Two panels, same person, one reaction rejected and one approved. The top panel shows Drake turning away, unimpressed. The bottom shows him nodding along, pleased. Whatever sits in the top panel is the thing being dismissed; whatever sits in the bottom is the thing being preferred, and the joke lives entirely in the gap between the two.

The panels never work alone. A single Drake reaction shown by itself has nothing to react to. The format only produces a joke when the two captions describe options a reader already recognises, so the contrast lands before they've had to think about it, a worse choice sitting above a better one that is usually simpler, lazier, or more obviously correct once it's pointed out.

Why the comparison is the whole joke

What makes a pairing work is proportion. The rejected option should look reasonable enough that someone might actually do it, and the approved option should be recognisably better for a reason the reader supplies themselves. The format doesn't explain the joke. It just sets two things side by side and trusts the reader to see which one wins and why.

The format traces to a single scene in Drake's music video for "Hotline Bling": he turns away from one thing looking unimpressed, then turns towards another with a wide grin and an open arm. Split into two frames, that gesture became the reject-then-approve pairing the format is built around.

When the meme itself appeared

There's no dated record here of the point at which people started cropping the video into two panels and pairing them with captions. Where a claim like that can't be tied to a specific source and date, it isn't stated as fact, so this covers the scene itself.

The joke only works if the two panels are pulling in different directions. The top panel has to be a real rejection and the bottom one a real preference, or a reader has nothing to measure the contrast against.

What breaks it

A common version of the mistake is putting two options in the panels that are barely different, so Drake's reaction to each one makes no sense. Another is using the format for a single statement, which just borrows the pose without the structure underneath it. If someone can't tell what's being rejected and what's being preferred from the panels alone, the format has been used as decoration.