This has frustrated me incredibly in a few different subreddits I frequented. There was some really welcoming, high-quality content, but then there were also terrible, low-calorie memes. The people that enjoy the memes definitely seemed to scoff at any criticism.

The easiest solution seems to be to allow filtering of content based on tags. In most cases, the memes were tagged as such. Had I been able to simply say, "Don't show content with the `meme` tag," I probably would have spent a good deal more time on reddit, browsing and contributing.