GIFs should not be compared to videos, for one GIF is 30 year old technology with obvious limitations, however, there is still demand due to its portability. It also creates better effect if its very short clip, which most GIFs are. I appreciate you checking it out.
What platform doesn't have the ability to play an mp4 file? GNU Icecat on a FSF approved distro maybe, but beyond that? The portability advantage of gifs are greatly overstated.
The way I see it, gifs are strictly obsolete. They're big, load slow, and have limited color support (what's the point of a high-resolution gif if you're going to trash all the color data anyway?)
You made all the right points about GIF, it is an outdated technology for sure, but nothing has truly replaced it yet, there is apng as well as other technologies, but that's not universally supported as GIFs are.
I still haven’t figured out the magic codec I can plug into ffmpeg so the self hosted videos on my Wordpress work on all web browsers (i thought h264 would do it but mobile still doesn’t like it) gifs are designed to be portable and work every time
In contrast, if your gif is over 1MB, my mobile browser will not display it. This is done to prevent excess data use. (It's a uBo ruleset)
I'm unsure what browsers will still not support h264 however. Most commonly you'd find webmasters using both webm and mp4s in their video sources to allow the benefits of the webm filesize, and the mp4 to support ios devices
Giphy is worth an estimated 300 million, gifs are extremely popular on mobile and discussion boards, your comment is not relevant to the actual marketplace.
I agree with you on a technical level, but the fact is the UX for sharing gifs is still superior to video. The ability to copy/paste them, and the fact they appear inline and autoplay in contexts like text messages are killer features. Users simply don't care how big the file is or really even how grainy it is, as long as it works.
Also to add to your point, file storage is becoming ambiguous with cloud option and also very cheap and abundant on most devices these days, internet speed is fast enough that large file size is not that big of an issue, so the benefits outweigh its limitations. GIFs are still best way to quickly share something that is expressive and purely visual. There are other technologies to support looping visual, but nothing that has been universally supported as GIF has. I'll be happy to offer other formats once they become available in the future.