> You’ll be hard pressed to find many people under 25 using them at all.

What do they use instead?

From what I've seen, text. I've heard a lot of younger folks call gifs "cringe". It seems like a dead trend, even millennials I know have mostly stopped using them.

It seems like we've come full circle then.

Maybe we can expect text emoticons (the ones with a hyphen for a nose) making a comeback soon.

They never went away, they just started being used ironically, but yeah, I do think we've already entered a post-ironic phase of text emotes

:-)

There's no real limit to the supply of gifs on the internet, and yet Meta spent $600m on a website hosting third party gifs that made almost zero revenue. I don't think they were going to get very far with arguments that nobody cares about gifs...

One the other hand, the owner of Giphy absolutely does get to limit which websites get to continue displaying the gifs that several years' of their user-generated content backlinked to Giphy.com

Not surprising that some bodies think the party making that decision shouldn't be Meta.

> One the other hand, the owner of Giphy absolutely does get to limit which websites get to continue displaying the gifs that several years' of their user-generated content backlinked to Giphy.com

I guess my question would be so what? You can cache them on your own system, if you wanted. However, I doubt historical shit posts and reaction gifs have any real value to anyone. Frankly it seems laughable that Facebook paid $660m for Gify in the first place.

> Frankly it seems laughable that Facebook paid $660m for Gify in the first place.

It's another vector for collecting user analytics.

I question the value there. Who cares that someone likes Seinfeld clips with George? Is that worth anything at all? You can get basically that data from Experian anyway without all of the hassle.

Maybe someone should have told Meta that when they bought Giphy!

I’m pretty sure the general tone here at the time could be summarized as “what they fuck are they thinking.”

Can confirm, reacting with gifs is 100% a boomer thing. And when I say boomer I mean anyone born before 1995.