[rspeer]

They're just modernizing the idea of a GIF. The GIF format was used long after it should have been obsolete, because despite its limitations, it had the key advantage of providing simple, silent animations that autoplay.

Now a lot of "GIFs" aren't in GIF format, they're videos with no sound, and that makes a lot of sense because it's 2018 and we've learned some things about compression and video since 1987.

If silent videos didn't autoplay consistently, people would keep using actual GIFs, using way more bandwidth for the same purpose.

[jerrre]

you could also block GIFs from animating by default