You would have hated it, then, in the days of only one or two TV channels, and in towns where there weren't many newspapers.
Which I suppose is a gloomy point: people have always been like this so it's unlikely to change.
I watched that episode in the last year and didn't make the meme connection until I was reading someone mention it somewhere. It would be interesting to have a modern take on that episode. The thing with memes is they don't necessarily convey an idea or a point that furthers a discussion. They're often just a way to relate something in the current context with a past idea (for a laugh), so it almost seems that a language based on memes would just end up stagnating culture.
Maybe I should start participating in Star Trek discussions!
Maybe but I think it is just more social signalling, to either show you are part of the opposition or to highlight the comment for like minded people. Similar to other comments : Yikes, Wrong side of history, a bad look, etc. Most of these comments are made on highly political threads, highly controversial topics such as system-d don't seem to evoke these kind of comments. That leads me to think that they are more emotional in nature than analytical.
One of the last examples I remember is about 18 months ago I noticed everyone, everywhere, as if coordinated by some unseen entity, started replying "oof" to everything. Maybe this really is just a variant of the Bader-Meinhof phenomenon (another one of "those little memes" you mentioned, heh).