First Day On The Internet Kid

2011image macroclassic

Published September 24, 2026

First Day on the Internet Kid is an advice animal image macro featuring a grinning young boy at a laptop, captioned to depict him as a naive newcomer who falls for obvious online scams. The format was first posted to r/AdviceAnimals on December 31, 2011 and quickly spread across Quickmeme, Tumblr, and forum culture in early 2012.

advice animalsimage macro memesearly 2010s memesstock photo exploitablessubreddit origin memes

Overview

First Day on the Internet Kid is an advice animal image macro built around a photo of a young boy grinning at a laptop with a clenched fist raised in triumph1. Captions cast him as a wide-eyed newbie to the web, falling for obvious scams or misreading basic online conventions2.

The base image comes from a stock photo shoot, which fans repurposed into one of the more recognizable naive-user characters of the early 2010s advice animal wave3. The kid is often paired with Lonely Computer Guy / Net Noob and treated as a younger counterpart in the same shared cast of clueless posters3.

Origin & Background

Platform
Reddit r/AdviceAnimals (viral spread)
Date
2011

The source photo belongs to a stock series titled "Young Boy Spending Time With Notebook," sold on Shutterstock, Dreamstime, and iStockphoto3. A watermark-free copy of the shot showed up in an October 30, 2008 press release hosted on Realwire, giving remixers a clean version to work with3.

The first meme edit was posted to the r/AdviceAnimals subreddit on December 31, 2011, with the caption "1000000th visitor to this site / free iPad"2. That punchline reused a gag that had already circulated on the earlier Lonely Computer Guy macro3.

How It Spread

Momentum built within days. A dedicated thread appeared on the Bodybuilding Forums the same day as the original Reddit post, and a Quickmeme page went live on January 1, 2012, pulling in more than 1,000 submissions in its first month4. A "First Day on the Internet Kid and Dad" post landed on the Top Tumbles blog around the same time3.

On January 12, 2012, Mashable spotlighted the character in its "5 Hilarious Viral Topics Trending Now" column, framing it as fresh mockery of web-illiterate users1. A few weeks later, on February 2, humor site Guyism ran a roundup of the best derivatives3.

From there the image hopped onto Tumblr, FunnyJunk, Funri, Stuff Of Awesome, and LolVirgin, sitting alongside other "internet age" advice animals like Internet Grandma Surprise and the 4chan-flavored Summer Fag3.

How to Use This Meme

The template typically pairs the grinning kid with a two-line caption in the standard advice-animal format. The joke usually depicts a naive online mistake, such as clicking a free-iPad banner, taking an "Internet Explorer" quip literally, or reading obvious forum sarcasm at face value3.

Frequently Asked Questions