So my animated gif was moderated and the post is still there for me but hidden. I can click to reveal it. What does everyone else see?
I see exactly what you’re seeing.
Could we add Cafe Society? Generally I’m not a fan of food pics, but I can see how in some instances such as, “What went wrong with my bread?” it might be useful to see so others could offer help.
And again, if there is a community perception that someone is abusing the option, they could be asked to dial it back.
Again, it’s 2020. Images should be allowed, moderated if they are a problem. I would love to see graphs and charts in GD and GQ.
Handle bad actors with moderation and applied community standards, but don’t try to blanket ban all images just because “it’s the way we’ve done it since the birth of the internet”.
$10 trillion dollars of wealth was destroyed in Q1 2020 and Trump may be the 2nd President of my lifetime to leave America poorer at the end of his Presidency than when he entered it, but God forbid the people reading this should be exposed to a picture of Federal Reserve data to quickly make this point. 
Oh, and if post text is limited, pictures become even more important in order to make a succinct point.
I’m okay with allowing images, but I did notice an annoyance in this thread. The images take up more space than necessary, and often take a bit to load since Discourse uses lazy loading (it only loads a post as you scroll to it.)
I think the idea of having thumbnails you can expand is a better idea. If the images were the size of those link previews, that would be quite nice.
(And I agree the link previews are a bit overdone. I would prefer them with less quoted text, with that text made a bit smaller and possibly lighter, and the title only as large as normal text.)
Oh great! I clicked the gif link and now I’m clucking and strutting like a chicken. Can you snap your fingers or something?!
That’s what my avatar is attempting to do, but those pesky gloves…
For those who want to browse like it’s 19989:
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/text-only-mode/nelklgbagpchkmoipfpcbbjjbdbjhgid?hl=en
I do. It’s a white square that is clearly visible against the off-white background of the SD Light theme.
If you want an invisible avatar, you could use a transparent PNG file. I just tested that and it seems to work.
I would like to browse like it is 19989, with the direct neural/temporal-lobe interface, with exabit transfer speeds so that it seems like the entire internet is inside my head, there are no language barrier, and we only occasionally make thinkos.
I definitely look forward to fewer thinkos… I’m currently plagued by them.
I recall a time when there was much handwringing over the introduction of smilies 
. Conservatives predicted mass abuse of the feature by the hoi polloi and several posters took a position that they personally would never use them and they would think less of any whippersnapper who did use them in a serious forum like GQ or GD.
Here we are a decade later and the board has not devolved into 4chan.
It’s taking longer than we thought.
Thanks for the idea. Not that I’ve gone with an invisible avatar, but it gave me the idea to give mine a transparent background so it doesn’t look “wierd” in different themes.
For anyone who wants to do this. Set the opacity to 0.0 and download.