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The bizarre thing is that the vast majority of these "gifs" come from a video source in the first place, so all they're doing is converting from a video, to a gif, back to a video format. This process destroys the quality and sound channel. Strange how sites like reddit eat this up.

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The reason why funny videos as gif became big is the promise they give you that they are funny without sound, so you can play them in the office or during commute without fear that something will suddenly be noisy, or that something won't be easily understood.

When gifs started breaking the promise of being fast to load, due to people sharing fairly large res animations, sites such as gfycat tried to replicate the promise of silent sketches, but with more modern technology.

This is not bizare at all. Less is sometimes more.

This is all certainly accomplishable without converting the video file twice. <video> tags support a mute attribute, and with minor javascript you can set a looping playback from a timestamp. Best of both worlds if you really want that.

I can't help but feel these tools are evolving in the wrong direction. And not even in a "Stop liking what I don't like!" kind of way; simply that the solution could have been reached with far fewer steps.

Not that reddit nor its average user are specially concerned about quality in general.

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