Are There Any Rare Pepes (Feels Frog)?
A strange meme phenomena is happening. If you frequent the front page of Reddit, you might have seen references to “rare pepes”. As far as I can tell, “Pepe” is the frog from the “feel’s bad man” genre of memes. By “rare pepe”, people mean modified versions of the feels frog. In 2013, I presented a short paper at the the CHI Evaluation Methods for Creativity Support Environments workshop (feel free to look at this). In summary, I created a novelty metric based on google reverse image search.
Want to skip to the imgur gallery of least to most rare pepes (some are NSFW)? Want to see the data? Go for it.
With a bit of scripting, I have compiled an annotated version of one redditor’s collection of 133 pepes. Using the methods I describe in the paper, I found the amount of times that each of the 133 images appeared on the Web using reverse Google Image searches. When finished, we can now (by now, I mean for today) verify a few rarepPepes!
Here is a link to the entire 133 images republished in order of least to most rare. These are based off of the rankings in this spreadsheet. The least rare image (#1) has a novelty score of 0 and appears in 151,000 web pages:
A mid-tier rare image has a novelty score of .495 and appears in 276 web pages:
Looking at the imgur gallery, it seems the more rare a pepe is, the more detached from its original reality it is. For example, this .56 novelty score pepe appears on 131 web pages. It does not look much like a sad frog to me:
At the time of writing, this rare pepe only appears on the set of 133 (1 web page), and has an image search novelty score of 1. We found a rare pepe!
Does it feel good to be to find a rare pepe? Yes. Yes it does. At the same time, to share a “rare” image on the internet makes it less rare. I make no promises about the rareness of any of the images in the future.
Links:
- The results: imgur gallery, spreadsheet
- The post of the corpus of 133 “feels frog” memes.
- The Searching to Measure the Novelty of Collected Ideas workshop paper.
- A post from OutOfTheLoop on the rare pepes trend.
