Why the "Share a piece of lore about yourself" meme got 1.2 billion views

In 2025, the “share a piece of lore about yourself” meme went viral and got 1.2 billion views. It possibly became the most viewed X post of all time. And it wasn't even original.

The X post turned a blank prompt into a personal myth millions wanted to publish.

Formats that let people invent a short, performative self—then make that story frictionless to share—win. Everything else that goes viral borrows the same pattern: identity, surprise, social signaling, and low friction.

Why the lore meme turned simple posts into social trophies

The lore meme succeeded because it supplies a tiny storytelling engine. It asks users to create a one- or two-line myth and hands them a clean canvas to publish it. That combination activates a handful of predictable psychological levers:

• Identity signaling — People use the artifact to tell their network who they are, in a compact, shareable form.

• Social-frame ego — The format creates a moment where the sharer looks clever, amusing, or interesting to friends.

• Surprise plus pattern — Short, surprising twists in a single line trigger comments and reshares: the pattern is easy to notice and rephrase.

• Low-effort broadcast — One line, one image, three taps: the fewer the steps, the higher the share rate.

• Scarcity and ritual — When a format repeats (annual, weekly, limited templates) it becomes a ritual people expect and plan to share.

How Spotify Wrapped (2016), Prisma AI (2016), and the ChatGPT-4o Ghibli (2025) trend all used the same script

Each successful example is different on the surface but identical at the core: they give people a compact new way to tell a story about themselves.

• Spotify Wrapped — It turns private listening into a public manifesto. The annual drop bundles identity, percentile comparisons, and neat visuals into a ritual people expect and brag about.

• Prisma AI — Prisma transformed selfies into art. That visual remix let users reframe identity through style, not stats; a small creative act became a social signal.

• ChatGPT-4o Ghibli trend — Users fed short prompts and received cinematic, emotional Ghibli-style visuals. The output felt like a mythologized snapshot of a personal prompt, which lowered the effort to share an evocative story.

Each example supplies one or more of the psychological levers above: identity, novelty, easy sharing, and a ritual or repeatable moment.

Why Grok Imagine failed where Ani & Valentine companions succeed

Grok Imagine launched with technical firepower and attention, but it has not become the kind of shareable ritual that sparks networks. The failure is not a lack of effort as Elon Musk constantly posts about it; it is a lack of the storytelling affordance that made the lore meme contagious.

And the novelty is just not there as it was with ChatGPT-4o's Ghibli trend.

In contrast, Ani & Valentine succeed because they function as characters people can adopt, roleplay, and narrativize.

Reddit and X users share their interesting interactions with these bots because it provides a novel character-based story to riff on.

Ani and Valentine are anthropomorphized companions; that gives users a hook to project themselves into a tiny myth. That character affordance is what turns output into shareable lore.

Novelty must invite personal mythmaking

The lore meme reveals a simple rule: novelty alone isn’t enough. Virality needs novelty that hands the user a way to reinvent themselves in public.

Spotify Wrapped packages data into a personal story.

Prisma AI lets users restyle identity as art.

Ghibli visuals turn prompts into cinematic self-portraits.

Ani and Valentine become shareable characters.

For a format to scale into a cultural habit it must:

• Let users tell a one-line story about themselves.

• Produce outputs that are immediately usable as social badges (caption-ready, platform-optimized).

• Minimize friction and preserve the illusion of effortless memeing.

• Offer repeatable or ritualized moments that encourage return sharing.

When those conditions are met, products stop being merely novel and become the medium through which users perform identity. That is the real growth engine behind the lore meme—and why the formats that copy that pattern, not just the visuals, are the ones that go viral.

Top Tweets of the day

1/

Alex Hormozi's Money Models launch was insane.

He has given insane value over ~4 years and crossed $100M+ in ~72 hours.

Easily the best showmanship on how info products work.

He has 100x fewer YouTube subscribers than MrBeast, who has 435 million subscribers, whereas Alex Hormozi only has 3.65 million subscribers.

The reason he could make as much as MrBeast is because he specifically targeted the one subset of audience (entrepreneurs) that actually make money whereas MrBeast's target audience is kids who don't make any money.

Hormozi's videos only get 100k to 1 million views but it comes from the right audience whereas Mr.Beast gets 100 million views but from the wrong audience.

2/

Dhruv Rathee is an influencer with 36 million subscribers. And he just sold a basic AI wrapper that already exists and it made a lot of money.

This shows how a decent enough app that specifically targets his audience would make for influencers with a massive following.

Most influencers know the content game. They suck at business. But the right businessman can absolutely print with perfect software partnership with an influencer.

Info products have zero cost. Software has cost but you can get recurring too. And lots of fitness influencer make millions from their videos if they are perfectly packaged. Channels like Fitness Blender make $100M+ due to massive rewatch value and stable audience.

3/

Gold insight if its true. It makes sense to translate X into dating app.

Most people nowadays don't give their real-opinion due to wanting to be politically correct but they do give their real-opinion to a bot so it makes sense to match people on their real ideology.

Never bet against Elon.

Rabbit Holes

1. VSL Podcast by Alen Sultanic

2. Speed matters: Why working quickly is more important than it seems by James Somers

3. From SEO to GEO: How to win distribution in the age of generative engines by Sandy Diao

PS: Sorry for the miss in the daily schedule. My M4 display went kapoot plus on the same day, my Windows PC started updating itself so missed 2-days in a row. One redundancy wasn't enough. Hormozi had 3 redundancies of everything for his launch. Ideally, I'd like to have 7-days of future posts scheduled. Back on track for now.

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More Startup Spells 🪄

1. Alex Hormozi’s $100M Money Models Book Launch Marketing Playbook: Webinar, Upsells, and SMS (LINK)

2. Chris Williamson’s Hollywood Heist: How Clip-First Strategy Skyrockets Podcast Subscribers (LINK)

3. Audience Growth using Cutting-Edge Tools (LINK)

4. Alliterations in Copywriting (LINK)

5. Warren Buffett's Ruthless 5-Minute People Filter For Efficient Networking (LINK)