Sunday Stealing
A list of questions, lifted openly from somewhere else, answered by everybody on the same day. That was the entire format, and for three years it was the most reliable post on this blog.
Sunday Stealing was the biggest of the question memes played here, and the name was the joke: the questions were explicitly stolen — from another meme, an old survey, a magazine quiz — with the theft acknowledged in the post. Everybody in the ring answered the same twenty or thirty questions on the same Sunday, then spent the day reading each other’s answers.
The weekly timetable
It was one slot in a full week of them, and the week was remarkably regular:
- Sunday — Sunday Stealing, and Scenic Sunday for the photographers
- Monday — Monday Mayhem, Musical Monday, Fun Monday, Microfiction Monday
- Tuesday — The Muffed Target, Tales on Tuesday
- Wednesday — Sensational Haiku Wednesday, Thematic Photographic, What The Hell Wednesday
- Thursday — Thursday Thunks, Thursday Theme Song, Three Word Thursday
- Friday — Aloha Friday, Friday’s Fave Five, Flash 55
- Saturday — Saturday 9, Small World Saturday, Weekend Reflections
You did not play all of them. Nobody did. But you played four or five, and so did the thirty people you read, and the overlaps were what held the whole thing together.
Why answering the same questions as everyone else worked
On paper a question meme is the laziest possible content: somebody else wrote the prompts and you just fill them in. In practice it solved a problem that personal blogs have and nothing has ever solved better.
The problem is that most days you have nothing to say. Not nothing at all — nothing that justifies a post. A question meme removes the need to justify anything. It gives you a guaranteed slot, a guaranteed topic and, crucially, a guaranteed audience, because everybody else has just written their version and is looking for other people’s.
And the answers were revealing in a way that deliberate writing rarely is. Asked directly to write about yourself, most people produce a CV. Asked what the last thing you stole was, or whether you would rather lose your sense of smell or your ability to whistle, people tell you something true almost by accident. Half the genuinely memorable writing on blogs of this period arrived through a numbered list somebody had copied from a friend.
The stealing
Worth being straight about: the questions were taken without permission, and the meme said so in its name. The convention was that you credited where you got them and that nobody minded, because a list of questions is not really the kind of thing anybody guards. It is a folk process — the same set of twenty questions would circulate for years, mutating slightly at each hop, in a way that would be entirely familiar to anyone who has studied how songs and stories travel. The American Folklife Center has spent decades documenting exactly that mechanism in older media.
This blog’s own contributions ran under titles like “The Me Me Meme”, “The Ninja Meme” in two parts, and “The Alpha Meme”. Most of the individual posts were not captured by the archive; links to them arrive here instead.
The mechanics nobody mentions
Three small pieces of infrastructure held the whole weekly circuit together, and all three are worth naming because none of them exist in the same form now.
The link list. Every meme post ended with a numbered list that participants added themselves to, hosted by one of a handful of small third-party services. It was the routing table. Without it, a meme is just a lot of people writing on the same subject in isolation; with it, entry number fourteen gets read by the thirteen people above them and the twenty below.
The blogroll. A permanent list, in the sidebar, of the blogs you actually read. Not a follow, not a subscription — a public, editorial statement of affiliation that you maintained by hand. Most of the surviving links into a blog like this one are blogroll links, which is precisely why they have lasted: a blogroll entry sits on every page of a site for years, while a link inside a post gets buried within a week.
Comment reciprocity. Unwritten and absolutely rigid. If somebody commented on you, you went and commented on them, usually the same day. It sounds like an obligation and it functioned as one, but it is also the entire reason the traffic circulated without any algorithm involved.
Pull any one of those out and the ring stops working. What happened between 2011 and 2013 is that all three were pulled out roughly at once — the services shut down, sidebars were stripped for page speed and mobile, and the daily conversation moved to feeds where reciprocity is not a norm and a blogroll has no equivalent. The memes did not so much die as lose their plumbing.
Hey, it’s only my opinion.
A Hui Hou