So. Many. Goddamn. Gifs.
This has been bugging me for a while, so i might as well rant about this here.
Every thread i visit in the Walking Dead section has a gigantic amount of pictures and gifs that describe reactions from the user who posted them. I mean..that would be fine once in a while but some threads are absolutely spammed with those, some gifs are repeated in other threads so that's a strike for originality, and i mean..is it that hard to write with text instead of huge pictures? It's a huge mess in my opinion, and the fact how a lot of these gifs are repeated (Like that Breaking Bad "You're goddamn right" one) is pure annoying. It's like reading a book, but the book is plastered with all sorts of pictures. That's not supposed to happen.
I'm tired of seeing those, truly. To those who do it, you're not a gif wizard, and you're definitely not funny, not funny anymore after posting that gif the hundreth goddamn time anyway. Seriously. You can go ahead and downvote me, and i'm sure that will happen, but when you see the same thing over and over, it gets tiring to look at, that's just a fact of life.
And i'm done.
Comments
Yeah, I'm not a big fan of when people overuse gifs either.
Not that I am against threaded discussions, but the overuse of gifs especially makes threaded discussions messy.
Yeah... it's interesting. The more mature series actually seem to attract a much younger clientele. We had a few forum gif overloaders back in the day as well, but they mostly remained in General Chat... we now have some people who would use the same gif 10 times in ten consecutive posts in completely ordinary discussions.
It's a valid mode of expression though, one that is generally accepted among forumites usually. A community either outgrows these or doesn't. They should not go by force, but by each forum member's individual resolution.
The thing that makes me nervous, though, is that some members do not seem to understand that memes can still be insulting. Some things posted here via animated gifs are just hideous things to say to another person, and these people always seem to wonder why they're being reprimanded for it. "It was only a gif" ... "But it's from The Big Lebowski!". Somehow that seems to justify that people start saying "cunt" to each other. Seriously, problem there.
You know what?
But seriously, a gif is nothing more than a way to make conversations slightly more interesting and expressive. If this whole forum didn't allow gifs, the conversations would only be half the fun and kinda boring to be honest.
I don't personally mind gifs - rather, it's the over saturation of them.
If used sparingly, then it's cool with me (not that I would do anything anyways unless the conversation gets too derailed, or as Vain mentioned, if they are used for insults).
Well, lots of people use Memes and gifs to insult people, including me.
Unless you don't count trolls and assholes as human, then I would understand.
I was going to post the helpful tip that you can use the ESC key to stop animated GIFs when they become too annoying. Except when I tried it, it didn't work! It appears to be a feature no longer available in Firefox (which I'm using), unless you install an extension for it.
So I guess I'll just say, with some browsers, you can use the ESC key to stop animated GIFs when they become too annoying.
Didn't know that. I'll have to try that next time I venture into any randomly chosen Walking Dead forum thread. :P
I think it's partly due to the upvote system providing positive reinforcement. gifs tend to garner a lot of upvotes because they're attention-grabbing and contain images that might be amusing regardless of the content being communicated. As soon as people figured out that posting an amusing/popular gif, no matter how inane or unrelated to the topic = instant slew of upvotes, they started doing so more and more.
I do like gifs and sometimes use them myself because they are fun, but if I see someone use them too much or use the same ones over and over, I do lose some respect for them. Which I guess is only a problem if people care about what I think about them...which they probably don't. Meh.
Couldn't of said it any better myself. I'm getting tired of seeing Walter Whites fucking face.
Why do people care about upvotes though? It's not like you can trade them in for games or anything like that.
It's always nice to have some validation for what you say, even if it ultimately doesn't mean anything. An upvote is essentially just a passing bit of praise: "I like what you posted," "I think you're funny," "You sound smart." Whether we like to admit it or not, most of us, at some level, crave the approval and attention of others. Even if those others are just random internet strangers, it still feels good to us when we find out that someone out there values our input.
I think you should make some sort of limit, before I could connect to the site easy but now it takes up to 2 minutes to load because of gifs/memes
You're god damm right!
get a gif blocker, it's most likely a thing by now :P
on the other hand down votes are sometimes totally silly.
Yeah, I sometimes just downvote for the lack of the third voting option I suggested in the forum improvement thread.
i'd be happy with no downvote just keep the upvote lol
no one really needs to know about negative thumbs anyway in most cases people voice their displeasure anyway !
Well, at times the overload of gifs would either cause a lag in my browser (which could span in 1-2 minutes) or simply just crash which is infuriating.
my toaster crashes on these forums, too, Telltale. Please fix.
I agree. I'm alright with gifs as long as they're used sparingly and not for attention or upvotes. They can be used to convey reactions that words simply can't, so they're handy in my opinion, but when people start overusing them is when it gets annoying. It's really irritating when people hijack a thread and turn it into a string of back-and-forth gif posting, the TWD forum is full of this. I'm glad we have the option to post gifs, but I'm afraid we might lose that privilege in the future with people abusing the feature and derailing threads so often.
It might just be me, but it irritates me so much when people post the same overused, common gif that you could probably find in a 5-second google image search for "reaction gif" in multiple threads. That shows they're posting them merely for the sake of it.