Forum Era
Avatars, signatures, reaction images. The phpBB and SomethingAwful years when the GIF was a unit of identity inside online communities.
Part of GIfs
10 moments in this segment.
- — eBaum's World and the First Watermark War. Numa Numa, Gary Brolsma's 2004 webcam lip-sync to O-Zone's Dragostea Din Tei. The Newgrounds Flash original was scraped by eBaum's, watermarked, and rehosted, the move that defined the forum era's villain economy. Place: Rochester, New York Figures: Eric Bauman, founder · Neil Bauman, father and business partner Eric Bauman launches eBaum's World from Rochester in February 2001 as a content-aggregation site. The model is simple and, for several years, very profitable: scrape GIFs, Flash animations, and sound clips from the rest of the web, stamp an eBaum's World watermark across each one, host on their own servers, sell display ads against the traffic. Within two years the site claims tens of millions of monthly visitors. The aggregation is not new. The watermark is. eBaum's brands stolen content as its own and removes the original creators' attribution as a side effect of the brand stamp. The site becomes the first industrial-scale theft operation directed at the animated GIF — a format whose lossless re-encode and absent metadata make ownership claims nearly impossible to enforce after redistribution.
- — SomethingAwful and the Image Macro. An animated Photoshop Phriday entry of the kind SomethingAwful's goons industrialized after 2002, the rotating-image grammar that 4chan would inherit and Tumblr would scale. Place: Forums of SomethingAwful, somethingawful.com Figures: Richard Kyanka (Lowtax), site founder · the SA Forums Goons Lowtax launches the weekly Photoshop Phriday and Comedy Goldmine threads on the SomethingAwful Forums in 2001-2002. Each week the SA Goons take a source image (a photograph, a movie still, a news screenshot) and produce dozens of edited variants competing for laughs. The threads incubate the visual grammar of the modern image macro: bold Impact-font captions, exaggerated MS Paint effects, the deliberately-crude versus the technically-impressive. Many of the threads include short looping animations. The GIF, on a forum where every member is loading every page over residential broadband or worse, is the only animated format that loads fast enough to be worth posting. The medium constrains the joke; the joke shapes the medium.
- — Peanut Butter Jelly Time. Ryan Gancenia Etrata's dancing banana set to the Buckwheat Boyz's nine-second hook. Originally a Newgrounds Flash from December 2002, mass-converted to GIF by forum users who wanted it loopable in signatures without the Flash plugin. Place: Flash animation by Ryan Gancenia Etrata, distributed via Newgrounds and college link-emails Figures: Ryan Gancenia Etrata, animator · the Buckwheat Boyz, 1996 source song Ryan Gancenia Etrata posts a short Flash animation to Newgrounds in December 2002: a yellow cartoon banana dancing across the screen, brandishing a baseball bat, set to the 9-second hook of the Buckwheat Boyz's 1996 novelty rap Peanut Butter Jelly Time. The Flash file is 200 kilobytes. The animation is fifteen seconds, looped. The piece spreads through college dorm-room email threads and forum signatures for the next eighteen months. By 2004 it is one of the most-linked items on the SomethingAwful Forums (see [[somethingawful-image-macros-2002]]). The dancing banana is a face the forum web recognizes on sight.
- — 4chan and the Image-Required Post. Trollface, born on 4chan's /b/ board in the second half of the decade, became the canonical reaction-face the image-required-post rule made possible. The /b/ era's signature export. Place: Christopher Poole's bedroom, Westchester County, New York Figures: Christopher Poole (moot), 15 · the early /b/ regulars Christopher Poole, 15, launches 4chan from his bedroom on 1 October 2003. The software is a hacked-together English port of Futaba Channel's open-source code; the cultural model is 2channel, the Japanese text-board that had been running since 1999. The defining technical choice is the one Poole inherits from Futaba without much thought: every post on every board requires an image attachment. Text-only replies are allowed, but threads start with a picture. On /b/ (random) the constraint becomes the cultural lab. If every post needs an image, every poster builds an image library; if every poster has a library, the library becomes vocabulary; if it is vocabulary it gets reused, captioned, re-cut, looped. The grammar of the modern image macro and the reaction-GIF arsenal gets industrialized here over the next four years.
- — ImageShack and the Free Hotlink. All Your Base Are Belong To Us, the canonical Zero Wing animated meme. Hotlinked into thousands of forum signatures across 2003 and 2004 via the free, no-account image hosting ImageShack provided. Place: Los Angeles, California Figures: Jack Levin, founder · the early ImageShack engineering team Jack Levin and partners launch ImageShack in Los Angeles on 22 November 2003. The product specification is exactly what the forum web needs and exactly what no incumbent is offering: upload an image (GIFs included) from any browser without an account, receive a permanent URL and a BBCode tag suitable for paste, no bandwidth limit, no per-image fee, no expiration. The site eats the cost; the forums get free inline images. Within eighteen months ImageShack is the default host for every phpBB and vBulletin forum running on the English-language web. Photobucket (founded 2003) and TinyPic (2004) build the same model in parallel. The animated GIF, which had been bandwidth-prohibitive for hobbyist forum operators to host themselves, suddenly works at scale.
