It's not as guilty, though. Memetic and referential humour can be and often are hilarious. But two things are absolutely essential:

The first is unexpectedness. reddit absolutely destroys this. OP IS A FAG! NOPE, CHUCK TESTA! SCUMBAG, SCUMBAG, SCUMBAG! 4chan does too, but to a lesser extent, and only because of the massive numbers it now has. You don't see "OP is a fag" in every thread. You don't see every possible joke making an appearing everywhere it possibly can. reddit just doesn't understand what makes things funny. It's kind of hilarious in a meta way, actually. It doesn't understand humour, but it recognizes correlations. "Hey, that guy I think is funny said that OP is a fag! That phrase must be hilarious! I want to be funny! I'll say it at every opportunity!"

The second is mutation. reddit also completely fails here. If an old joke appears in a new context, there is a very high potential for that instance of the joke to be funny. 4chan (and /b/ in particular) is sometimes guilty of stagnation, but you do see change, and lots of it. On reddit, you don't. Ever. It's just the same joke over and over again, all day every day, without ever changing. Just look at how ridiculously popular forthewolfx is, or the massive "no, that's y, x is when z" chains.

While people say that /b/ was never good, this just isn't true. It did used to be significantly better than it was. At some point about four years ago, I mostly abandoned it for reddit and other smaller *chans, because the decline had become intolerable. Chanology, though it achieved what it set out to do (something I didn't think it would), cemented and hastened the death of 4chan, especially /b/. Since then, it's gotten even worse. But reddit has gone from very good to absolutely fucking terrible with few redeeming qualities, and 4chan has stopped declining, even if it will never recover. 4chan's worst is significantly better than where reddit is now, and reddit still has a ways to plunge.

I also don't buy for a second that the first guy was being ironic. "OP is a fag" shows up in every fucking thread. That idiot is just parroting.

So, yeah. There's my asspie-like rant. Maybe someone will find my stupid opinion interesting.