For nearly 14 years, an online message board called Memegen has served as a virtual water cooler for Googlers.
Memegen was a place for employees to offer blunt criticism of their bosses, share gallows humor about job cuts, or joke about receiving notes from their parents to excuse them from returning to the office after the pandemic.
But Google executives, after watching their employees rant about the war in Gaza in recent months, are making big changes to turn down the heat on their company’s beloved message board, according to documents reviewed by The New York Times.
One of the most significant changes to Memegen will be the removal of a virtual thumb. Popular memes rise to the top of Memegen based on these votes. Unpopular ones quickly disappear from view. Another change will be the removal of metrics that allow people to see how popular other employees’ memes have become.
Google said it made the changes, which will take effect later this year, based on feedback from employees who said the thumbs down made employees feel bad and the metrics made the message board feel too competitive. But some employees said they worried the changes would censor their free expression and turn Memegen from a real-time gauge of employee sentiment into a boring corporate message board.
The discussion on the Google message board reflects the long-standing tension between meritorious employees and Google executives trying to tame the company’s sometimes freewheeling culture. More than 4,000 employees liked a recent post that sums up why they’re so protective of the forum: “The 5 minutes I spend on Memegen before I start work are the best 2 hours of my day.”
A Google spokeswoman said in a statement that “as the team shared transparently with employees, they are experimenting with some common industry practices similar to what other internal and external social media platforms have done.”
Memegen was created in October 2010 by two Google engineers, Colin McMillen and Jonathan Feinberg. Mr. McMillen has left Google. Its name is short for Meme Generator because in addition to displaying memes (funny images with apt text on them), it helps employees create or create them. Using their work usernames, employees can select or upload an image, type a message on it, post it, and wait for responses to appear.
Christopher Fong, Google’s former director of partnerships, recalls that more than a decade ago, during Google’s meetings, known as TGIFs, even though they were often held on Thursdays, employees flocked to Memegen when executives like Larry Page and Sergey Brin were talking. They offered live feedback on whether they agreed or disagreed with the observations and voted, forming an informal poll—a rolling corporate identity. People still use the forum for real-time reactions under the current CEO, Sundar Pichai.
People wrote what they “were thinking but were embarrassed or afraid to say,” said Mr. Fong, who runs Xoogler, a community of former Googlers.
Employees loved Memegen because it was a community hub that felt uniquely Google. Even executives who baked there at times liked it. Eric Schmidt, the company’s former CEO, wrote that Memegen was “wildly successful” at letting employees “have fun while commenting heavily on the state of the company” in his book How Google Works, co-authored with Jonathan Rosenberg .
“In the fine tradition of Tom Lehrer and Jon Stewart, Memegen can be very funny while causing controversy within the company,” they wrote.
Over the years, the tone of employee chatter has become more tentative, echoing changes in social media and society at large. The row worsened when staff began posting about the war in Gaza last fall. Workers engaged in heated arguments about the war and positions they disagreed with, making them harder to find, said two people with knowledge of the exchanges, who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly.
The company’s internal moderators said in a February memo seen by The Times that they viewed coordinated downvotes as a “bullying tactic.” The second half of 2023, they added, saw a drastic increase in complaints about content shared by employees. In February, the company began the effort to remove ratings and downvotes.
When the changes are fully implemented, employees will still be able to use Memegen to post and comment. Violating the company and its policies is still within the rules as long as the posts don’t attack people or use abusive language.
But some employees are skeptical that Memegen will retain its quirky character. The changes “will kill Memegen,” a recent post said. “That, of course, is the point.” This post has been liked by more than 8,000 employees.
Discussions about Memegen have been a problem for the company in the past. In 2017, a Google engineer, James Damore, wrote an internal memo criticizing the company’s diversity policies. Employees used Memegen to criticize Mr. Damore and the memo, and the feud went public. Google eventually fired Mr. Damore. She sued for discrimination and dropped the lawsuit in 2020.
After the Times reported in 2018 that Google paid former executive Andy Rubin $90 million in damages after he was accused of sexual harassment, one of the top posts on Memegen featured a GIF of a happy contestant on a game show showered with confetti. The text read: “Caught sexually harassing employee.”
In 2019, Google introduced community guidelines aimed at setting limits on internal message boards. The company stressed the need to be respectful: no trolling, no ranting, no politics.
“Our primary responsibility is to do the job we were each hired to do, not to spend work time discussing non-work matters,” the company told employees at the time.
Most of the time, employees do not talk about war and other serious issues in Memegen. Jokes about working at Google are perennially popular, though heartfelt tributes on the message board have recently struck a chord, such as one wishing Memegen a happy birthday: “You make Google really special.”
