It was magical, serendipitous, and wonderful.
People's creativity hasn't disappeared, but it lives in corporate-owned distribution platforms now.
It's nice that people don't have to spend so much effort building websites, but we definitely lost something in the experience. We did gain convenience for creators and consumers (but also gained ads, tracking, etc.)
There are plenty of highly talented people publishing on YouTube, TikTok, and beyond, but we lost something with the loss of personal websites being popular and the loss of formats like Flash, platforms like NewGrounds, etc.
The old web felt like stepping into someone's personal atelier. Bespoke, intimate, crafted, and intentionally curated.
I'd never heard of this manga. Cool!
`once` - play once on load then stop.
`none` - do not play on load
`normal` - loop forever if the gif says to
With the popularity of animated "emoji" on some forums these days, I couldn't function without some way to globally disable animated gifs.
(On Gwern.net, we call this 'demo mode', and we use it to hide some UI elements after a certain number of interactions or page-views, under the theory that if you've, say, uncollapsed a collapse region a few times, you've gotten the idea, and you no longer need a big obtrusive text label saying 'click or hover to uncollapse'.)