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It's honestly something I've become quite bitter about. I find the resurgence of the gif has significantly reduced my enjoyment of browsing websites like reddi

It's honestly something I've become quite bitter about. I find the resurgence of the gif has significantly reduced my enjoyment of browsing websites like reddit. Even small subs which used to be the place to go for deeper discussion have largely devolved into image boards targeting the lowest common denominator. When it's appropriate I have no problem with a video. But if posting a video it should really be in its original form. Uploading to Youtube or even just using a <video> tag lets the viewer decide if they want to listen to audio, and what resolution to watch in. It's pretty rare that I'd choose to watch in no sound and at the lowest resolution possible. Not to mention the absurd amount of data gifs download. The recent trend of converting videos into gifs back into videos (websites like gfycat) make even less sense. All you're doing is damaging the quality of the video. To what end? Even articles that are posted are now scattered with gifs. Why? I guess because it's trendy. But it makes it incredibly difficult to focus on the text. The article above is a good (and likely self-aware) example, but this one from Atom also stuck out for me. http://blog.atom.io/2016/02/03/introducing-block-decorations.html http://blog.atom.io/2016/02/03/introducing-block-decorations... Terribly nauseating. So that's my rant. Frankly I'd welcome a browser extension to block animated gifs online and hide reddit posts than only link to them.

