How do GIFS make you feel?

[Ellie]

I think there is a difference between webgifs with moving stuff like this: 
and square gifs with cuts from some movie or so. The style of using gifs as to over-express all feelings (like adults before emojis were a things)in chat i can imagine was common before. And most of those square gifs you see on for example discord can be pretty bad.

Idk with yall folks but i feel there is a difference between "WEBGIFS" and those "square-gifs" that "is for boomers" (Silly), but i have no idea if there is any name that differentiates them.

[Skykristal]

ah yes, I can see where the boomer thing is coming from. However I differ between GIFs and the intention/use of the GIF. Those 50+ boomer greeting squares are terrible I am sorry. Never liked them and I hate when ppl send or show them to me. However, I feel like it was seen differently in the past or perhaps I was just younger and happy about everything.

I love GIFs. Not the square ones (although many are fine, memes etc) but WEB graphics, people's personal projects and artwork. I love animation in general and that's where GIFs fall in too, even if the format isn't mp4. However I do hate the quality of it in some cases where you either have a giant file or very low-quality GIF.

One thing I do dislike is that they give the ability to create flashy crazy websites easily. Not a fan and highly annoying. I also feel like most older graphics especially are the fastest. I occasionally browse gifcities and get jumpscared at least once. Many GIFs are very cool however. Especially the 3D "pixel" stuff is pretty neat.

[Aarix]

Do I like gifs? As a file format--yes! Even though it is outdated, how amazing that we can all so easily trade something as exciting as moving images :) the limitations of the format are a kind of beauty too; in the same way that ye olde pixel art is about doing the most with the least possible, the limitations of a gif are part of what make it awesome. Love me some crunchy dithering. gifs as art in themselves are awesome :)

Gifs as decoration, however... are really not my cup of tea :(

It might be surprising for a denizen of these forums, but I actually have no affection for gifs-as-decoration, especially retro gifs. Power to you if you like them, but I find them, foremost, tremendously distracting when they are not the primary focus of a page. Fortunately, it's a simple matter to get into firefox's guts and set my image.animation_mode to none :V I believe an important part of taking back the digital world is customising one's own end-user experience... but I digress!

More than my personal management of sensory loading, though... My real issue with gifs-as-decoration isn't that they're passe, it's that they're so very ubiquitous in the web revival scene--especially old gifs taken from the old web... decade or decades old blinkes and stamps and whatnot... I'm always suspicious of both nostalgia and irony for their own sakes... while there's a lot to be said for the ethoses (ethe? ethese??) of post-irony, post-cringe, metamodernity... a part of me is kind of jaded by the reliance on retro aesthetics to evoke the feelings of better, more innocent times. While perusing Neocities, a real sense of homogeneity does begin to emerge pretty quickly :( a lot of this has to do with the recycling of these old graphics. Why should something so infinitely full of possibilities for unique expression as a personal webpage have a recognisable aesthetic? And why should it be an aesthetic which is already familiar? What's stopping us from making something completely new (as opposed to continually remixing & recontextualising old content... not that there's anything wrong with that)?

Again, no hate meant at all... but you asked my stance, and well, there it is ^^; and again, it's more than a little ironic that I'm posting this in such a gleeful gif heaven. No webweaver should be beholden to the tastes of anyone else, and that's what makes places like neocities so beautiful