I think it's a lot more because the internet was a niche. It's something your parents/family or weird creepy uncle wasn't on. All these old memes still feel "untouched" by facebook and it feels like an in-joke. In other words memes felt more special.
4chan was onto something, once memes became mainstream they died... a little hyperbolic but they do lose their fun factor being more popular now.
I can handle being a consumer. That gives me a choice
It's when I'm the product that I start to get irritated
I don't love old memes. They bore me. I see and make plenty of new stuff that makes me laugh, including laughing at consumer culuture. But most of thosr memes are not on Lemmy or Reddit.
I think for a number of us it's nostalgia, like what @Tosti@feddit.nl was saying. I too was there when the old memes were formed. And I think you're on to something too, OP.
They annoy the hell out of me because people aren't even trying anymore to make them funny. Yesterday it felt like half of the memes were self-referential "haha it's so funny how we now post the old memes again" shit and people up voted them to the moon.
Sorry you didn't get the joke. They weren't referencing anything because they were only there to say "Hey, remember this one?" We all did, and the townspeople rejoiced.
If you don't get all warm and fuzzy for nostalgia, you aren't old enough yet.
Old memes are funny. Old meme templates with new low effort text is not and the kinds of like chuck testa is just plain spam and always has been.
Anyone can create memes. Only few can create clever and funny ones.