RE: Quality Content, Quality Content... NO! Networking is where it is at!
I (pretty much) agree with you, that networking and interacting with the community is the primary objective... but I also think it's super-important to present original content. If I want to look at memes, I can go to a meme site.
When I first came to steemit (which was 16 days ago), after doing a couple of posts, I thought, 'Now what?' And started checking out what others were doing. It actually worked in my favor that my upvote counted for nothing; I just upvoted and commented willy-nilly on anything that caught my eye or engaged me. That's one element I don't like about steemit, is that we're actually restricted on the number of upvotes we can give, and there has to be a strategy around when/how many upvotes.
But as I'm getting deeper into steemit, I'm finding great people here!
Memes are not a problem. You can upvote them or not. Some of them take a lot of work to create. The problem is that it isn't easy to filter out the memes. My opinion of course. I don't want to hear or read a lot of things that get posted here. That is why we have votes, to reward the content that we like. We also have flags or downvotes to combat things we don't think ad value. (Use with care)
oops, I wasn't clear. I think memes are sometimes hilarious, and I also create my own. (Hopefully at least funny.) I guess I was disappointed in the "funny" feed, to find almost nothing but memes that were (as far as I could tell) found on the internet, posted on DMania, then reposted here.
But I found the solution(s): One, as you implied, ignore them. And two, I switched to the "humor" feed, which I've found to have lots more humorous, original content. :-)
Thanks for the upvote, @whatsup!