- — YouTube Launches. Chris Crocker's Leave Britney Alone, uploaded to YouTube in September 2007, one of the platform's first viral video-to-GIF cuts. The template the next decade of reaction-GIF excavation would follow. Place: San Mateo, California · above a pizzeria Figures: Steve Chen · Chad Hurley · Jawed Karim, three former PayPal employees Steve Chen, Chad Hurley, and Jawed Karim register youtube.com on 14 February 2005 and ship a beta within months. The technical proposition: upload any video, the site re-encodes to Flash Video (FLV) and serves it inline in a 425x350 player that the Adobe Flash plugin (already on >95% of consumer browsers by 2005) can render without a separate launch. Karim's first upload, Me at the zoo, goes up on 23 April 2005. The medium that will eventually displace the GIF as the primary reaction format of the consumer web (see [[tiktok-takes-over-2021]]) starts here. But the displacement is not immediate. For the next decade YouTube and the GIF complement each other: YouTube is the source pool, the GIF is the cut-and-loop excerpt format. The two co-exist as a pipeline.
- — I Can Has Cheezburger and the Impact-Font Cat. Maru, the Japanese Scottish Fold whose box-diving YouTube clips became the canonical animated lolcat. The form I Can Has Cheezburger formalized in static macros lived parallel in motion, on every forum and Tumblr feed. Place: Honolulu, Hawaii · icanhascheezburger.com Figures: Eric Nakagawa and Kari Unebasami, founders · Ben Huh, who buys the site in 2007 Eric Nakagawa and Kari Unebasami launch I Can Has Cheezburger? from Honolulu on 14 June 2006, named after the captioned photograph that becomes the site's founding image: a British Shorthair cat, mouth open, captioned in white Impact font with black stroke I CAN HAS CHEEZBURGER?. The photograph itself predates the site by a few months and was traced to a 4chan /b/ thread (see [[4chan-founded-2003]]). The site formalizes the visual grammar that SomethingAwful (see [[somethingawful-image-macros-2002]]) and 4chan had been developing in scattered threads: Impact font, white fill with black stroke, top-and-bottom caption placement, deliberately ungrammatical English (lolspeak). The form is rigid by design. The rigidity is what makes it a vocabulary.
- — Gawker Media Adopts the Reaction GIF. Judge Judy's eye-roll, the exact register of reaction GIF Gawker, Deadspin, Jezebel, and Gizmodo systematically imported into edited journalism after 2006. The vocabulary walked across the class barrier wearing a smirk. Place: Gawker Media offices, SoHo, New York · Gawker, Deadspin, Defamer, Jezebel, Gizmodo Figures: Nick Denton, Gawker founder · Choire Sicha, Gawker editor · A.J. Daulerio, Deadspin editor · the rotating Gawker Media writer pool From roughly 2006 the Gawker Media blogs — Gawker, Deadspin, Defamer, Jezebel, Gizmodo, Kotaku — make sustained editorial use of reaction GIFs in headlines, sidebars, and body copy. The aesthetic comes directly from SomethingAwful (see [[somethingawful-image-macros-2002]]) and the forum web. The infrastructure (ImageShack, see [[imageshack-2003]]; YouTube, see [[youtube-launches-2005]]) makes the cuts and the embeds trivial. Deadspin under A.J. Daulerio is the most aggressive adopter. A sports highlight becomes a three-second GIF before the broadcaster's own clip site has the video up. The GIF appears in the post, in the headline image, in the social share. The site's reading experience is, by 2009, structurally dependent on inline animation.
- — Dramatic Prairie Dog. The five-second head-turn cut from a 1999 NHK documentary, rescored with the Young Frankenstein orchestral sting and uploaded to YouTube on 17 January 2007. The template for every YouTube-to-GIF reaction cut of the following decade. Place: YouTube · clip originally from a 1999 NHK documentary, rescored by an anonymous editor Figures: Anonymous YouTube uploader · the prairie dog itself · NHK documentary crew (uncredited source) A YouTube user uploads a five-second clip on 17 January 2007: a black-tailed prairie dog turns its head sharply toward the camera. A three-note orchestral sting (lifted from the 1974 film Young Frankenstein) is overlaid on the turn. The source footage is from a 1999 NHK Japanese television documentary; the cinematic re-score is the anonymous editor's only addition. The clip is titled Dramatic Chipmunk despite the animal being a prairie dog. Within two weeks of upload, GIF conversions are circulating on SomethingAwful (see [[somethingawful-image-macros-2002]]) and 4chan (see [[4chan-founded-2003]]). Within a month it is on every forum that supports inline images. The GIF is approximately 250 KB and loops the head turn indefinitely, which is exactly the unit of meaning a reaction GIF needs to be.
- — The Rickroll. Rick Astley's pointing-finger dance from Never Gonna Give You Up, 1987. The bait-and-switch link began on 4chan's /v/ board in March 2007; the loop became a forum-web reaction GIF independent of the prank that surfaced it. Place: 4chan /v/ board · a fake Grand Theft Auto IV preview link Figures: Anonymous /v/ users · Rick Astley, unwitting subject · Mike Stock, Matt Aitken, Pete Waterman, who wrote the 1987 song On 15 March 2007 a poster on 4chan's /v/ board (see [[4chan-founded-2003]]) shares a link claiming to lead to the first-ever gameplay trailer for Grand Theft Auto IV. The link instead redirects to Rick Astley's 1987 music video for Never Gonna Give You Up. The first documented Rickroll. By April the prank has spread to /b/, then to SomethingAwful (see [[somethingawful-image-macros-2002]]), then to the wider forum web. The mechanism is older than the joke. Bait-and-switch links are as old as hyperlinks. What makes the Rickroll persistent is the choice of payload: a song familiar enough to be instantly recognized, square enough to be inherently funny in an ironic frame, and (crucially) the music video's specific aesthetic of mid-twenties Astley in a beige trenchcoat doing the cha-cha with a pointed finger. The finger becomes the GIF.
