Doge

About

Doge is a slang term for “dog” that is primarily associated with pictures of Shiba Inus (nicknamed “Shibe”) and internal monologue captions on Tumblr. These photos may be photoshopped to change the dog’s face or captioned with interior monologues in Comic Sans font.

Origin

The use of the misspelled word “doge” to refer to a dog dates back to June 24th, 2005, when it was mentioned in an episode of Homestar Runner’s puppet show. In the episode titled “Biz Cas Fri 1”^[2], Homestar calls Strong Bad his “d-o-g-e” while trying to distract him from his work.

Identity

On February 23rd, 2010, Japanese kindergarten teacher Atsuko Sato posted several photos of her rescue-adopted Shiba Inu dog Kabosu to her personal blog.^[38] Among the photos included a peculiar shot of Kabosu sitting on a couch while glaring sideways at the camera with raised eyebrows (shown below, right).

In December 2013, shortly after the breakout of “Doge,” the tech news site The Verge^[39] published an article identifying Sato’s Kabosu as the original Shiba Inu depicted in the meme. In addition to Kabosu, The Verge also identified “Suki,” a Shiba Inu who lives with San Francisco-based photographer Jonathan Fleming, as the scarfed dog portrayed in another popular instance of the meme.

Spread

On October 28th, 2010, a photo of Kabosu was submitted to the /r/Ads subreddit^[3] with the title “LMBOLOOK @ THISFUKKINDOGE,” where it received 266 upvotes, 218 points overall and 48 comments prior to being archived. Sometime in April 2012, Tumblr user leonsumbitches^[15] uploaded an audio file of a computer reading a passage written like the commands of a turn-based adventure game about encountering a “doge.” The passage was paired with a photo of a woman patting a dog on the head^[16] and has gained more than 33,000 notes as of July 2013.

leonsumbitches: You have encountered Ａ… from dailydoge

In response, the single topic blog Your Daily Doge^[17] was created, but was quickly abandoned after reblogging leonsumbitches’ post several times. On May 7th, YouTuber KwandaoRen66 uploaded a video with a person reading the text over a fake Pokemon battle.^[4] By June, doge threads in which numerous people shared photos of dogs in different outfits began appearing on 4chan boards, including /v/^[11] (Video Games). The same month, a photoset of a dog with a cup and saucer balanced on his head went viral on Tumblr after airpi^[14] referred to it as “Polite Doge.” In August, the first doge single topic blog, Fuck Yeah Doge^[13], launched on Tumblr. The growth in summer 2012 coincided with the popularity of the single topic Tumblr Shiba Confessions, as people began to refer to these dogs as “shibes.”^[18]

In December 2012, the term “doge” appeared on Reddit in a post submitted to /r/DogsIWannaHug.^[6] The same month, an interior monologue captioned photo of a Schnauzer was submitted to Cheezburger^[5] with the title “Schnauze.” On January 8th, 2013, the subreddit /r/Doge^[7] was created, sharing photos and videos of the captioned Shiba Inus. In May, /r/dailydoge^[9] was created to share one dog photo a day, captioned or not. Another single topic blog, shibe-doge^[12], launched in July 2013 dedicated to sharing Shiba Inu photos. On July 29th, 2013, a doge thread^[19] was sticky-featured to the top of the 4chan board /s4s/ (Shit 4chan Says), garnering more than 600 replies.

On November 20, 2013, Youtube implemented an Easter egg, that changes the text to be colored and in Comic Sans, much like the original internal-monologue style captions, when user searches the phrase “doge meme”.^[22]

4chan’s /r/Murica Raid

On the evening of August 26th, 2013, a group of users on 4chan raided against Reddit’s tongue-in-cheek patriotic forum /r/Murica^[20], flooding the subreddit’s frontpage with dozens of photoshopped images depicting the Doge character in All-American-themed settings (shown below). According to The Daily Dot’s report^[21], the raid started late Sunday night and lasted until about 12:15 p.m. (ET) on August 27th, at which point /r/Murica’s moderators began removing Doge-related posts from the subreddit index. Unlike previous clashes between the users of 4chan and Reddit, the sudden influx of Doge images was reportedly met by little opposition from Reddit’s userbase, reflecting the growing popularity of the character outside of Tumblr.

Notable Examples

On Tumblr, in addition to the captioned photos, the “doge” tag^[10] often contains images of a Shiba Inu whose facial features have been manipulated, similar to Starecat.

Dogecoin

On December 6th, BitcoinTalk forum member Dogecoin introduced an alternative crypotocurrency based on the meme as a satire of the Bitcoin boom in a thread titled “Dogecoin – very currency – many coin – wow – v1.1 Released.” Similar to Bitcoin and its derivatives, Dogecoin can be mined and exchanged for goods and services among the participants, though it is programmed to level out at a higher threshold of up to 100 billion coins and prevent any use of special bitcoin-mining equipment like ASICs. In comparison, Bitcoin will cap out at 21 million coins and Litecoin will support up to 84 million coins in circulation.

Following the launch of the official website, a slew of social media channels and referential webpages soon emerged for Dogecoin, including a Twitter account and a Facebook page, racking up more than 1,000 followers and 1,800 likes within the the first week, respectively. On December 8th, an entire subreddit community dedicated to the use of satirical cryptocurrency was launched at /r/dogecoin, accruing more than 2,600 subscribers in just over a week.

Throughout the first weekend of December, Dogecoin was highlighted by a number of tech news sites and blogs, providing a further boost to the value of the satirical currency. By December 14th, an encyclopedic article describing the concept of “Dogecoin” had been submitted by Wikipedia editor CitationNeeded. At its peak, the estimated value of DogeCoin skyrocketed to as high as $400.80 per coin (shown below).

As of December 15th, one Dogecoin (DOGE) is worth about $ 0.0002 USD, with the market capitalization of $1.45 million USD and 7.2% of the 100 billion total coins having been mined.

Dogewallet Hacked

On the day of Christmas, several members of Dogecoin forum^[35] began reporting that their funds were being transferred to an unknown account identified as “DQT9WcqmUyyccrxQvSrjcFCqRxt8eVBLx8.” Later that same day, the founders of the Dogecoin storage system Dogewallet, temporarily shut down the service and issued a statement^[37] confirming that a hacker had gained access to its file system and modified its pages to reroute the coin transfer to a static account, which may have resulted in losses up to $12,000 worth of the crypto-currency. In addition, the Dogewallet administrators announced that it will immediately begin reimbursing all users affected by the hack.

Search Interest

Search interest for the word “doge”^[1] is consistent as it is also a Venetian term for “leader” used as a title in some Italian “crowned republics” including Genoa and Venice. However, there has been an upward spike since May 2013.

External References