Earlier quoted context omitted.
The phenomenon of meme photo degradation is indeed an interesting one. I think that is one reason I have always been put off by memes even when they come from loved ones, the photos look LITERALLY dirty, as if passed around by hand :)
a lot of that has to do with meme-regurgitator sites that stamp their watermark all over an image. the reality is that the picture is being passed around by way too many automations that apply filters or reencodes with little regard to the quality drop, and lots of priority going to making the image smaller, and thus cheaper to host.
Sure, if you host all the images on S3. But why would you? Anywhere else you can get unmetered gigabit for a few hundred/mo, the savings would be non-existent.