Ah, the days when memes were actually funny
More generally, memes are only funny to people who are immersed in them. You were probably more immersed in the memes then so they were funny to you. And less now so they are not. But nothing fundamental has changed. Memes by their nature tend to be based on inside jokes that are only funny to the people on the inside.
I'm part of several gaming subreddits that hold an overly hostile view of the game's developers, and the number of memes used to stab or jab at said devs outnumbers old-school "funny" memes or even the more contemporary "shared experience" memes practically two-to-one.
Plus, there are all these unwritten social rules about meme templates, and indeed they seem to have their own economy of sorts.
Take everything together and it seems that memes are serious business, which is stupid if you ask me. Memes are supposed to be funny and lighthearted!
I think with all the frustration out there, urban red-state Millennials like myself are stuck expressing themselves in meme form since our congressional representatives (Missouri) appear to be chasing rural voters who think Biden is a scary socialist. One of these days I'll find time to grab a stamp and mail off a few memes on paper to my congressperson, since they don't seem to be reading my emails to them or listening to the voicemails I send them.
To wit: "If the money to feed, clothe, and house the homeless has to come from taxing Jeff Bezos... I'm not going to lose any sleep over that."
In soviet russia SUSTANTIVE VERBs YOU!
In north korea email is for old people
I think the prank / meme became so widespread that at some point they changed the site code to spell out the linked domain name in text after the <a>.
2. ...
3. profit!
This joke form is apparently as old as 1938: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_Soviet_Russia
Think dancing baby, zombo.com, cheezburger cat... they were funny, we passed em on, that was that. I do remember saving the ones I liked in a 'funny pics' folder -- which I still have -- but I'm not sure there were very many people 'immersed' in them any more than any other fringe part of internet nerd culture.
That said, AYB was probably the first meme I ever 'immersed' in, in that it was the right combination of weird and zany and that it fit my zeitgeist back in the day.
But then icanhazcheezburger.com and KnowYourMeme came around, and that their efforts to collect and categorize probably marked the beginning of the end.
Bad memes are awful (Sturgeons law), but a good meme is cheap fun that I can consume in a second