I haven't worked there in several years, but assuming memegen hasn't wildly changed: Management likes having a pulse on employees, and they tolerate memegen since it's mostly fun, it builds shared culture in a massive company, lets workers (mostly) harmlessly blow off steam, and it would be massively unpopular to shut it down. Management does not like that memegen is often a nexus of cynicism and employee activism. Also in my experience, most employees were nearly completely agnostic or ignorant about whatever trend was on memegen, so it wasn't necessarily representative.

> Management likes having a pulse on employees, and they tolerate memegen since it's mostly fun ...

A long long time ago I used to work at Yahoo. There was an internal mailing list called "devel-random@yahoo-inc.com", which was basically a forum for engineers to let off steam. I used to enjoy the occasional emacs-vs-vim threads, or the ribbing it frequently gave to Jan Koum (founder of Whatsapp).

When Marissa Mayer became CEO in 2012, one of the first things she did was to join this forum, to get a pulse on the developers.

I know this, because my VP comes running to me one day: how do I join this group "devel-random"?

I asked him: are you sure you want to join it? It's a huge time suck if you're not careful.

No, no, he replied; Marissa wants us to join it so we can get a feel for the company (turned out she said no such thing, but you know how senior management is: aping everything that a CEO does).

A couple of weeks later he quietly quit the list. :-D