icebraining 10y ago
Firefox has Gif Block: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/gif-block/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/gif-block/
zyxley 10y ago
> Even small subs which used to be the place to go for deeper discussion have largely devolved into image boards targeting the lowest common denominator. There's some black humor here in how the actual imageboards (4chan, etc) are heavily pushing towards WebM for short animations.
- fl0wenol 10y ago
  Because it is likely that a poster on an imageboard made the video themsevles, rather than reposting in an environment that may only permit simple image links, it encourages them to save it as webm instead of distilling to a GIF (not easy to do properly, very bandwidth intensive on view), which allows the videos to be longer and higher quality while file size caps can be lowered. Mobile users are also thankful for this trend.
userbinator 10y ago
I keep animations off by default; it definitely makes the Web less distracting. On the other hand, I've seen many others browsing pages with plenty of GIFs and other distractions, often with no adblocker, and it just astounds me how they can even concentrate with all the other stuff trying to get their attention. (This reminds me of the other discussion here about Chrome users accidentally activating the Back shortcut because the focus isn't on a text input. Perhaps they were too distracted by all the other cruft on the page, like animations, that they didn't notice more subtle things like the focus changing...)
aplaice 10y ago
Firefox has a setting that prevents images from being animated (in about:config): image.animation_mode set to none (The gifs are still loaded and present as static images. Video files pretending to be gifs are not dealt with.)
- ars 10y ago
  > Video files pretending to be gifs are not dealt with. For that you need: media.autoplay.enabled You will have to pause/unpause youtube videos to get them to play. Biggest issue is that I can't figure out how to play videos with ads on youtube since ads don't have a pause button. (I just play them in VLC instead.)
anexprogrammer 10y ago
I share that feeling. Just as the world seemed to be getting nicely settled with PNGs along comes Giphy with a mission to destroy the universe. So even when the anim isn't either a tedious throwback to the worst excesses of geocities, or there just to distract and annoy it's garbage quality. Someone will post a video, in gif form, to help illustrate some post, and you can barely make out a thing as the dithering has sent the detail to oblivion. Just make an mp4. Simply being able to stop a gif anim by hitting ESC was far too useful, so browsers don't do that any more, or sites are somehow blocking it. I don't understand the appeal of gif anims at all.
derefr 10y ago
To me, a gif (at its best) is effectively a quote from a video—a short sample of a film or TV show that can be embedded into an article as an example to be discussed, serving the same purpose that a blockquote serves. Ideally, such things should—rather than being copied and cut into shape—be transcluded, effectively fancy links to an original that include time-slicing metadata. But making transclusion an easy or default behavior has been a losing battle for text since the web was created; I don't expect changing the medium being embedded will change how people think about things.
- joelg 10y ago
  Ted Nelson would be so proud. The atomicity of the internet - sealed documents at URLs - is really regrettable. A much more powerful design (although admittedly more complicated) would have been a "turtles all the way down", IPFS-style approach where any asset could be transcluded or linked into. But I don't think we'll ever see it.
  - cooper12 10y ago
    Mediawiki (the thing behind Wikipedia) actually lets you transclude whole pages and it's also the way its templates work. It's pretty cool because you can also have options to not include certain info inside <noinclude> tags and some templates such as for episode lists even show less information when transcluding. Oh and you can also transclude specific sections IIRC. By linked into, are you saying by URL? I notice that archive.is actually adds its own links to the side like a ruler. I think the status quo of linking only to headers is okay, but maybe you're envisioning something like linking to specific words in sentences. That would be great for quoting but the HTML would probably look/load horribly. Maybe there could be a system that let you link to offsets so it wouldn't need actual anchors in the source, but those could break with a simple addition of a word at the beginning. It's an interesting problem for sure.
- insulanian 10y ago
  > To me, a gif (at its best) is effectively a quote from a video... This is a very nice definition. Thanks!
Spooky23 10y ago
Sometimes a picture is worth a thousand words. http://m.imgur.com/Owxi9?r http://m.imgur.com/Owxi9?r
- gunnihinn 10y ago
  And a GIF is worth a thousand * framerate * seconds words. How can anyone be surprised they're beating images?
- bcook 10y ago
  If only I could view that "movie" with Chrome on Android.
  - libraryatnight 10y ago
    I just watched it on Chrome for Android. Just had to tap to play
shklnrj 10y ago
Agree totally to this. Also I find that you have to really wait to know if the GIF animation has really ended or not or how long it is! That can irk me, specially since in the same time, you can click on a Youtube link and see the timeline and content in quality form, stop it without any suspense.
azeirah 10y ago
Are there any browser plugins that add video controls to gifs?.. If not, why isn't there a browser plugin that adds video controls to gifs?
- noisem4ker 10y ago
  My guess is that nobody wants to get their hands dirty working on what's probably very old code for a very old format. That and maybe the fact that it's probably not very easy to travel back and forward in GIF's incrementally painted animation model described by Gankro in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12333329 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12333329
- danthejam 10y ago
  Here's a bookmarklet that gives you video controls: http://slbkbs.org/jsgif/ http://slbkbs.org/jsgif/ It lets you play it backwards, frame by frame and change the speed.
- runaway 10y ago
  I made a Chrome extension that opens a player on specifically selected gifs but not wholesale (would need too much memory) https://github.com/0ui/gif-scrubber https://github.com/0ui/gif-scrubber
sotojuan 10y ago
> Even small subs which used to be the place to go for deeper discussion have largely devolved into image boards targeting the lowest common denominator. I'm a bit late to this thread but honestly after many years online I've come to the conclusion that most people outside of HN don't want to come home after work to have deep discussions and would rather post and upvote "lowest common denominator" stuff.
giancarlostoro 10y ago
There were some sites that would let you hit "play" before showing a gif, I think that's a better approach, as long as you can pause them after. That Atom example is really bad on the eyes. Of course I can always hit "ESC" to force all gifs on one page to stop, but that's just forcing that on the page. I like the option to pause and unpause gifs. I guess that's why gifs to video became a thing. Never knew about gif to video back to gif though.
Pxtl 10y ago
I actually have the reverse reaction. I find the frustrating slow load-times of the modern internet intolerable, and enjoy how low-quality gifs start immediately, unlike cumbersome videos. Fast load times are one of the things that keep bringing me back to hacker news.
rtpg 10y ago
the practical reason for this happening is that you can put images basically everywhere (github PR comments, emails, etc.), but these facilities rarely support video. Video support on the net has until very recently been pretty awful too. Now that the video tag can be reasonably expected to work, in a couple of years we might have the tools to just embed video when we want to.
jlarocco 10y ago
I agree they're nauseating, but it's somewhat amusing to watch them become popular again. The funniest part, IMO, is that the people who have "Watch this GIF of me entering code! OMG!" on their Github README are more or less the same crowd who were complaining how low brow and annoying GIFs were ~10-15 years ago.
yitchelle 10y ago
This is exactly one of the reasons why I like reading HN so much, especially the comments. The lack of gif animations or emoji is really refreshing. Thank your for keeping it simple.
paulryanrogers 10y ago
Firefox has a built-in config key to disable animated images: image.animation_mode. And Chrome has a extension too.
greendestiny_re 10y ago
I understand the troubles you're having with GIFs, however, I'd just like to say that none of the modern "image video" formats work on my Android, which is why I have to use a separate browser from Google Play Store to download the video and then use another separate player app to watch what usually amounts to a 5-second clip of something happening. In many cases, I'd prefer a GIF of the file.

