The post received more than 580,000 views in three days (shown below). On June 25th, 2019, the presentation was uploaded to YouTube. In the remainder of the speech, Arato discusses how he began to accept his meme celebrity and his embracing of the notoriety, establishing a homepage for the photographs. There was "no solution-only a temporary solution." While he considered taking action, he says, Arato decided there was not much he could do. Several months later, Arato began finding the photographs used in a variety of other contexts, outside of the stock photographs he agreed to. Both were happy with the results and continue to work together, resulting in a "couple hundred" stock photographs.
#Hide the pain harold meme trial#
After uploading the photograph to Facebook, a professional photographer contacted Arato regarding modeling, inviting him to a trial shooting. His story begins with a vacation in Turkey, where a photograph of him was taken. On March 5th, 2016, Redditor The_Shreckoning announced Arató's identity on the /r/youdontsurf subrredit. On March 3rd, Kőszeg, Hungary resident András Arató identified himself as the man in the stock photo on the pain_harold group on the Russian language social network VK (shown below). On sites like MemeCenter, stock photos featuring Harold have been edited to image macros, mostly used for sex or similar kinds of jokes.
On October 31st, 2013, a subreddit community for stock images, including Harold, /r/youdontsurf, was created. On September 10th, a Youtuber ChinnyxD uploaded the story, narrated through text-to-speech. Then on September 7th, Imgur user someshitbag compiled notable quotes from the 4chan thread into a gallery post titled "Hide-the-pain-harold," which garnered more than 880,000 views in just over three weeks.
On May 5th, 2014, Harold's stock photos inspired a lengthy tribute thread on 4chan's /b/, crafting a fictional story about an unhappy old man working as a stock photography model.
This was titled " Maurice" (his alternate name) and has over 10k likes. Another Facebook page was created on January 1, 2014. On October 23rd, 2011, a Facebook page for Hide the Pain Harold was created.