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Comment by drenvuk | Hacker News Reader

One important thing that was not mentioned in the article: gifs automatically play and are not easily stopped. Videos have more knobs on the client side to tweak whether it plays or not. If I use a gif, I know with great certainty that unless all images on the client are blocked they are going to see my animated content. There are tons of extensions and browser features out there that attempt to stop that feature from videos.

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1. Users have bandwidth limits. (And videos are big.)

2. Users hate constant motion on the page. (And videos have constant motion.)

3. So users stop videos from playing automatically.

4. Publishers want the video to play, so they stop using a proper video format, and use the GIF format, which produces even bigger files, and prevents users from stopping the motion.

Something’s horribly broken here. I really want browsers to let me treat GIFs as videos and block autoplay.

Typical usage of GIFs is flatly obnoxious.

Producers don't care, they want you to see their content if you go to their site.

If they're willing to abuse technology to ruin my day, I don't see why their opinion should have any weight.

You're missing the point. Why do you think you get a say in whether their opinion has any weight? As of right now their opinion of how it should work IS how it works until all of their wasteful bytes are rendering and animating in your face.

The point is, if they do shit like this they have outed themselves as hostile. I'll do what I can to either avoid them, or if I get tricked into experiencing their wasteful bytes, attempt to prevent them from doing so on my client end. They've done me, and the rest of the world, wrong. Therefore it's no longer productive to have a conversation with them about it and instead I'll apply technological and behavioural changes on my end to mitigate the damage rather than attempt to convince them to change their ways.

Good? Should the user not be able to decide how something plays on their own machine?

It's about defaults.

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