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Comment GIFS will destroy Imzy
What I like about Imzy is the comments. Imzy is a community. You get a real feel of interaction and thus community when you comment with the other members.
But look at the comment threads, any GIF immediately demands your attention. You can't help look at it. Hence, it will garner views and thus hearts/likes. It will at the very least garner attention and reward the poster. That attention and reward immediately forms a feedback loop that heavily favors gifs over comments. Soon gifs will pre-dominate the comments section on Imzy, devolving them into gifs, reaction gifs and counter-reaction gifs. Who can read comments when gifs predominate?
Solution: Take a cue from reddit and ban gifs (and pictures) from the comment threads. They don't belong.




Hahaha
You should have seen the drama post about this a month or two ago. Despite it, Imzy is still doing fine and will keep building its own culture.
Maybe but it's inevitable.
I agree. I don't think we should be taking our cues from reddit.
Besides, I can't imagine GIFs fully taking over a space meant to foster healthy discussion.
Exactly. There are some spaces that'll tend to have GIFs and some that won't. Too many people want this to be exactly like reddit (but nicer!) and it just doesn't function the same way.
Yea, I don't recall ban so much as a lack of ability, anyway. Maybe that changed since they've been doing more over the last year but I'm near positive that you could only post a link to an image in comments for a very long time? I could be wrong, though.
Then again, Reddit's dev has been stalled for years, so it's not like taking a cue from reddit so much as attempting something they can't even try.
Ayy, nice username choice
Community leaders are able to disable the
/giphycommand, by the way, and they're totally welcome to discourage usage of gifs more generally.Comments can be collapsed (little carrot thingy next to the timestamp), but we don't yet have a user setting to disable all gifs.
But yeah I totally agree that gifs aren't appropriate everywhere, and can be hella distracting. But a lot of people, and entire communities such as /giphy_roulette, find them to be a lot of fun.
I agree. If low-substance posts are a problem for a community, community leadership should step in to moderate.
I think the fact that they can be disabled per community is enough of a solution tbh.
Also @ OP - banning ALL pictures from comments wouldn't be very helpful, as adding a photo of something appropriate to the post is a common part of a lot of conversations, say if you're answering a trouble shooting issue, and need to add screenshots to explain what you mean.
Greenie -- HELP! This thread is the first I've ever seen gifs on Imzy, and I was horrified to find that WE CAN'T PAUSE THEM. For some of us, gifs that flash ("flashing doesn't just mean strobing; for us a ton of gifs affect our brains that way) make a website UNUSABLE.
I was going to suggest a universal "gifs are paused until you click them" setting, but if that's a very hard thing to do, the FIRST thing you have to do is put a "pause" button on those gifs, like you have in Twitter and Tweetdeck.
Yeah like I said, we don't currently have a setting to disable gifs all together. I agree that we need one.
Comments with gifs can be individually collapsed, but I realize that isn't ideal.
How do I collapse a comment that has a gif? Also, how do I disable them in a community I run?
On web you can collapse them via the little carrot
\/to the right of the time stamp.I'm mobile at the airport but I believe giphy can be disabled via dashboard > settings > app store. I think it used to be called plugins.
I tried the little carat, and thankfully it works, but it only works for the moment. If you go leave the thread and go back, the comments are open again. I hope you find a universal giphy pause setting soon!
Please let me know when you find out how to disable it. When I click on the giphy app (which is turned on) it opens the app for configuring. I don't see a way to "turn it off."
I'd like to see a user function that pauses or hides all gifs.
Totally agree there should be a user setting :)
You make some excellent points, I'm sure some communities thrive and depend on gifs. As long as a community leader can disable gifs then I'm cool with it. I'm still learning my way around Imzy and wasn't aware of this functionality.
Sorry, to clarify, the automated giphy integration can be disabled by comm leaders. Which like, in practice probably accounts for 80-90% of gif usage. Beyond that, community leaders can set rules discouraging the use, which I think communities like /politics have done, or at least I know the leaders over there will remove stuff if it's just a gif.
Slack has a nice way of handling this. All images/videos/embedded media in comments have a "hide" button (shaped like an arrow). Clicking it alternates between hiding and showing. There is also a user preference that, when set, defaults all embedded media to hidden. I would love options like this in Imzy.
Maybe imzy can include this in the communities so for those who want serious discussion of stuff, giphy, gifs, etc.
Perhaps also there could be an option to hide quick 1 setence low effort comments would be discarded in favour of comments with a bit more substance. My worry is that unless the algorithm that detects low effort posts is actually smart, any posts with "aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa" or random words repeating just to fill up the text box will just null and void the feature.
I'd like this, not because I'm concerned about conversation but because I'm concerned about people who get seizures/hate GIFs for other reasons.
