The MTV Video Music Awards (VMAs) Sunday night were the first real test of a redditor’s grand experiment to track the most popular GIFs on Twitter in real time.
His site, aptly called GIF Hell (may be NSFW), launched over the weekend, just in time to capture the VMA moments that instantly went viral and were immortalized as infinitely-repeating GIFs: Miley Cyrus's performance, with special guest Miley Cyrus’s tongue. Lady Gaga's seashell bikini. Anything featuring One Direction.
GIF Hell features a list of current popular GIFs, based on the number of times each has been tweeted. It also has an all-time leaderboard, which will be a lot more interesting when the site is more than 2 days old. In that short time, though, GIF Hell has already indexed more than 100,000 GIFs (though many are duplicates).
To give a flavor the moments that caught fire at the VMAs (and elsewhere), here are 10 trending GIFs that appeared on GIF Hell Monday morning:
1) Taylor Swift telling One Direction (and ex Harry Styles) to pipe down
2) A meeting of the K-pop minds
G-Dragon bowing to Exo accounts for several of the top slots on GIF Hell.
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3) Ed Sheeran looking super thrilled to be at the VMAs
4) Styles struggles to unhook a fish
5) Sylvester the Cat needs coffee and cigarettes on a Monday morning too
6) Brittany of Glee flashes an unnerving smile
7) One Direction's Zayn Malik plants a kiss on bandmate Niall Horan
8) Horan and Styles politely applaud Cyrus's performance
9) Knowing when to close your laptop
This is a reaction GIF that bore captions such as"when my ex messages me on Facebook."
10) David Tennant shaking his fist at John Barrowman
A running Doctor Who joke from when Tennant hosted quiz showNever Mind The Buzzcocks.
H/T Reddit | Photo via @1DUpdatesAU/Twitter