Am I going crazy or is it the case these days that a large amount of flash files uploaded here are just short loops that have no business being flash files?

What's the point of it when a .gif or video format would make far more sense than a file type intended for interactive content?

There are multiple reasons, the best ones being that flash can handle vector animations, thus theoretically have an unlimited display size without compression artifacts, and the other being that the creators are simply more familiar with the format than they are with traditional video editing or creating.

And for archival reasons.

Maybe some of those flash files were made back before web video really became viable to produce and share.

Furaffinity.

Furaffinity still only supports GIF or Flash for animated content. So if you want to share your animated content, you either have to use either one of these or use another site completely and most artists use furaffinity.

Ketra said:
Am I going crazy or is it the case these days that a large amount of flash files uploaded here are just short loops that have no business being flash files?

"these days" is not exact timeframe, but looking at most recent uploads under animated, there's like handful flash uploads out of several hundred GIF, WebM and APNG uploads.

Ketra said:
What's the point of it when a .gif or video format would make far more sense than a file type intended for interactive content?

I actually kinda hate the comments that are "why this isn't a gif? it's only small loop" because something being small loop doesn't mean that it should ideally be gif.

GIF limits the colors to 256 maximum and as lossless format, the filesizes skyrocket if you try to raise resolution and/or framerate. So if you want to share the animation in high quality, you try to avoid GIF unless there's apple users commenting how inferior their hardware is and they need it.

Flash does also allow using PNG image sequence on top of flash video (.flv) and NotMeNotYou mentioned vector objects, so technically this way you can get lossless quality animation which might also be lower filesize from GIF.

Mairo said:
Furaffinity.

Furaffinity still only supports GIF or Flash for animated content. So if you want to share your animated content, you either have to use either one of these or use another site completely and most artists use furaffinity.

I guess that explains it, I can see why it's more convenient to just make it a flash. Hopefully with flash support on it's way out people will switch to more convenient file types

I doubt that FA would implement HTML5 files for now or in the near future, given the website's coding is stuck in 2005.

The one thing I'll miss about Flash is how very interactive it was. HTML5 is fine, but I don't know if those games using that format could be saved offline.

Not sure with DeviantArt if they have HTML5 support.

AlexYorim said:
I doubt that FA would implement HTML5 files for now or in the near future, given the website's coding is stuck in 2005.

The one thing I'll miss about Flash is how very interactive it was. HTML5 is fine, but I don't know if those games using that format could be saved offline.

Not sure with DeviantArt if they have HTML5 support.

Furaffinity does actually support audio files and embed them with HTML5 already and has been for years.

Thing with flash was that even that was never supposed to be saved for offline usage. It's simply that the way that interactive content was done in past, it had to be done trough browser extensions and these were basically software running executables inside the browser, so having it in single file made things for that much easier.

From archival standpoint, HTML5 definitely sucks much more on this front.

Newgrounds and itch.io should both have pretty good HTML5 upload support. zorunais animations have links to newgrounds in description for interactive 3D versions, even work somewhat on phone.