SpeechMeme is back. I rewrote the whole thing.

Hey. Jan here, the guy who built this.

Quick backstory for anyone who wasn't around: the first version of SpeechMeme was one drop zone, one button, and a lot of duct tape. It worked, people used it way more than I expected, and then it got slow, I got busy with other stuff, and it just sat there for a while. That was on me.

So I rewrote it. Not a facelift, from zero. It's live at speechmeme.com, and this post is the changelog.

Highlights

It's fast now. Pages open instantly, gallery images don't make you wait, and the back button does what you expect.
There's a Discord bot. Speech bubbles without leaving the chat. /bubble, /search, /random.
The gallery got rebuilt. Favorites, comments, and reactions on comments.
Ranks. You earn XP for basically everything and climb from Lurker to Meme Lord. Your name and avatar change as you go.
Profiles. Sign in with Google, pick a handle, get speechmeme.com/@you.

The site

The old site was built in 2023 on tools that were fine in 2023. This one is a fresh Next.js app with a design that's a lot calmer: off-white canvas, one accent colour, real components instead of hand-rolled divs. There's a dark mode, and it isn't pitch black because I hate that.

The drop zone is still the first thing you see, because it's still the whole point. Drag a picture in and the bubble is on it before you let go. The settings underneath finally have a real preview: you see your bubble on an actual photo, in a fake group chat, before you download anything. You can change

the shape (rounded or boxy),
the bubble size (normal or big, the big one has a much deeper body),
which side the tail points,
whether it goes top, bottom or both,
and cut-out mode, which punches the bubble out of the image instead of drawing it on top.

GIFs work too, same as before.

The bot

This is the one I'm most happy about. It has its own page, or invite it straight away at speechmeme.com/bot. Three commands:

/bubble takes any picture or GIF you attach, plus the same style options as the site, and posts the result in the channel.
/search cat finds something in the gallery. The search understands what's in the picture, not just the title, so "angry homer" works.
/random is exactly what it sounds like.

It runs the same rendering code as the website, so what you get in Discord is what you'd get on the page, pixel for pixel. There's a short cooldown per person so nobody can flood a channel.

If you want to see it in action first, it's in our server.

The gallery

Rebuilt from scratch. Memes open in place with no page load, arrow keys flip through them, Escape closes. Every meme has a proper page with its own link, so sharing one somewhere gives you a real preview.

New things you can do:

Favorite a meme. One click, it's on your profile.
Comment on it.
React to comments with 💀 😭 🔥 🐐 💯. Reactions stack up with counts like they do in Discord. I built these last and they're my favourite part, they are extremely bouncy.

Ranks

You get XP for posting, commenting, when someone reacts to your comment, and when someone favorites your meme. There are ten ranks:

Lurker, Normie, Reply Guy, Shitposter, Redpilled, Based, Chad, Sigma, Gigachad, Meme Lord.

Every rank changes how your name and avatar look across the site: colours, gradients, frames, and at the top end a spinning halo situation. Nobody is Meme Lord. It's 50,000 XP. The full ladder with what each one unlocks is at speechmeme.com/levels.

Ranks are cosmetic. They don't unlock features and they can't be bought.

Profiles

Sign in with Google, pick a handle, and you get speechmeme.com/@yourname with your memes, your favorites and your rank. Handles are 3 to 20 characters, lowercase letters, numbers and underscores.

One thing I need to be upfront about: accounts from the old site did not carry over. It was a full reset. There was no clean way to migrate them and I'd rather start honest than ship something half-broken.

What didn't make it (yet)

A report button in the gallery. Everything that gets uploaded, commented or set as a username or avatar already runs through AI moderation before it goes live, so the gallery stays clean without me watching it 24/7. But if something slips through, ping me in the Discord and it's gone.
Editing a comment. Delete and repost for now.
The bot only speaks English.

If something breaks

Tell me in the Discord. I'm reading everything this week and I'll probably reply faster than I should.

That's everything. Go make something stupid.