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.