Products · Pattern or everyday thing
Animated GIFs
Raised as a usability problem by 17 people on Hacker News over 17 years (2010–2026), in 16 threads.
No issue was raised by at least 3 people in 3 threads this year.
No issue was raised by at least 3 people in 3 threads in the last 5 years.
Every issue, all time, most people first
Autoplaying GIFs distract from reading the surrounding postUnreviewed
20102026- No pause button, so looping GIFs on articles are tedious to read past2026-06-22
- Looping GIF animations have no pause, so viewers can't tell where they start or end2023-03-21
- Animated GIFs on websites are distracting and cause headaches while reading2021-06-15
Unreviewed issues were grouped by machine: Claude Haiku labelled each comment as a usability complaint, named what it's about and summed up the problem in a line, and a small model grouped similar problems. Nobody has checked them by hand. Expect mistakes.
The newest 17 complaints
- No pause button, so looping GIFs on articles are tedious to read past2026-06-22
- Looping GIF animations have no pause, so viewers can't tell where they start or end2023-03-21
- Looping animations distract and can't be paused or controlled, forcing people to abandon pages2022-07-13
- Animated GIFs on websites are distracting and cause headaches while reading2021-06-15
- Animated GIF presentation is inaccessible and a poor way to present information2021-01-06
- Animations play too fast or too slow and loop, so users waste time and get distracted2021-01-06
- Can't pause, rewind or restart; must wait a full loop to start over2020-03-27
- Long GIFs can't be paused or rewound, so missed steps mean rewatching everything2020-03-03
- Animated GIFs on a page can't be paused or interrupted and eat CPU2017-03-15
- Long animated GIFs cannot be scrubbed, forcing viewers to watch the whole thing2017-02-05
- Animated images are distracting and the option to disable them is hard to find2016-03-02
- GIFs autoplay, causing annoying banner ads and distraction2016-01-26
- Adding text is hidden behind one grey button, hard to find2014-07-08
- GIFs auto-play constantly, distracting and potentially seizure-inducing for the reader2014-05-24
- Autoplaying animated GIFs are distracting when reading the surrounding post2013-08-15
- Constantly oscillating tab icon distracts and makes user close the tab2013-04-05
- GIFs switch too fast to study the labels before changing2010-12-03