200 Hacker News comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8432528

Imgur decided to use compressed mp4 videos -- which are lossy and cannot be saved locally -- to save on the bandwidth-heavy load times on gifs. 

Some users are happy about the faster load times; some are unhappy about losing gifs to a video format that isn't even webm like gfycat and giphy provide. 

The beauty of gifs like the one above is that you can save it, email it, etc.

Videos are hosted on a service such as YouTube and they can disappear -- as regularly happens there. 

On giant leap...BACKWARDS.  Isn't the world sick of fuzzy, lossful video at this point? 

I would have thought so, but then I read this:

http://www.theverge.com/2014/10/9/6948635/imgur-is-upgrading-the-gif-for-the-21st-century

Imgur founder Alan Schaaf says:

Let's get real, the .GIF format is outdated and is not really that great for the modern web anymore. It was created in 1989, and it wasn't even created for the purpose of animation. What we're trying to do is keep that same experience almost intact but just make the technology around it much better.

He says that their conversion saves 10x on bandwidth.

But yeah, I miss lossless gifs.