Hey Dev folks,
I've been on here for a few months now and I read rather regularly but one thing I've noticed particularly on here is the usage of gifs in articles. There are times when a gif is absolutely perfect for conveying a thought or message that wouldn't come across the same just in text. However, I've seen gifs littered throughout articles as if to have them for the sake of having a cute or funny gif in the post and it's distracting to see it reload over and over again as I'm trying to read something below or above it.
I'm wondering if there's anyone else who finds them as distracting as I do or if I'm just being a big curmudgeon about it 😅 Any comments would be greatly appreciated.
Oldest comments (28)
I'm generally one of the "guilty parties", although I do try to select a handful of GIFs (usually no more than one per heading) that relate directly to the topic. My main point with them is to break up the monotony that a bunch of text can create.
That can be handy, I guess I feel a a still image would be less distracting but if the gif was actually relevant to the topic then I can see it working.
I find they're often noise and rarely signal (or at least, a signal I'm interested in) but I fear we might be in the minority on this one.
This outlines my feelings to the nose. Thanks for reassuring me I'm not the only one 😅
They're wonderful for conveying emotion when text won't suffice, I couldn't agree more.
I'm glad to hear your take on it, I hadn't considered it was for the writers enjoyment.
Text will always suffice.
trollface.jpg
Oooohhh boy... Old school emotes lol. Those were the days.
Funny enough I found myself in the same position about a year or two ago when I started using Discord. I felt like an old man not being able to keep up with all the gif reactions and custom emoji, it was overwhelming at first. After some time, I feel you'll get the hang of it though 😊
I use emojis in posts but not gifs, mainly because I don't think gifs add to the content of an article.
Gifs totally add to comments, though. I'll never stop doing that.
Stop trying to make fetch happen. It's not gonna happen.
I'd post a Gif-reply, but my work workstation's being stoopid-slow, this morning.
I think there's a place for gifs, I'm not sure they fit in articles on this site. Most of the posts I read here interest me because I am trying to learn something (either something I don't know about that seems useful, or a feature in something I regularly use), and gifs are distracting when I am trying to digest new knowledge.
Gifs should be stoppable. Like teitter does it :) When i eant to tead something, everything what moves distract me.
Yes. Gifs and large, full-width memes really take away from my reading experience on informative articles.
A handful is tolerable. But when it becomes a Tumblr gif-fest where every discernible emotion or attempt at humor is paired with a gif... it's insufferable.
One of the things to remember about some of the articles that end up here is that they're the result of article mirroring. In my case, anything that I post to my Blogger/BlogSpot tech-blog gets mirrored here. While there are many people that are writing for others to read, there's likely just as many that are writing solely for themselves - others' reading is more a side-effect of search engines finding your open-published page.
For people falling into that latter group, what's important is how readable/memorable an article is to the author an not "some rando". =)
That said, I generally eschew graphics in blog posts (unless there's really, really, really no other way to succinctly convey a concept). Though I am way guilty of making Slack channels look like Geocities had a seizure.
I tend to forget that some people do write for themselves. An interesting point, thanks.