As a benign Internet phenomenon, I personally don't get memes. At all. I see how some people might like them, I understand the jokes, but they just don't entertain me and the lack of originality (inherent to the format) irks me. Whenever someone puts up an otherwise excellent piece of writing on some topic and includes memes to 'lighten it up', I struggle to fight the automatic impulse to disqualify the author.

I severely dislike the way a lot of memes use images or videos of people caught on camera doing something odd or stupid, who in the worst case end up being ridiculed for years by millions of strangers just because they looked silly.

But the concept of memes is exploited in an explicitly malign manner too. Anyone who has come across that type of meme knows what I mean; the thought terminating clichés which push one or another form of hate by means of seemingly innocent ridicule and jocularity. Anti-Semitic, trans-hate, gay-hate, political mudslinging, dehumanizing of refugees. Often you can't even tell which are the output of genuine troll factories like the one in Saint Petersburg, or just edgy teenage shrieking. These hitch a ride along in the broader meme culture, and for enabling that type of discourse alone I personally hate the whole concept of memes.

I think the damage they do and have done as a delivery vehicle for hate to society worldwide is severely underestimated, and we lack defence mechanism against this phenomenon.

<meme ref"Old man yells at cloud"/>

(The fact that this jest will accurately identify one specific image to 95% of the readers is in itself testament to the effectiveness of memes as a viral vector for societal diseases (i.e., hate) as well.)