Dabloons, autopsy of a TikTok meme - Self-excitation and self-destruction in social media cultures

Aug 26, 2026

This paper analyzes the extremely short yet highly fertile narrative of a TikTok meme: the rise and fall of the dabloon fictive currency. The study treats the meme as a case of self-exciting trendiness, where cultural vibrancy feeds its own popularity through a spiraling cycle. TikTok users, despite understanding its fad-like nature, intensified it by turning ephemerality into an inflationary mechanism that escalates and then collapses the trend. The analysis offers a cautionary view of accelerated online cultural cycles.

LanguageEnglish

CategoryResearch & Report

FormatPDF

Pages28

Reading Time1 h 11 min

AccessFree to download

Abstract

Keywords

Introduction

Self-excitation as a cultural dynamic

Memes, media ephemerality, and communal agency

Case study: the dabloon economy

Dabloons, autopsy of aTikTok meme Self-excitation and self-destruction in social media cultures Francisco Weichsler Kerche Nunes and Tommaso Venturini Cite as: Kerche, F. W., & Venturini, T. (2026) . Dabloons, autopsy of a TikTok meme: Self-excitation and self-destruction in social media cultures. Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies [https://doi.org/10.1177/13548565261417919](https://doi.org/10.1177/13548565261417919) Abstract In this paper, we analyze the very short and yet very rich story of a TikTok meme: the rise and fall of the dabloon fictive currency. We examine this story as an example of self-exciting trendiness: a common internet dynamic in which trendiness and cultural vibrancy become inextricably inter twined. In the case of the dabloons and of many other memetic phenomena in TikTok and other platforms, this connection creates a spiraling cycle of popularity that is as potent as it is cursory. TikTokers understood all too well that the dabloon currency was going to be a fad, but, rather than being discouraged by this ephemerality, they pushed it to its extremes. Like many online com munities, they doubled down on the transience of their subculture, and did so in the most literal way, using the inflation of their currency to first escalate and then implode the trend. The rise and fall of the dabloon trend offers a cautionary tale about the accelerated cycles of online cultures and internet memes: an illustration of how online communities can create culture not despite but by means of their ephemerality. Keywords TikTok, internet subcultures, trend acceleration, dabloons, memes, digital methods Introduction In probability theory, self-exciting processes are statistical distributions where a certain event has a tendency to trigger further occurrences of the same event ( Hawkes and David, 1974 ; Reinhart, 2018) . This model has been successfully applied to many natural and social phenomena, including social media activity (Crane and Sornette, 2008) and financial volatility (Bacry et al. , 2015), and even their combination within the GameStop affair (Ortu et al. , 2022) . In this paper, we investigate self-excitation from a cultural rather than from a mathematical perspective. From mathematics, we retain the idea that some dynamics do not follow the gradual rise and fall typical of diffusion processes, but are structured as sudden ‘jumps’. In the words of the father of this model,“diffusion could not describe some of the rapid changes that could be plainly seen from time to time in financial series”, which instead appear as “jump-diffusion processes in which the jumps have contagious characteristics (Hawkes, 2022 : p.629) . Many subcultural phenomena online, we argue, exhibit this cluster-jump nature. Describing them requires less to retrace their diffusion than to highlight the complex mechanics of their self-excitation. In this paper, therefore, we wish to explore how media ephemerality is self-consciously exploited by internet subcultures to generate memetic dynamics that cascade across users and produce creative ways to engage in critical discourse. In translating the notion of self-excitation into the realm of digital cultures, we also wish to underline the active role played by the communities that build and maintain those cultures. Putting forward the metaphor of self-excitation, we wish to contribute to the research on internet memes (Iloh, 2021 ; Miltner, 2018 ; Shifman, 2013) and to continue to detach it from its unfortunate origin in Richard Dawkins theory of the Selfish Gene (Dawkins, 1976) . As many authors have pointed out (De Seta 2016 ; Sampson, 2012), the idea that online trends spread as genes or viruses reduces internet users as involuntary carriers (Blackmore, 2000) and hides their crucial role in propagating ideas and making them exciting (Jenkins, 2013) . In Dawkins’words: “when you plant a fertile meme in my mind you literall

FAQs

What is the central phenomenon studied in the paper?

The paper studies the TikTok meme centered on the fictive currency called dabloons and traces its rapid rise and fall.

How does the paper explain the meme’s popularity dynamics?

It frames dabloons as an example of self-exciting trendiness, where trendiness and cultural vibrancy reinforce each other in a spiraling popularity cycle.

What role did TikTok users play in the dabloon economy?

Users intentionally pushed the meme to its extremes, using its short-lived nature as a cultural mechanism—escalating through inflationary play and then collapsing the trend.

Aug 26, 2026

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