Year-End Unsolicited Advice: Stop Using GIFs
by Laurie Ruettimann
I always end the year by writing about my accomplishments, regrets, and resolutions. The calendar makes reflection feel inevitable. This year, I’m not doing that.
Sometimes habits are useful. Not this one. I’ve become stagnant and flat. So instead, I’m ending the year with one piece of unsolicited advice I’ve been sitting on for a while.
Stop using GIFs.
This is not a passive-aggressive note. It’s an aggressive one. And before you assume it’s about you, let me be clear: it probably is. GIFs are old. Not retro. Not classic. Old.
The GIF format dates back to the late 1980s. It was designed to solve a technical problem: slow internet, limited storage, and the need for lightweight visual files that could loop. And it worked well for that era. That era ended a long time ago. What remains today is habit.
The people who still rely on GIFs tend to fall into two camps: people who have always used them and never stopped, and people who started using them after COVID to appear younger than they feel. Neither group is committing a crime, but neither group is saying anything new.
I have not seen a genuinely creative use of a GIF since 2019. The format stopped evolving. What we have now is the same reaction shots circulating endlessly: a clip from The Office, Leonardo DiCaprio raising a glass, characters from Friends jumping up and down. The same clips, stripped of context and reused until they no longer carry meaning.
Your GIF game feels stale because the medium itself is stale.
Let me live.
I can already hear the response. “Laurie, let me live. Why do you have to yuck other people’s yum?”
Makes sense that some sensitive nerd would say that because GIFs feel harmless. But there’s another issue underneath all of this: GIFs rely almost entirely on other people’s work. That’s someone else’s writing, acting, and comedic timing. You borrow the joke, detach it from its source, and present it as witty response.
I would rather see someone attempt a joke and miss than watch them drop a GIF and call it “funny.” A GIF mostly tells me what you’ve already consumed. A failed attempt tells me something about how you think. Most people are funny when they shoot from the hip with their own ideas, even when they take a swing and miss.
But you should resist posting GIFs unless your name is Lance Haun and you have a rare, uncanny ability to surface the deep cuts that actually make me laugh.
He is exempt. Everyone else is not.
So, my year-end unsolicited advice stands. The GIF had a moment. That moment passed. Please don’t respond to this by sending me GIFs. That would only prove my point, dorks.