5 Viral Videos And Memes That Actually Helped The World

Now, raising all that money is great, and 99.9 percent of the time, that's where a normal feel-good fundraiser story would end. But if there's one thing I despise, it's normalcy (and also pants). Turns out all that money did more than provide endless bobbleheads for office execs at the charities that received the funds. The University of Massachusetts Medical School actually discovered the gene responsible for causing ALS, and they attributed that success to the fundraising effort providing them with the resources they needed to do so. An internet fundraiser actually made a real difference. For real! The internet did that! You know, the awful one!

The hope is that this newly identified gene will assist in treating the disease, perhaps leading toward a cure one day, or at the very least making it less of a dick hole.

The meme spread like the jaws of a starving man leaping on a nourishing back-alley ham casserole, and Success Kid's family licensed the image for shirts and posters and ad campaigns. The kid was being sold on merchandise in Hot Topic, and they don't do that for just anyone. Life seemed good for Success Family -- except for the kid himself, who was rather embarrassed to be associated with the whole thing, but hey, life is full of ups and downs and sand.

Another one of those downs reared its ugly head in 2015, when Success Kid's dad, Justin Girner, needed a kidney transplant. He'd been on daily dialysis for six years, which is like watching Young Sheldon every day for six years. The family started crowdfunding to pay for the surgery, hoping to get the $75,000 they'd need to cover associated costs. That's a pretty steep proposition for anyone, and more than a family whose only claim to fame is "includes kid who doesn't like to eat dirt" has on hand. Lucky for Girner, success is in his blood. When his wife decided to make it known that Success Kid was part of the family, they used the meme to spread the word, and the internet's endless love for all things that can be shared and understood in a single image on a 3x5" screen did the rest. The end result was more than $100,000 raised and a successful transplant.

Since Dad no longer needed to spend hours every day hooked up to machines, cursing his inability to access the cool parts of the Matrix, the family was able to look ahead to doing things most of us take for granted. And one of those things was just heading out on a vacation, which is pretty awesome.

Because the bullies were such a stellar blend of assholes, the video was posted online. But when the internet doesn't like something, it bites back, and the kids were removed from school and forced to do community service, while Karen was offered a fun family vacation. That's nice, right? Barely scratches the surface.

A man Klein had never met before saw the video and, remembering how he was bullied as a child, started an Indiegogo campaign to help her out. He thought that if he could raise a few thousand dollars for her so that she could do something with her family, it would be a well-earned reward for what she'd had to put up with. And if she didn't want that, maybe she could invest in a bus-mounted catapult to launch future bullies into a land far, far away. And he did raise a few thousand dollars. A few hundred thousand dollars. See how I set you up there and then pulled the rug out? Fuck yeah!

By the time the campaign ended, Klein was presented with a check for $703,000, minus some fees. It was enough to allow her to retire -- a decision she said she still had some difficulty making, even after having to endure other people's monstrously asstatsic children.

When Ebola was scaring people even more than U.S. politics back in 2014, Band Aid 30 came together with a tweaked version of the sappy "This is why I hate being in malls at Christmas" song "Do They Know It's Christmas?" The song is two shakes of a lamb's tail away from being a face-palming mix of uninspired, desperately ignorant, somewhat racist, and just plain shitty. But it had One Direction in it, so people liked it, and man did it raise money.

Now, you might expect a song featuring Ed Sheeran, Seal, and Ellie Goulding to do well, but keep in mind that this thing raised nearly $1.5 million in about five minutes. And it's awful, just so goddamn awful. It's so awful that a guy who literally had Ebola called it "cringeworthy." Imagine how much this has to suck if it's to help deal with Ebola, a disease that liquefies your insides and turns you into a blob of bloody pain, and a guy who actually survived it tries to listen to the song, gets about halfway through, and says, "Nah, fuck this. I cannot deal with this."

It's a clear testament to the giving spirit of humanity that even one of the worst things ever recorded can inspire charity if the cause is good enough.

Fast-forward a few months, and Van As and Owen had perfected a design for a prosthetic hand which could be 3D-printed. This would make affordable prosthetics for people missing fingers -- like a five-year-old boy they'd met named Liam who was born without any -- way more attainable.

The hand, which is fully functional and capable of gripping things as the wearer flexes muscles in their arms to control it, costs only $15O. That's significantly less than most similar prosthetics, and you'd imagine that the people that came up with it would try to use their invention to garner a sweet payday and an office with free snacks. That's what wealthy people do, right? Make buttloads of money and put a few Snickers in a building? Owen and Van As gave away the design schematics for their hand for free, the result of which has been a remarkable boom in the prosthetics industry. Other individuals and companies began playing with the design, and because it's so cost-effective, many can actually be given away for free. A volunteer group called e-NABLE grew from this as a way of matching those missing limbs with those who could provide matches for their needs as each individual requires slightly different design capabilities.

As more people got involved, designs evolved and the $150 schematic actually gave way to even cheaper ones, some going for as low as $35. Eventually, they could be constructed with bits and pieces that snapped together, and some were produced to look like superhero limbs with Spider-Man or Captain America motifs. So not only do you have a replacement for a missing body part, but you're also technically a member of the Avengers.

Hands are being built specifically for rock-climbing, bowling, playing musical instruments, and even enhanced gripping with extra thumbs. An entire industry that left people waiting years to afford new advances is now a thing of the past.

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