...Reading these replies, it looks like the general understanding of memetics here is rather low.
It's true there's some really poor memes that started where most Internet memes start and then ended up all over Tumblr because (no offense to Tumblr users) Tumblr likes stupid crap, and there's a lot that quickly died where they started but were adopted by a younger crowd; There was a time when I spoke in 1337sp34k virtually all the time online, and had I been born six years later then right now I'd be having that phase and probably spouting off with "over 9000 lulz xDDDD" instead. But assuming that every meme is based on ridicule, immaturity or bydlo ideals is kind of exclusive to most of memetics; In the end, all an Internet meme is is an in-joke that, instead of being shared by a very small group, is shared by a large one, encompassing most of the a target audience of the joke or art. In fact, a meme is just any behaviour, saying or joke that spreads through a community or supercommunity to the point of recognition. Any reference that you put in that you actually expect your audience to get (e.g. "It's-a me, Mario!" in Quartz or "I have this notion that I'd quite like to sail the ocean" (or pretty much any line, really) from Snakewood) is a meme. A reference nobody gets or that goes beyond the widespread in-joke of a meme to simple mass appeal, like a dead metaphor, or that relies not on borrowed humour or drama but on low comedy formed around, for example, poor linguistics, is generally poor.
As a rule, I would say the less widespread the impact, in other words, the less memetic, a reference, the subtler it should be; So that somebody that does not get it would not even realize it was there, in vaguer cases, while those that would notice it (sometimes it's an hard balance to find, and I tend to go too vague or subtle). And the less mature or highbrow a meme or reference the less likely you should include it at all.
If that's tl;dr, the gist is that I do not think meme means what I think you think it means, and also that in general the more obscure your reference, the more subtle it should be, and the less refined, the less likely it should be included at all.