Bury these memes, please

When a meme becomes a designated hate symbol, it's time for it to go. The gloomy frog mutated into a nefarious amphibian when it was co-opted by racists and trolls over the past year or so.

In September, the Anti-Defamation League added Pepe to its list of hate symbols. Matt Furie, Pepe's creator, has been working with the ADL to try to resuscitate his cartoon's character.

But at this point, it's kind of a lost cause. It feels bad, man.

These University of Central Florida fans were certainly psyched about their signs.

Not even the dead gorilla could be as buried as this low-effort meme deserves to be. The internet saw an explosion of Harambe memes after the gorilla was shot to death in May. There is no end in sight, though there really ought to be. Prepare for a flurry of ironic memorial posts this coming May because the internet never forgets.

You know when you and your friends are onto something cool, and then someone's parents learn about it. Suddenly "bae" doesn't sound so lit anymore, fam.

That's what happened to "delete your account" on the grandest scale in 2016, after presidential candidate Hillary Clinton tweeted the three-word jab at rival Donald Trump. The internet drove in a few more nails in the coffin with explanations and analyses.

Anybody who still posts that joke needs to delete their account.

This meme will not die until there is a Crying Jordan in place of every living person's face. You can usually see the infamous image following big sports games, like when the Golden State Warriors blew a 3-1 lead in June, or when the Cleveland Indians did the same in November.

The meme needs to die because it's become so predictable. I've come to expect a Crying Jordan to pop up anytime any team loses. People will probably plaster the picture over my face when they're done reading this.

How is Grumpy Cat still a thing? The internet loves its cats, but Grumpy Cat has now outlasted Longcat, Nyan Cat and Keyboard Cat. The meme got a book deal, a movie and ended up on Broadway with "Cats."

While its use as a meme has died down, Grumpy Cat is still oozing into mainstream pop culture. Those 15 minutes of fame should have ended a long time ago.

Fake articles could well be the worst aspect of the internet in 2016. Granted, they've been around for a while. But we're finally seeing the wreckage that follows when people believe and post pretty much anything that looks like a news story.

Fake news functions just like a meme: it lives exclusively on social media and is shared wildly. Most memes are harmless. But fake news, like this example, swayed a US presidential election, whether Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg wants to admit it or not.