‘Stale and repetitive’ Memebridge has gone offline for a revamp, says founder

Speaking exclusively to Violet, the main admin said Memebridge had lost its inventiveness, but would be back one day

Danny Wittenberg

Though still appearing in searches, the page has gone offline

Memebridge, the biggest Cambridge page on Facebook, has gone down – and it doesn’t look like it will back in time for Christmas.

Nearly 25,000 social media users who liked the meme platform can still see its name on their search suggestions, but as is standard procedure when Facebook pages are deactivated, a quick click of the link redirects to the notice: “Sorry, this content isn’t available right now.”

And Violet understands the much-loved page may not return until the start of Lent term. A decision about its future will have to be finalised in the next two weeks, however, as Facebook developers remove pages permanently 14 days after the deletion has been requested.

Speaking to Violet, the main Memebridge admin said: “Memebridge isn’t dead but it needs a bit of a revamp to make it as good as it was at its peak again. It was getting a bit stale and repetitive, relying on the same kind of stuff without being inventive like it used to be, both in terms of submissions and stuff that I made myself. It’ll probably come back someday, but in a slightly different form to say the least.”

Violet also spoke to the founder of Grudgebridge, who temporarily deleted their own page last month after widespread complaints that it was becoming an excuse for cyber-bullying. They told Violet they were not surprised by the decision to close Memebridge, coming on for a year since it started.

“It’s very tiring being an admin when you don’t really care about what content you’re providing anymore,” they said in a statement on Sunday. “I’m not particularly interested in the grudges which get submitted nowadays and I can’t imagine Memebridge was either.”

They went on to question whether Memebridge was starting to lack the cutting edge with which it burst onto the meme scene last December, setting a trend for an ecosystem of university meme pages which has spread up and down the country, before waging war on some of its more pugnacious rivals such as ‘Oxmeme’ and ‘Durhameme’.

“The best content in the Cambridge meme-sphere is coming from ‘Things that I do not understand about the University of Cambridge’, and that Memebridge ended up relying on low-hanging fruit meant that it lost relatability,” they explained. “In the end, it was only slightly wittier than the general ‘Student Problems’ page.”

Yet much of the university mainstream have expressed their sadness at the possible demise of Memebridge. As far as Violet meme columnist, Aryehi Bhushan, was concerned, it is sad reacts only.


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“Memebridge was perhaps the most integral part of Cambridge’s online profile, providing ample procrastination opportunities, and inspiration for passionate meme enthusiasts like me,” she said.

“Its loss(.jpg) would be a damaging blow for all of us, but nevertheless serves to remind us of the importance of generating and sharing original meme content. Gone, but never forgotten, if true.”

Indeed, in the 12 months since Memebridge began, the page overtook every student news platform as the most popular Cambridge community on the Internet, and is responsible for the inspiring the rise of other pages with user-generated posts such as Grudgebridge, Crushbridge, Kindbridge, and even Duckbridge and Bridgebridge.

The pioneering meme page can be credited with heralding former CUSU President Amatey Doku as a local icon, and more recently, exposing Professor Eugene Terentjev, a Queens’ Director of Studies, for his heavily criticised email to Natural Sciences Freshers.

Now, though, the meme dream appears to be fading