I need to start by saying that if there's a topic about this, please allow me to delete this rather than getting a strike/ban on my account because it seems that my browser wasn't allowing me to search about this in the forum right before I created this post.

If this does happen to be an original topic, however, I guess I'll explain the specifics of my question.

Maybe the word 'meme' has a way broader definition than I'm taking it for. If it does, I'm specifically talking about these commonly-seen pictures that have text replacing what the original text was, or they place text at the top and bottom of the picture that always has the same meaning behind it. I think I'm immune to the humor a lot of people my age find in this stuff, because I see this nearly everywhere I go on the Internet. When the pictures are edited, they're done so sloppily with little creativity put into it. I have to say, frankly, how unimaginative I find these things. It makes me mad except in VERY few cases, to see this stuff pass for art, which even though I do value and would never censor that art that I absolutely HATE... I just have to wonder why? I mean, I remember reading somewhere that the first of such memes was posted on the Internet in 2005, but I never saw these things until the 2010s or so, and I cannot comprehend why they have such massive appeal. At least when it comes to their precursor, the demotivational posters that I saw a lot of in the mid-2000s, the pictures would change and thus you'd get a different meaning for each of them, but this newer stuff just has people applying it to about every conceivable thing. I find them falling flat in stimulating the imagination because the same images over and over always have the same meaning when it comes to this.

Something else I don't understand is the fact that anything that goes viral is instantly called a meme. Am I missing something?