I might get a lot of flack for this, but I am going to throw my hat into the ring about this. Personally, I agree with both of these and it would be hard to decide which post describes my opinion better.
I personally have my own evidence of something like this happening (except it wasn’t a meme).
My most liked post was on the Bionicle is Officially Cancelled Topic where I posted a quote that I felt described the end of G2 Bionicle and was something that people could discuss.
Link is here:
However, Meso posted right under me with the word “sigh” that added almost nothing to the discussion, yet at the time of posting this, his post has almost 75% more likes than my post.
The reason for this is most likely caused by Meso being a cast member, so people will like almost whatever he posts, because they want to look “cool” or something like that. You then compare this to a Master who has not been on the boards that long, so most people don’t know that much about him.
All in all, the main reason people get likes on the boards is mostly because of what they post, but it can sometimes be attributed to the amount of popularity they have among the other users of the boards