[mschuster91]

gifs have the advantage of working on lower-resource devices (cellphones, netbooks) without any delay.

youtube and other "feature-rich" sites work only with massive stuttering for me, so I'm happy for any gif instead of a video which needs to be set up and torn down for every play.

[exodust]

The first gif on the page is more than 4MB.

You can do a lot better than animated gifs. No pausing or frame control, forget about audio, limited colour palette, painful to make...

If you cram megabytes of this stuff onto a single page, don't expect everyone to get the same framerate.