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By: Hellen Zaboulani
Google has, for close to 14 years, hosted an online message board named Memegen, where employees could share ideas and chat about mostly anything. The broad range of topics discussed on Memegen have included job cuts, returning back to the office following the pandemic, critiques towards bosses and comic relief.
In recent months, however, one topic has come in the limelight on the message board leading to heated debate – namely the war in Gaza. As reported by the NY Times, Google executives are ready to make changes to the company’s beloved message board in a bid to ease tensions. Planned changes to Memegen will include scrapping the virtual thumbs-down feature—which helped popular memes rise to the top while less voted on memes swiftly disappeared from view.
Also, a feature where employees can see metrics of how popular one meme has become will be removed. The tech giant said it plans to implement the changes later this year. Google said the changes planned were based on employee feedback which indicated that thumbs down votes made workers feel bad, and that the shared metrics made the message board too competitive.
Per the Times, some employees are not thrilled about the changes, worrying that its a way of censoring their free expression and changing Memegen into a dull corporate message board, rather than the lively real-time barometer of employee sentiments. The proposed changes to the message board, have in themself, become a hot topic on Memegen. Over 4,000 employees liked a recent post about protecting the forum entitled, “The 5 minutes I spend on Memegen before starting my work are the best 2 hours of my day.”
Memegen was first created in October 2010 by two Google engineers, Colin McMillen (who has since left the company) and Jonathan Feinberg. The name is short for Meme Generator, and it allows employees using their work user names to select or upload images, type a message over it, post it as a meme and be seen and replied to all throughout the company.
Christopher Fong, a former Google partnerships manager who now runs Xoogler, a community of former Google workers, said Memegen has been popular for more than a decade. Employees had commented on and voted on company meetings and on decisions made by the company’s upper echelons. People wrote what they were “thinking but embarrassed or afraid to say,” said Mr. Fong. Employees loved
Memegen for being a community hub and a free space for opinions where even the top executives were not immune to criticism.
Memegen has grown into more of a political scene, though since October when the war erupted in Gaza. Bickering broke out amongst employees and members down-voted posts they disagreed with, which made them harder to find, said two people with knowledge of the exchanges, who requested not to have their names published.
Per the Times, in February, the company’s internal moderators began their effort to remove the down votes and meme scoring, saying they saw coordinated down-votes being used as a “bullying tactic.” They added that there was a drastic increase in complaints about the content employees were sharing, starting in the second half of 2023.
A Google spokeswoman said in a statement that “as the team has transparently shared with employees, they’re experimenting with some common industry practices similar to what other internal and external social platforms have done.”
