[bryceneal]

It's fascinating to observe the dramatic shift in perceptions around Flash on Hacker News over the past 5-10 years. As I recall, discussions mentioning Flash were once dominated by near-unanimous complaints about its flaws, and there was an overwhelming sense of relief when it was announced that it would be deprecated.

Now, the narrative has evolved to appreciate the unique creative value Flash provided and the distinct niche it occupied at the intersection of art and code. Maybe it took us some time to recognize this, or maybe it's possible for both sentiments to hold true simultaneously.

[npteljes]

I think it's because Flash means more than one thing to people. As a plugin, it was horrible for multiple reasons: insecure, undiscoverable, pain to view at different resolutions, etc. As a creative outlet, it was awesome, it enabled a lot of people to express themselves, and others to take part in a culture.

[rchaud]

I think it comes down to those that categorize Flash's use cases as either white-hat or black-hat.

Some will remember Flash-based banner ads and video sites, that often had malware; that's black-hat Flash.

Many others will remember Flash for the games, cartoons and experiences that were non-commercial in nature and thus were malware-free.

[Groxx]

tbh I think the dividing line is pretty clear:

Many are glad the performance and security nightmare of a runtime is gone, and we have modern replacements for most of what it did. They're not all superior, but I think it's fair to say we're roughly equivalent now, and possibly better, in aggregate.

Most are sad that the excellent, ubiquitous, amateur-friendly authoring environment is gone, and no replacement currently exists. There are many more-specialized ones, but few general ones (and they're far less widely used, though that could change eventually).

[jpgvm]

Flash was ironically ahead of it's time.

I don't think Flash is shit canned if it wasn't acquired by Adobe. While it was Macromedia it was no threat to established players, neutral ground if you will. Adobe was much more relevant during that era and as such the acquisition painted a target on it's back.

There exists an alternate universe where Macromedia stayed independent or was acquired by a party like Mozilla interested in openning up the Flash standard. We would be writing frontend "web" code in AS4 or AS5 by now in a fully tricked out IDE that would support code, design and animations in a single interface.

Instead we have the steaming pile of garbage that is Javascript, the one surviving attempt to make that better (Typescript), CSS that is now tortured beyond recognition, no good tooling for building animations or highly interactive interfaces etc.

Flash was a scapegoat to kill the old web but also to ensure that the burgeoning App Store/Play Store would rule mobile instead of something more accessible and cross platform.