Edit: not a fan of hiding one-sentence replies though.
I've got no real weigh in on the gif thing--I've literally not seen any gifs in posts I've responded to. And it's definitely not as irksome as the built in system for gifs that facebook and twitter have.
HOWEVER, can we stop with the hyperbolic language? 'Destroy'? Really? Damage? hinder one's enjoyment of? Alter the culture to something I might not care to participate in? None of these equals DESTROY. I'm tired of DESTROY DEMOLISH ANNIHILATES clickbait language and how it's warped our sense of meaning.
I agree. Honestly all melodramatic language like "DESTROY" does is make me not take the post or the op seriously at all. Sorry dude. Maybe it's tone policing but honestly if you think people posting little moving pictures is going to ruin the site, it just means I can't take you seriously. Of course stuff like saying "this makes me furious" is different, but like... THIS IS GOING TO RUIN EVERYTHING- whether it's gifs or hearts or whatever, makes me roll my eyes and snicker.
Also honestly, I'm not a big gif person but, it wouldn't surprise me if lots of people were discouraged enough if gifs were disabled all together to leave SO, that might not be good for the site either. Sorry dude, you don't get to define what we all want. Doesn't work that way.
I appreciate your comments, and yes it's a little 'tone policey' but you make a good point about not using hyperbolic language.
I thought carefully about using 'destroy' Imzy versus something another term. But I finally decided that 'destroy' was appropriate because Imzy is a new site that aims to build communities of people. My personal opinion is that gifs stifle thought and conversation. Gifs overrun conversations and end them.
A person can agree/disagree/argue with a comment but you almost never see that communication with gifs. In my view, all gifs are is a low-effort attention grabbing reaction from someone which adds nothing of substance to a conversation.
To me, if Imzy allows gifs to overrun conversations then the conversations will be pointless. If there are no comment conversations then the sense of community never builds. Without vibrant communities people will not return to Imzy or come to it. Without people then Imzy stagnates and eventually falls out of use, going the way of Digg.
Think about it, I can comment here to argue or agree with what you wrote, but if I just posted a gif instead this conversation would have immediately died. No one comments thoughtfully on a gif. I stand by my view that uncontrolled comment gifs have the ability to destroy Imzy as a website. Fortunately, I've since learned that Imzy community mods can disable gifs and that gives me hope. Not everyone wants gifs but not everyone wants them removed. I think everyone can be accommodated.
Or maybe, just maybe, some of us can just ignore the GIFs and comment anyway.
Hey folks I feel like we can tone it down with the giphy in this thread, considering that OP is saying they don't like them.
The Irony geiger counter is ticking away... I noticed that too. :~\
Yeah, I get enjoying gifs but we prob don't need to antagonize new folks.
I anticipated that comments to my anti-gif rant would include gifs. I chose not to say anything just to allow the commentators to post gifs and illustrate my point for me.
DOOM! GLOOM!
Or maybe that's just how youngins communicate.
Animated gifs are today's version of what Star Trek writers imagined when they wrote the "Darmok" episode.
We figure out how to communicate in all sorts of ways. :)
I come from tumblr, so... reaction gifs are the norm.
It's a well-known fact that there's a Supernatural reaction gif for everything.
And a Simpsons gif.
That's a bit sensationalising it...
Gifs wont destroy anything. Also imzy is not reddit, there is no karma to try and game and the hearts on an individual comment really dont mean much outside of that thread.
All great points but I want to highlight your last point as a big distinction between reddit and imzy (currently):
On reddit, you can click on their profile and see their positive internet points ("karma") for both comments and links. It gamifies the interface. Gives people an extra game-like incentive to post and comment in way to gather as many points as possible.
On imzy, while there are positive internet points ("hearts") for comments and posts, there is no counter of "total hearts" on anyone's profile: which I think is GOOD. It de-emphasizes the game aspect.
While people might be called "karma whores" on reddit, there is no point to "heart mongering" on imzy. The focus is on content and community.
Thanks, you said it a lot better then I did. I do like how imzy focuses more on communities then individuals running up their personal points. It does make for better discussions because your not worried about losing points for saying something and not just posting an over used joke.
It really does depend on the community. I'm a regular on a whole bunch of different communities here, and none of them are gif-heavy at all (I've really only seen them here and in /introductions, and even there only occasionally). So if you hate them, maybe you just need to join different communities?
[cliché] a picture is worth a thousand words [\cliché] well and an animated one... I'm not against the use of gifs or images in the comments but I understand your sentiment. We will see what happens...
I think that as long as they stay like comments and make sure they're not hateful or sexist, they'll be a welcome change. Tumblr has gif replies and it's still a pretty friendly community. 😊