Is the deadly slideshow dead yet?

This is not a a technical post. this is maybe a UX post, or perhaps just a "I’m slightly pissed off" post.

I just want to say one thing to designers, clients, users. Slideshows, those sliders that show you galleries of pictures on websites, are bad for you. Very bad. Maybe not 100% of the times, but most of the times (99%) yes, they are.

I have one single question that I ask every time someone wants me to create a page with a slideshow: "Why on earth do you want to hide some content that you painstakingly put together?"

This should be such a very clear, basic, simple to understand concept, yet it clearly isn’t, as it looks like I can’t seem to convince most people of my common-sense idea.

So, when does it make sense to have a slideshow gallery?

Well, imagine you have a news site. You might want to put a slider up there, below the navbar, to show the featured content. People can reach that same content via different routes too, but it’s nice to have some kind of ad showing the most important articles on your site.

That’s it.

I can’t think of any other use case when you might need a slideshow.
You should never ever hide real content in a slideshow. I am talking to you, photographers. Why the hell would you choose to hide your best shots inside a 20-pages slider? Isn’t that insane?
There’s no reason at all, other than habit (that’s what people have been doing in the past, so people keep repeating it).

I’ve read a few "web design 2014 trends" articles here and there on the interwebz, but I didn’t see this slideshow thing mentioned anywhere so far. I really hope 2014 will be the year slideshows die, for good! ????