icebraining 10y ago

Firefox has Gif Block: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/gif-block/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/gif-block/

zyxley 10y ago

> Even small subs which used to be the place to go for deeper discussion have largely devolved into image boards targeting the lowest common denominator. There's some black humor here in how the actual imageboards (4chan, etc) are heavily pushing towards WebM for short animations.

fl0wenol 10y ago
Because it is likely that a poster on an imageboard made the video themsevles, rather than reposting in an environment that may only permit simple image links, it encourages them to save it as webm instead of distilling to a GIF (not easy to do properly, very bandwidth intensive on view), which allows the videos to be longer and higher quality while file size caps can be lowered. Mobile users are also thankful for this trend.

userbinator 10y ago

I keep animations off by default; it definitely makes the Web less distracting. On the other hand, I've seen many others browsing pages with plenty of GIFs and other distractions, often with no adblocker, and it just astounds me how they can even concentrate with all the other stuff trying to get their attention. (This reminds me of the other discussion here about Chrome users accidentally activating the Back shortcut because the focus isn't on a text input. Perhaps they were too distracted by all the other cruft on the page, like animations, that they didn't notice more subtle things like the focus changing...)

aplaice 10y ago

Firefox has a setting that prevents images from being animated (in about:config): image.animation_mode set to none (The gifs are still loaded and present as static images. Video files pretending to be gifs are not dealt with.)

ars 10y ago
> Video files pretending to be gifs are not dealt with. For that you need: media.autoplay.enabled You will have to pause/unpause youtube videos to get them to play. Biggest issue is that I can't figure out how to play videos with ads on youtube since ads don't have a pause button. (I just play them in VLC instead.)

anexprogrammer 10y ago

I share that feeling. Just as the world seemed to be getting nicely settled with PNGs along comes Giphy with a mission to destroy the universe. So even when the anim isn't either a tedious throwback to the worst excesses of geocities, or there just to distract and annoy it's garbage quality. Someone will post a video, in gif form, to help illustrate some post, and you can barely make out a thing as the dithering has sent the detail to oblivion. Just make an mp4. Simply being able to stop a gif anim by hitting ESC was far too useful, so browsers don't do that any more, or sites are somehow blocking it. I don't understand the appeal of gif anims at all.

derefr 10y ago

To me, a gif (at its best) is effectively a quote from a video—a short sample of a film or TV show that can be embedded into an article as an example to be discussed, serving the same purpose that a blockquote serves. Ideally, such things should—rather than being copied and cut into shape—be transcluded, effectively fancy links to an original that include time-slicing metadata. But making transclusion an easy or default behavior has been a losing battle for text since the web was created; I don't expect changing the medium being embedded will change how people think about things.

joelg 10y ago
Ted Nelson would be so proud. The atomicity of the internet - sealed documents at URLs - is really regrettable. A much more powerful design (although admittedly more complicated) would have been a "turtles all the way down", IPFS-style approach where any asset could be transcluded or linked into. But I don't think we'll ever see it.
- cooper12 10y ago
  Mediawiki (the thing behind Wikipedia) actually lets you transclude whole pages and it's also the way its templates work. It's pretty cool because you can also have options to not include certain info inside <noinclude> tags and some templates such as for episode lists even show less information when transcluding. Oh and you can also transclude specific sections IIRC. By linked into, are you saying by URL? I notice that archive.is actually adds its own links to the side like a ruler. I think the status quo of linking only to headers is okay, but maybe you're envisioning something like linking to specific words in sentences. That would be great for quoting but the HTML would probably look/load horribly. Maybe there could be a system that let you link to offsets so it wouldn't need actual anchors in the source, but those could break with a simple addition of a word at the beginning. It's an interesting problem for sure.
insulanian 10y ago
> To me, a gif (at its best) is effectively a quote from a video... This is a very nice definition. Thanks!

