r/HighQualityGifs is a subreddit honoring really good GIFs, and in particular the days when GIFs were made, as a mod writes “one frame at a time in MS Paint.” It has, unfortunately, been forced to realize its irrelevance in the age of Giphy. But it has also been forced to celebrate Star Wars, because today is May 4th.
So, the whole subreddit has been redesigned into a Star Wars opening credits scroll, with text flying over the real (clickable) front page of Reddit. It moves too fast to read the whole thing on your first try, so you’ll have to refresh a few times to get the whole message. But the gist of it is: everyone knows how to make GIFs with one of dozens of easy-to-use programs, and it’s cool but it sucks.
“you probably don’t remember dancing baby.”
Most of the message is a tirade against Reddit newcomers, the type of user who can be dissed for having “default sub friends” (people who subscribe only to the default subreddits that Reddit subscribes every new account to), not remembering “when 500KB was a large file size,” and being a “Daily Show watching son of a bitch.”
“You probably don’t remember dancing baby, coming soon GIFs, dancing banana, or Netscape’s loading GIF either... You got no reputation here, you got no name,” the litany continues. But it ends on a nice note: please hang out anyway. “I hope you stay here and learn our ways.”
In honor of the high-quality GIFs of yesteryear, here’s a low-quality GIF of r/HighQualityGifs. In honor of Star Wars, here’s Star Wars kind of:
Presumably the subreddit will go back to normal tomorrow, unless it’s planning to celebrate Cinco de Mayo.