My impression is that it's a lack of remixing. I don't think recreating the exact same joke with different people in the video is particularly novel. It seems less like meme/remix culture and more like how you find a slightly different version of the same item (or literally a repackaged item from the same factory) for sale on Amazon from fifty different "brands" that have random ass names.

The meme could be good. The mixes could be good. But...is that what is actually happening? Or is someone hoping to create their own version that gets view in competition with the original so they can squeeze out some monetization from a trend and hoping the algorithm lotto smiles upon them?

[dead]

I used TikTok and also never came across a meme like that. Or maybe I did once or twice, I just quickly swiped away (or if something I’m not interested in is shown repeatedly I click not interested and it’s gone at least for a long time). If you’re shown the same meme from 20 different people chances are you just kept watching them, maybe with disapproval, but your device can’t read your brainwaves yet so the service just thinks you’re super interested.

And YouTube also had those stupid challenges with everyone doing the same stupid shit before TikTok even existed.

It’s a culture thing I guess. Overlay videos of other videos and the memeing videos has been in TikTok since the beginning. Youtube would probably ban the former under a copyright strike or something.

Most memes and most application of memes were not that funny. Scrolling reddit 10 years ago is not that different from TikTok just with pictures instead of videos.

Weren't memes always just that? I think we're just old

Eh. They really weren't. "I'm firin' mah lazer" wasn't funny and yet for a while it was ubiquitous. I'd wager in fact that most memes weren't inherently funny: their purpose is in-group signalling for the most part.