About
Third World Success is an advice animal image macro series featuring a photograph of a dancing tribal child with captions about overcoming hardships that are associated with life in underdeveloped countries. The series can be seen as a derivative of Success Kid and the anti-thesis of First World Problems.
Origin
The First World Problems image macro series started with a Buzzfeed[13] post in March 2011 that juxtaposed stories from the First World Problems subreddit[14] with the items in question. Later that year, a Quickmeme[15] page was created featuring a stock photo of a woman crying. As of March 2012, it has over 91,000 instances.
On November 11th, 2011, Slacktory published a compilation of photos entitled “Third World Perks: A Photo Meme”[8] as a alternative to First World Problems. The images consisted of people living in impoverished conditions accompanied by optimistic captions.
Approximately two and a half weeks later on November 27th, the first Third World Success image macro was created on Quickmeme[1], featuring a photo of a group of dancing children with the caption “Found water / wasn’t contaminated.” It was subsequently posted to Reddit[12] by user somename2222 and accumulated over 12,000 up votes within 4 days.
Previous to the photo’s association with Third World Success, it has been seen on Twitter[18] as early as June 2011 and paired with the phrase “It’s Friday Niggas”[16] as early as October 14th, 2011.[17]
Spread
On November 28th, the viral content site BuzzFeed[4] posted a round-up of instances titled “The Third World Success Kid Meme.” Within 24 hours, there were 230 Reddit threads related to the meme and 972 Quickmeme[3] submissions. On November 29th, the culture blog Molempire published another compilation of derivatives. The meme has since spread to Tumblr[5], the Body Building forums[6] and Meme Generator.[11] As of March 2012, there are over 8000 instances on Quickmeme and over 630 on Reddit.[19]
Notable Examples
Derivatives
Two weeks later, a Second World Success[20] image macro appeared, using a photo of a smiling child waving a Chinese flag. Instances of this were posted on Memebase[21], FunnyJunk[22], and #1 Meme Universal Trend.[23]
Classifications
The Third World[24] is a term coined in 1952 by French anthropologist Alfred Sauvy to define countries that did not take part in either capitalism (the First World) or communism (the Second World). Over the years, it gradually gained a negative connotation, being associated with poverty and a country being underdeveloped.[25]
In contrast, the phrase First World[26] is associated with already developed countries. First World Problems are meant to criticize the fact that people who live in countries considered the First World will probably not have to encounter problems their Third World counterparts will: not owning a computer, starvation, and combat.[27]
Search Interest
External References
[1] Quickmeme – Found water
[2] Reddit – Third world success
[3] Quickmeme – Third World Success
[4] BuzzFeed – The Third World Success Kid Meme
[5] Tumblr – #third world success
[6] Body Building – Third World Success
[7] FunnyJunk – third world success
[8] Slacktory – Third World Perks A Photo Meme
[9] The College Town Life – All My Bitches Love Me
[10] Harpito – Niggas that shot wyclef
[11] Meme Generator – Third World Success
[12] Quickmeme – We have first world problems, so I thought we should also have third world successes
[13] Buzzfeed – 15 Examples Of First World Problems
[14] Reddit – /r/firstworldproblems
[15] Quickmeme – First World Problems
[16] Google – Image search for "It’s Friday Niggas
[17] Facebook – Its friday niggas Photos
[19] Reddit – Search results for "Third World Success
[20] Quickmeme – Second World Success
[21] Memebase – And It’s Mostly True!
[22] FunnyJunk – Second World Success Comp.
[23] #1 Meme Universal Trend – Second World Success meme collection
[24] Wikipedia – Third World
[25] Cuso International – What’s In a Name?
[26] Wikipedia – First World
[27] Wikipedia – First World Problem