Fair point, thanks for bringing this up. Never thought of it as a distraction, but I will consider it for my next blog posts. But please bare with me; I used to be a profesional clown (no joke), so I'm usually fooling around :)

Not disturbed but got damn a looping gif makes it hard to read the text around said gif (adhd if relevant, idk)

I've got this theory. If an animated GIF is available on Slack, it isn't worth using.

I saw an article on some Cosmo-esque sex talk site which did the same thing. It was a listicle with stupid GIFs throughout. The paragraphs were about 8 words wide on my screen, and each GIF was as if they just typed the list item title into a Giphy search.

It is a bad trend. Memes are one thing... Animated ones are a way of saying "Look at me, not the content".

EDIT for extra observation: I blocked them in uBlock, which was nice. However, Reader mode in Firefox has them! And you can't block element in reader mode. Perhaps "disable animated GIFs" needs to be a checkbox for that feature in Firefox.

I don’t think people are thinking about how they come across or what they are trying to communicate, they just do it because other people do it.

Even as someone who's doesn't struggle with them, there's way too many for too little text here. It puts me off reading it and also highly distracting when I'm trying to. I ended up just deleting them from the DOM, they add nothing.

I don't know why this is becoming a thing.

Maybe they're mimicking messaging apps like Telegram.

It's just another way people say "me too" online.

can you share the article, i'm trying to be more littered in disability and this type of article tend to be useful.

See https://alistapart.com/article/designing-safer-web-animation...