Wherever there is fertile ground on the Internet (i.e. they aren’t disabled), gifs will flourish. The compressed, silent, automatically playing and repeating little bits of video are one of those essential oddities of the Internet. When you want to express contempt on an online forum, why not use a Lucille Bluth eye roll? When you want talk about the weather on Tumblr, why not use a dramatic “winter is coming” snippet?