The GIF Is on Its Deathbed | Hacker News Reader

The GIF Is on Its Deathbed

theatlantic.com

30 pointsJamesAdir25 comments

If the article's central point is going to be "younger people deem GIFs cringe but many people deem them an art expression" then there's nothing much to discuss in there.

I thought it would discuss replacing GIFs with small and well-compressed videos but nope, it's mostly about what youngsters find cringe and what other people deem art. MP4s are mentioned to be smaller -- very briefly.

And services serving looping MP4s in the place of GIFs has been the case for a while. Even an irrelevant platform like 9GAG woke up to it some years ago and is happily saving bandwidth and traffic that way.

That's literally all of that wordy and uninteresting article. Saved you a click.

I bet they don't even know gif usage in discord and twitch but yeah "younger people", and "art expression" sounds like a subjective opinion.

> I thought it would discuss replacing GIFs with small and well-compressed videos but nope, it's mostly about what youngsters find cringe and what other people deem art.

The first <50% of the article (7 paragraphs) was devoted to the cringe aspect. The next <50% (7 paragraphs) is actually devoted to the difficulties of the format and various companies phasing in MP4. And then there's a concluding paragraph.

I don't understand why you would attempt to summarize the article without reading even half of it.

> The internet’s file format has been diagnosed as “cringe,” but there are other threats to its existence.

you wanna know what's cringe?

worrying about if something is cringe.

What's replacing/killing it? It's definitely not enough to state that it's dead because "people think it's 'cringe'". Or that one site that supports gifs is in question.

This whole article is kinda cringe, TBH. gifs will die when there's a better format for sharing, that's universally supported.

A clueless neophyte says "gzip is dead."

The initiate replies, "each to its place, and to its purpose."

The master ends, "for each, there is a place where they are optimal."

GIF isn't going anywhere. Or at least it better not be. I hoarded a massive collection of gifs from the GeoCities age and to date have not found a better format to convert them to, not to mention some of them were created with quirky software and I doubt they will encode correctly. Oh and I am not getting rid of my YTMND collection. It is getting harder to play my collection of SWF's. Maybe they should write about the death of shockwave animated cartoons and games, or at least their popularity.

Nice, are these gifs available in any publicly viewable way?

Not at the moment. I used to keep them in a /gif dir on one of my sites but too many people were hotlinking instead of copying them and since I did not create most of them it felt like taking them down was the right thing to do.

Depending on the total collection size I’d be interested in reducing the bus factor on this data, as a more recent collector of internet antiquities like ancient gifs, It would be cool to add some genuinely old files to my archives, so I personally would love to get my hands on a copy of that. Email in my profile if your interested.

This article misses the point that there is no other common file format to replace the current functionality of a .gif, aka— image or animation, looping or non-looping , no User-control needed. MP4 does not suffice for many use-cases.

Don't forget "doesn't require fancy codecs and heavy video players for a simple animation"

WebP and APNG both support looping with far better compression than GIF.

Why do people post this drivel anywhere

I wish mp4/av1 could be put as <img src= or <body background= or through css as background-image: url() . As it stands, to replace GIF one has to go through a hacky series of other tags/options.

or use apngs

GIFs will never die, and nobody wants webm. Clueless misinformed Atlantic.

It's sad, webm seems like a good format + it can have audio.

>+ it can have audio.

Yeah, that's exactly why it can't and won't replace GIF.

gif will die once people stop making gifs of modern content.

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