What is up with GIPHY and other GIF search tools being oversaturated with low-quality content made by otherwise unknown content creators?
So I was recently clued in to the controversy regarding a creator called "benjammin" on GIPHY, who for some reason recreates other GIFs of himself in a generic American colonial outfit, and then mass reports the originals so only his version is accessible. You can see the stark difference in GIF search results by trying to search for a GIF of basically anything on Reddit (which uses GIPHY) versus on Discord or Gboard (which use Tenor). The Reddit/GIPHY search will invariably show almost exclusively images of this benjammin guy, while the Tenor search will have what you're most likely actually looking for. There have been discussions all over Reddit about this recently, e.g. here: https://www.reddit.com/r/whenthe/comments/1of23ky/and_this_is_why_i_dont_use_giphy/
But Tenor is also not immune to weird, recurring GIF creators. There's this weird series of GIFs featuring a really ugly puppet with a nose ring called "Jeffy" that shows up in almost any GIF search on Tenor. For example, simply searching for "gross" gives one of the first results as this just insanely unsettling GIF: https://tenor.com/view/sml-jeffy-spinach-yucky-gross-gif-26468474
Furthermore both platforms have a tendency for GIFs containing references to specific people to show up. It's less common but a lot of times when I'm searching GIFs I will see reaction GIFs that are subtitled something like "[random username] moment".
How do these kinds of GIFs get so much attention from the algorithm? Who even are these people and what is the deal with their obsession with mass-producing these low-quality slop GIFs? Do they make money off of it somehow? And are these platforms not aware of how easily abused their service seems to be?