd pinpoint it to just around the turn of the year to 2016. Maybe very late 2015 even. But throughout the course of the year you had these changes fully set in and you also had events which took place over the course of that entire year like trump's campaign which resulted in him becoming president.

I would argue 2014 was the first hints of this transition. That was the year where the BLM movement started and race relations really started to go down the tubes after the initial optimism of the Obama admin. A lot of the politics of today started in that midterm, unfortunately. Then 2015 had Trump/Bernie and we're still kinda in that era.

I would argue 2014 was the first hints of this transition. That was the year where the BLM movement started and race relations really started to go down the tubes after the initial optimism of the Obama admin. A lot of the politics of today started in that midterm, unfortunately. Then 2015 had Trump/Bernie and we're still kinda in that era.


You have a point since 2014 is when people started to get tired of the left although that backlash grew exponentially during Trump's campaign run. Exhibition A: Gamergate.

Yup, 2015, or 2016!

Yup, 2015, or 2016!


Very late 2015 felt like the start of the transition. Trump running for president, music feeling different, memes changing, etc.

Very late 2015 felt like the start of the transition. Trump running for president, music feeling different, memes changing, etc.


It was also the beginning of today's Cancel Culture! Cancel Culture officially started in 2014/2015!

It was also the beginning of today's Cancel Culture! Cancel Culture officially started in 2014/2015!


I didn't notice it back then. I guess i'll take your word for it.

It was the beginning of the political craziness these days, at least in 2015/2016!