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Comment by devwastaken | Hacker News Reader

The proof is in the pudding. Nobody makes webgl+javascript 2d animations hostable anywhere. There's little to no websites that will host arbitrary content like they could with swfs.

Luckily browsers don't matter, and newgrounds has their own flash player you can launch content with.

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Yeah: the "real winner" here is simply the closed garden of native applications, all purchased from a two-party oligopoly (which is where all of those use cases now exist, de facto); it isn't a coincidence that Apple not only spearheaded both results, but also holds back a lot of standards for the open web on their mobile devices :/.

This. I don't understand why more people don't see this connection. It was obvious to me even at the time that Thoughts on Flash was more about driving traffic to iPhone and the App Store than about actual issues with Flash itself

Sorry, no. HTML5 exists. Web “standards”? Lmao. Is whatever the Chrome team develops the web standard now?

Is it "web platform animation is that bad", or is it "web platform video is that good"?

I think a large part of the flash animation scene being as big as it was was simply that it was the only real way to do video at the time, and so it was popular because video is engaging, and animation was the way to do it when video was big, bandwidth was limited, and browser support was bad.

Now that YouTube exists and video hosting is free, bandwidth is plentiful, and when everyone has a smartphone camera and can shoot some video super easily, the cost of animation is much higher than the alternative. If you do want to put in the effort, you go where the eyes are and render the animation to video and upload to YouTube.

Web platform games very much did replace flash games over time. I'm not saying that it being bad isn't a part of it, of course, but I don't think it is the lone factor.

"Web platform animation is that bad" and "Web platform video is that consolidated" would be my vote, personally.

Tech affects community affects affordances affects distribution pipelines.

Well the state of art seems to be scroll wheel operated slideshows. I'm still not sure if that is just one gigantic troll because HTML5 is such a trash platform or if people truly believe that's how you should present content. It probably started as the former and morphed into the latter.

>Nobody makes webgl+javascript 2d animations hostable anywhere. There's little to no websites that will host arbitrary content like they could with swfs.

codepen?

github pages?

I feel like part of the equation that gets ignore is the fact that the amount of screens and UX that need to be supported these days just doesn't make sense for Flash/canvas based apps.

We all invested in responsive layouts and dropped the rich, absolute and hand made layouts of yesteryear.

Well why would you when you can just export it to a video and have it accessible to mobile users as well? Most devices even have hardware acceleration for h264 video, so its a nicer experience too.

> Nobody makes webgl+javascript 2d animations hostable anywhere.... no websites that will host arbitrary content.... browsers don't matter....

Huh? Sorry, I can't make head or tail of your comment. Is it intended as sarcasm?

There is no "Newgrounds as it was at Flash's peak" for HTML5.

I don't think this is true at all. itch.io and Gamejolt are very popular platforms for indie artists. You submit a zip instead of a swf but the end result is the same, your work is online and playable by anyone. Be it games or animations. They might have not had a big cultural impact like Newsgrounds but they're serious platforms and they definitely fit the requirements (host arbitrary html5 content with ease)

> They might have not had a big cultural impact like Newsgrounds

So ... there's nothing like Newgrounds at its peak, then.

The requirement is _far_ beyond simple hosting. The creation process has to be 5 minutes to an animation from zero domain experience, and an hour or two from a game. Flash's tools were _that good_.

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