Haters Gonna Hate

2000catchphraseclassic

Haters Gonna Hate is a catchphrase used to shrug off criticism, borrowed from early 2000s hip hop and turned into a full-blown image macro series after artist Omar Noory drew a strutting kid GIF in November 20083. By 2011 it had spawned thousands of remixes of celebrities, animals, and cartoon characters walking away from imaginary insults, becoming one of the defining reaction formats of the early Reddit era4.

catchphrase memessnowclone memesdismissal memeslate 2000s memeship hop memes

Overview

Haters Gonna Hate is a dismissive comeback aimed at anyone talking trash, usually delivered with a slow strut and zero eye contact. The format almost always pairs the phrase with a subject caught mid-swagger, whether that's a toddler, a bulldog, a cat walking away from an explosion, or a cartoon character posing like they own the block1.

What makes the meme click is the mismatch between the confidence of the pose and the absurdity of the subject. Editors love slapping the caption on animals, babies, and reality TV screenshots because the strut reads as pure attitude no matter who's doing it2. The phrase also spawned the wider 'X-ers are gonna X' snowclone, a template 4chan users ran into the ground in 2010 by swapping in every verb they could think of2.

Origin & Background

Platform
Hip hop lyrics (phrase) / Yay Hooray (GIF) / Reddit (viral spread)
Creator
Omar Noory
Date
2000

The phrase itself first showed up in the 2000 pop single 'Playas Gon' Play' by 3LW, with the line 'haters gonna hate' tucked into the chorus alongside the title hook2. Rap culture had been using 'haters' as slang for years by then, with Ice-T's 1999 track 'Don't Hate the Playa' helping push the term into wider circulation2.

The visual meme came almost a decade later. Artist Omar Noory told Know Your Meme he drew the original strutting kid GIF in November 2008, saved it as 'baller.gif' for a project he called 'Top Secret,' and uploaded it to his portfolio in 20092. He first posted it publicly in an art thread on the design forum Yay Hooray, where it started getting passed around2.

How It Spread

The word 'haters' had already been catalogued on Urban Dictionary back in August 2003, giving the slang a paper trail long before the GIF existed3. Image macros using the phrase started popping up in 2009, with subjects photographed mid-action and the caption slapped on top, and Urlesque documented a batch of 26 of them in May 20104.

A 4chan variations thread that same month kicked off the 'X-ers are gonna X' template, where users swapped 'haters' and 'hate' for any noun-verb pair that fit a picture2. Throughout 2011, Reddit became the main hub for the format, with more than 2,000 posts tagged with the phrase and animated GIFs of strutting animals dominating the front page2. In June 2011, BoingBoing ran a 'microscopic GIF edition' collecting tiny versions of the strut, and on January 25th, 2012, Urban Dictionary named 'Haters Gonna Hate' its Word of the Day5.

How to Use This Meme

The typical build is a photo or GIF of someone or something walking, posing, or otherwise looking unbothered, with 'Haters Gonna Hate' as the caption. Common convention pairs the phrase with subjects who shouldn't logically care about criticism, like babies, dogs, or cartoon villains, and the strut is often exaggerated or looped. The snowclone version swaps in any verb, following the 'X-ers are gonna X' pattern popularized on 4chan2.

Frequently Asked Questions

Haters Gonna Hate

2000catchphraseclassic

Haters Gonna Hate is a catchphrase used to shrug off criticism, borrowed from early 2000s hip hop and turned into a full-blown image macro series after artist Omar Noory drew a strutting kid GIF in November 20083. By 2011 it had spawned thousands of remixes of celebrities, animals, and cartoon characters walking away from imaginary insults, becoming one of the defining reaction formats of the early Reddit era4.

catchphrase memes snowclone memes dismissal memes late 2000s memes hip hop memes

Overview

Haters Gonna Hate is a dismissive comeback aimed at anyone talking trash, usually delivered with a slow strut and zero eye contact. The format almost always pairs the phrase with a subject caught mid-swagger, whether that's a toddler, a bulldog, a cat walking away from an explosion, or a cartoon character posing like they own the block1.

What makes the meme click is the mismatch between the confidence of the pose and the absurdity of the subject. Editors love slapping the caption on animals, babies, and reality TV screenshots because the strut reads as pure attitude no matter who's doing it2. The phrase also spawned the wider 'X-ers are gonna X' snowclone, a template 4chan users ran into the ground in 2010 by swapping in every verb they could think of2.

Origin & Background

Platform
Hip hop lyrics (phrase) / Yay Hooray (GIF) / Reddit (viral spread)
Creator
Omar Noory
Date
2000

The phrase itself first showed up in the 2000 pop single 'Playas Gon' Play' by 3LW, with the line 'haters gonna hate' tucked into the chorus alongside the title hook2. Rap culture had been using 'haters' as slang for years by then, with Ice-T's 1999 track 'Don't Hate the Playa' helping push the term into wider circulation2.

The visual meme came almost a decade later. Artist Omar Noory told Know Your Meme he drew the original strutting kid GIF in November 2008, saved it as 'baller.gif' for a project he called 'Top Secret,' and uploaded it to his portfolio in 20092. He first posted it publicly in an art thread on the design forum Yay Hooray, where it started getting passed around2.

How It Spread

The word 'haters' had already been catalogued on Urban Dictionary back in August 2003, giving the slang a paper trail long before the GIF existed3. Image macros using the phrase started popping up in 2009, with subjects photographed mid-action and the caption slapped on top, and Urlesque documented a batch of 26 of them in May 20104.

A 4chan variations thread that same month kicked off the 'X-ers are gonna X' template, where users swapped 'haters' and 'hate' for any noun-verb pair that fit a picture2. Throughout 2011, Reddit became the main hub for the format, with more than 2,000 posts tagged with the phrase and animated GIFs of strutting animals dominating the front page2. In June 2011, BoingBoing ran a 'microscopic GIF edition' collecting tiny versions of the strut, and on January 25th, 2012, Urban Dictionary named 'Haters Gonna Hate' its Word of the Day5.

How to Use This Meme

The typical build is a photo or GIF of someone or something walking, posing, or otherwise looking unbothered, with 'Haters Gonna Hate' as the caption. Common convention pairs the phrase with subjects who shouldn't logically care about criticism, like babies, dogs, or cartoon villains, and the strut is often exaggerated or looped. The snowclone version swaps in any verb, following the 'X-ers are gonna X' pattern popularized on 4chan2.

Frequently Asked Questions