“GIFs Are for Boomers Now, Sorry,” Vice’s Amelia Tait argued in January. They started to look dated, corny, and cheap. These search features surfaced the same GIFs over and over, and the popular reaction GIFs got worn into the ground.

As the GIF’s star rose, GIF-searching features were added to Facebook, Twitter, and iMessage, making it even easier to find a GIF to express whatever emotion you wanted to convey without words.Īnd that was the turning point. “This is the file format of the internet generation,” Tumblr’s then-head of creative strategy, David Hayes, told Mashable in 2016, while more than 23 million GIF-based posts were being uploaded to the site he worked for each day. GIFs-particularly “reaction GIFs,” such as Michael Jackson chomping on popcorn and Mariah Carey muttering “I don’t know her”-were a lingua franca of the internet and significant enough culturally that in 2014, the Museum of the Moving Image in New York even put on an exhibit of reaction GIFs (titled “Moving Image as Gesture”). Not only did I make dozens a day for the website I worked for, but I often made extras for co-workers who requested them for their personal use.

You had to have them! They were the visual style that the audience craved. Fiddling with them was worthwhile, because GIFs were very important.

This was 2015, and GIFs had to be smaller than 1 megabyte before you could upload them to most social platforms. It took trial and error to figure out how to make sure the colors weren’t too weird, the frame rate too fast, the file too big. About 40 percent of my first full-time job was dedicated to making GIFs-a skill I had professed to have during the interview process, and that turned out to be much harder than I thought.

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