Indeed, but we can take the example of Youtube aswell.
Early days their communication was more towards rewarding youtubeurs for their videos and incentivization helped quality content for them. From this emerged a whole community and it even created the Youtuber job too.
I believe it's more about execution than the idea itself. From the day steemit founder went to EOS, there haven't been much updates ever since.
I can be convinced that execution is the problem too, but I've seen plenty of iterations of Steemit that eventually all went down the same path. And you can see so many other forums and platforms doing something similar, but they simply can't escape the fact that the system, once gameable, slips away. The cost of democratisation?
But yes if the picture you posted gets famous and go to the hot page, you earn cryptos.
And you can also invest on memes, if the meme you invested in goes to the hot page, you get cryptos too depending on how much you've invested.

Now that's... something a bit new. Wasn't there a FB game back in the day, investing points in "hot pics"? I don't know, fun is fun but I still need to see for myself that this can work for tokenised models!
People using memes are still alive?

Im pretty sure half of the internet is still alive.
Only half? You overestimate the internets =p