Over the years, GIFs have become the de facto standard for quickly sharing reaction memes on social media. Most apps seamlessly integrate GIF search engines, making it easy to find the perfect GIF regardless of context. However, there’s one glaring issue with the format: it lacks sound.
What Made GIFs Such a Big Deal?
It’s easy to see why GIFs are so popular among users. GIFs provide a personalized way to respond by allowing users to share moving images. They can effectively capture motion (and thus emotion), making online communication more expressive and engaging.
GIFs are convenient and load quickly, even on the slowest of connections, allowing for seamless online interaction. Thanks to GIF browsers like GIPHY and Tenor, you can find the exact meme or TV show clip you’re looking for in mere seconds without ever having to look it up online. Plus, if a GIF you want currently doesn’t exist, it’s easy to make one yourself.
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However, it’s also important to understand the technical reasons that made GIF so prevalent. I won’t bore you with the long history of GIFs and how the format fell into obscurity before meme culture eventually revived it.
Instead, all you need to know is that GIF is a widely supported file format. It works reliably in most apps, allowing users to share and view GIFs without running into compatibility issues. The file size is also relatively small (though still several times larger than MP4) and uses lossless compression, meaning it preserves the image quality of the original video.
Short Clips Would Be So Much Better
Don’t get me wrong, I love GIFs and use them all the time. When it comes to conveying strong emotions online, GIFs are infinitely better than generic emojis and stickers. They’re so fun that scrolling through the selection easily turns into a source of entertainment in itself. It’s just the complete disregard of audio that makes the experience feel incomplete.
Imagine how funnier meme GIFs would be if they also included the sound. I contest that nearly every GIF would be far more enjoyable if it also included sound. Simply put, short videos would be better than GIFs if we had a way to share them quickly.
A great example is video embeds on Discord. By embedding the video in Discord chat, everyone can watch it straight from the app. However, this also requires you to find the clip on a different platform and do a workaround to embed it.
In many cases, it’s the sound that made the meme go viral in the first place, like Rickroll and Ain’t Nobody Got Time for That. If you use the Discord soundboard, you know exactly how funny sound can be by itself.
Since clips still aren’t an option, the current workaround is to create a GIF with subtitles, leaving the rest to the recipient’s imagination. If they don’t know the original, they won’t get your reference, leaving the joke to fall flat and the reference lost in translation.
Why Don’t We Have GIFs With Sound?
GIF is an image format, which simply means it doesn’t support audio. You can think of animated GIFs as digital flip books: a series of images are played in sequence to create the appearance of motion.
Some websites claim they’ve created GIFs with audio, but they’re actually short clips in the MP4 or WEBM file format. If we want to add audio to a GIF, we must use a different format, making it no longer a GIF from a technical standpoint.
That said, there’s no excuse why we don’t have short clip browsers in addition to GIFs yet. You’d think that server storage would be an issue. However, MP4 files are actually significantly smaller than GIFs, and WEBM files are even smaller, all while containing sound and having better visual fidelity than GIFs. That’s why most GIF databases have transitioned to MP4 using the GIFV file extension. Most GIFs you see on the web are actually MP4 videos that behave as GIFs.
Perhaps we don’t have clips because it’s a copyright issue. Then again, GIFs use copyrighted materials in a transformative way that typically falls under fair use.
I think that we have the technology to create a clip browser in the same fashion as current GIF browsers. If implemented, it should mute audio by default to prevent annoying sounds from playing while scrolling through Facebook comments. Just think of all the sophisticated options we could have to use as chat replies in place of those dusty old GIFs.
