[moonshinefe]

I forget which site it is off the top of my head but there's a pretty prominent gif sharing site that does it I often get linked to.

I think it's basically just as you say, for English speakers anyway, a bit of an easier way to read out URLs when talking in person or voice chatting. With non-English speakers it doesn't do much, and you're forced to say letter for letter as you would with a lot of other URLs.

[djhn]

One twist on this would be to somehow limit the wordlist to words that have relatively unambiguous pronunciation, and maybe limit those to the 100 000 most commonly used ones.

Of course then you'll have to use more words for a similar number of links.

[anirudhrata]

its gfycat.com

[asadlionpk]

Yes gfycat is what partially inspired us too.