I almost always bail when I see animated gifs in a technical article. They are most often meant to add a touch of humour, so of questionable value to begin with, and I find them painfully distracting from the text I'm actually trying to read.

“Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.” — Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

>They are most often meant to add a touch of humour, _so of questionable value to begin with_

This comes across as remarkably sad to me. Humor is of questionable value as a baseline?

To each their own, I suppose. I enjoy a technical article with animations that explain things, or a well-placed joke/humorous anecdote/etc. Especially in cases where the humor also supports a point or illustrates something. I tend to remember things better when they have some sort of emotional impact, and out of the emotional impacts possible (sad, angry, etc.) I definitely prefer joy, humor, etc.

You're right. I definitely worded that poorly. My distaste for animated gifs that are _meant_ to be funny, but I find sensorially painful and detracting rather than enhancing definitely leaves me in poor humour.

All in favour of animations that explain things and definitely enjoy a well-placed joke or anecdote.

I use image thumbnails for my blog posts as well but they don't even show up in the article. Instead when the article is linked to on twitter or a message the thumbnail will show up. That's to say that this is pretty awesome and very valuable for a blog even if not used for cringy pop-gif stuff in the article.

but if that thumbnail is from an AI-generated image, it has no value.

tech blogs don't need to follow the same practices as clickbait farms. the audience is very different

How would you even know it's AI generated at this point? Did you see the images generated by the author of the article? They might as well have been made by a human digital artist

they're great. but if you have no image relevant to an article to put in the header/thumbnail, what value does using a cringy stock photo or generic cutesy cartoon add?

the infotainment/clickbait/gossip websites do that because they know their target audience. you don't need to do that on your tech blog

1. It will attract people by catching their attention

2. It will not affect clickthrough rates of people like you who don't like it

You are probably right about meme/gifs (or xkcd comics) anywhere near the top indicating a low-quality post. Though they are fine if you can get a few pages in before finding memes/comics. Meme style gifs below the fold... probably not.

But we are talking here about headers with abstract "art". They are more there for style and "vibe".

Placing a Meme/gif/comic comic above the fold seems to indicate the author was unconfident about the actual content hooking the reader, and they decided to try and hook them with humour or recognisable memes instead. Which is a bad sign in itself.

All that custom abstract art in the header really tells you is the author cares about style/vibe. Which I'd argue is not a bad sign in itself; though perhaps it's a warning sign to quickly check other things, like does the style/vibe match the content you are expecting? Is this just low-effort content to attract newsletter signups?

It's also annoying when the header takes up more than half the screen. Especially more than half of a desktop screen. Phones are somewhat excusable. But I'm not sure there is a correlation between that and bad articles. Caring about style is not the same thing as being good at style.

Don't want them either, but, please blame the specs? not needfully the writers?

https://ogp.me/#metadata opengraph requires an image, for example

You can use the same image for every page on the website if you want.