I've come to imagine a pretty bleak hypothesis about this whole schtik.
We already know that, in spite of every online blunder commited with the goal of making more money and documented right here in detail with the explaination on why they all were terrible and unethical ideas, the new owners of this website are pouncing at every occasion to make the same idiocies, because they stopped paying attention as soon as they heard the word "money". Eye-gouging new UI, ad-valanche, meme coin no one cares about, you name it.
And you know what's all the rage nowadays?
AI-generated pictures.
My fear is that they ordered the website to become a picture database, whose photos – and quite possibly artworks – can later be used as reference for executing prompts.
I would assume that they are trying to exploit a copyright loophole by gathering as many photos in a database, in order to avoid accusations of their AI picking up pictures online.
It may be quite a stretch, and I do hope that I'm wrong, but even accounting for Google's algorithm, there's really no good reason to upload that many pictures in so little time, especially ones so irrelevant to what the website is meant for. And it wouldn't be the first time a website had its content sold to a LLM project – remember Reddit?

>moderators are closing the comment sections of all the slop articles.

We're as confused about this as you are.