You’ve hit the red stop button, the bus is slowing to a halt, the doors lurch open with a hiss, you go to disembark ... but wait.

Do you thank the driver?

The question of public transport protocol has become an unlikely meme on social media, alongside claims that it is the ultimate test of character – with those who give voice to their gratitude hailed as “the best of humanity”.

According to KnowYourMeme.com, the meme originated on Reddit two weeks ago, when a user elevated “people who say thanks to the bus driver” to pharaoh status.

From Reddit, the meme – reminiscent of so-called “wholesome memes”, a knowing attempt to make the internet a kinder place – spread to other platforms and was applied to various established formats, such as Exploding Brain. “People who don’t say thanks to the bus driver” were also condemned.

The popular Instagram account Brown Cardigan, followed by nearly 400,000 people, embraced the cause with characteristic near-deranged fervour, collating the best – and increasingly aggressive – expressions of “unrelenting gratitude” under the hashtag: #justthankingbusdriverthings.

Brown Cardigan concluded its frenzy with an apparent screenshot of a fabricated story in The Australian newspaper headlined: “Bus drivers around the country recieving [sic] wave of praise”.

“WOW. Huge. Memes that change lives and empower everyday heroes. Our job here is done,” read the caption beneath the story, which reported “a whole new sense of job satisfaction” and even an uptick in career change inquiries.

Brown Cardigan’s self-appointment as a “conductor of goodwill” may have been facetious, but the meme nevertheless sparked an earnest debate about passenger etiquette.

At the time of writing, a BuzzFeed poll had found that more than 15,300 people said they thanked the driver – 82% of respondents – while just 8% admitted to alighting in silence. Just over 1,000 (6%) said they opted to “give the driver the nod”, while 4% claimed – one would assume, falsely – to say: “Thanks for getting me to my stop while working under such brutal conditions.”

But debate elsewhere on the internet flagged the possibility that the weight of the implicit expectation to thank your bus driver could vary by region.

In Australia, where Brown Cardigan is based, a loud “CHEERS DRIVER” or exaggerated nod of thanks is de rigueur on alighting the bus, in the smaller cities of Brisbane and Perth in particular, but not infrequently in Sydney.

Roy Molloy, an Australian musician, tweeted that he had “never been so serious in [his] entire life” as he was about the importance of thanking the bus driver.

His tweet caught the attention of Gladiator actor and lively tweeter Russell Crowe, who agreed, adding: “It’s simple common courtesy.”

But discussion in New Urbanist Memes for Transit-Oriented Teens – a Facebook group of nearly 100,000 mostly millennials interested in urbanist issues – suggested that view was by no means the case elsewhere in the world. Londoners in particular were singled out for scrutiny.

One member described thanking the bus driver as “Irish culture”.

“I used to thank bus drivers when I lived in a city where that was a thing people did,” wrote one commenter. “For now, I live in a city that mercifully rejects small talk and the forced emotional labor of giving and accepting thanks (New York) – so I no longer do.”

Several respondents distinguished between the relative convenience of expressing their thanks while exiting from the front door, and the potentially unseemly volume necessary to be heard from the back.

A minority were unapologetically ungrateful. One woman wrote: “I don’t talk to strangers so I don’t thank my bus driver.”