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.
Top comments (28)
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 😅
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 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.
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.
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.
I'm on the fence on this one. As a newbie writer, they're an easy way to put some simple fun into a post that can also add decent value. As a reader though, I generally find the infinite loop factor distracting. It's great the first few iterations, but afterward my eyes are mindlessly drawn toward them and not the text.
That said, I think it would be cool to have more options as a reader of turning them off in some way, as M. Shemayev mentioned.
I'm sure there's an extension out there for Chrome that would do this. It's just unfortunate I can't add extensions on mobile.
Human attention can't be at peak all the time. For a good learning session, you need some relief to rest your brain. Comic is a good solution for this.
Of course, a comedy show is not the best way to learn. It's just a matter of balance.
Sometimes they can be distracting, especially when they are full bleed and move fast with high contrast. But it depends on my mood whether they'll actually impact me. Usually the worst offenders are sparse enough that I can just scroll them out of view, so I haven't had to resort to more dire measures.
Not so much, no. Unless they're all over the place to the extent that it feels like I'm reading Geocities.
Where they do get in the way is in slides during presentations. They can be funny, but too often they sit behind the talker while they rabbit on about something else and you find yourself watching the cat fall over again and again and wait what was that dev talking about?
Yes. Gifs and large, full-width memes really take away from my reading experience on informative articles.