Do people enjoy reading in this format? Beyond being a bit passé at this point, are these things ever even amusing. I know they interrupted the flow of an interesting story here, but why are people still doing this?

Judging by the number of commenters here complaining or providing the cleared text this format has definitely got old.

Complainers always make more noise. I personally find it cute, a bit like listening in person to a very expressive story teller.

I sympathize with the critics, by the way - I have gripes with plenty of online content, even if not with this one. A button to enable the GIFs would probably be best for everyone.

I don't know about amusing, but Rashida Jones is cute, and I did not mind having her on my screen.

And they took up more than 10 MB of data. The text itself is less than 10 kB!