Spooky23 10y ago

Sometimes a picture is worth a thousand words. http://m.imgur.com/Owxi9?r http://m.imgur.com/Owxi9?r

gunnihinn 10y ago
And a GIF is worth a thousand * framerate * seconds words. How can anyone be surprised they're beating images?
bcook 10y ago
If only I could view that "movie" with Chrome on Android.
- libraryatnight 10y ago
  I just watched it on Chrome for Android. Just had to tap to play

shklnrj 10y ago

Agree totally to this. Also I find that you have to really wait to know if the GIF animation has really ended or not or how long it is! That can irk me, specially since in the same time, you can click on a Youtube link and see the timeline and content in quality form, stop it without any suspense.

azeirah 10y ago

Are there any browser plugins that add video controls to gifs?.. If not, why isn't there a browser plugin that adds video controls to gifs?

noisem4ker 10y ago
My guess is that nobody wants to get their hands dirty working on what's probably very old code for a very old format. That and maybe the fact that it's probably not very easy to travel back and forward in GIF's incrementally painted animation model described by Gankro in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12333329 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12333329
danthejam 10y ago
Here's a bookmarklet that gives you video controls: http://slbkbs.org/jsgif/ http://slbkbs.org/jsgif/ It lets you play it backwards, frame by frame and change the speed.
runaway 10y ago
I made a Chrome extension that opens a player on specifically selected gifs but not wholesale (would need too much memory) https://github.com/0ui/gif-scrubber https://github.com/0ui/gif-scrubber

sotojuan 10y ago

> Even small subs which used to be the place to go for deeper discussion have largely devolved into image boards targeting the lowest common denominator. I'm a bit late to this thread but honestly after many years online I've come to the conclusion that most people outside of HN don't want to come home after work to have deep discussions and would rather post and upvote "lowest common denominator" stuff.

giancarlostoro 10y ago

There were some sites that would let you hit "play" before showing a gif, I think that's a better approach, as long as you can pause them after. That Atom example is really bad on the eyes. Of course I can always hit "ESC" to force all gifs on one page to stop, but that's just forcing that on the page. I like the option to pause and unpause gifs. I guess that's why gifs to video became a thing. Never knew about gif to video back to gif though.

Pxtl 10y ago

I actually have the reverse reaction. I find the frustrating slow load-times of the modern internet intolerable, and enjoy how low-quality gifs start immediately, unlike cumbersome videos. Fast load times are one of the things that keep bringing me back to hacker news.

rtpg 10y ago

the practical reason for this happening is that you can put images basically everywhere (github PR comments, emails, etc.), but these facilities rarely support video. Video support on the net has until very recently been pretty awful too. Now that the video tag can be reasonably expected to work, in a couple of years we might have the tools to just embed video when we want to.

jlarocco 10y ago

I agree they're nauseating, but it's somewhat amusing to watch them become popular again. The funniest part, IMO, is that the people who have "Watch this GIF of me entering code! OMG!" on their Github README are more or less the same crowd who were complaining how low brow and annoying GIFs were ~10-15 years ago.

yitchelle 10y ago

This is exactly one of the reasons why I like reading HN so much, especially the comments. The lack of gif animations or emoji is really refreshing. Thank your for keeping it simple.

paulryanrogers 10y ago

Firefox has a built-in config key to disable animated images: image.animation_mode. And Chrome has a extension too.

greendestiny_re 10y ago

I understand the troubles you're having with GIFs, however, I'd just like to say that none of the modern "image video" formats work on my Android, which is why I have to use a separate browser from Google Play Store to download the video and then use another separate player app to watch what usually amounts to a 5-second clip of something happening. In many cases, I'd prefer a GIF of the file.