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Isn't entertainment reason enough? And the problem they are solving is to allow others to send memes that are unique and funny or otherwise entertaining given a

Isn't entertainment reason enough? And the problem they are solving is to allow others to send memes that are unique and funny or otherwise entertaining given a simple search string. It's not sending someone to the moon, but it's also not worthless. The system itself would benefit from hard technical solutions as well. Facial recognition in gifs; understanding context in a picture... you may see it as a waste, but it may also lead to discovery some new CS techniques for these things. I'm not necessarily saying they can show a value of 600m, but I would just dismiss the whole idea either.

bunderbunder 9y ago
Sure, but they don't even do the gif search all that well. I tend to go just about anywhere else to hunt for gifs. When I go to giphy, my computer slows to a crawl and the fan starts blasting on high as a result of the webpage trying to immediately load way. too. many. animated gifs all at once. And I wouldn't even dream of going there when I'm using my cell phone's data plan; a single page load would probably chew through a couple bucks' worth of my monthly allotment. Other sites (Google image search, for example) let me look at a single frame static preview, and only look at the animated versions of the gifs that look promising. That works quite a bit better for me. It's even faster, since it's hard to browse anything when your browser's become unresponsive. They may have captured the hearts of some segments of the market, but things like that leave me thinking they've got a long way to go before wider appeal is a realistic possibility. Meanwhile, challengers are sprouting like mushrooms.
DiThi 9y ago
Since it's integrated in Telegram as "@gif", I tried to use it many times to search for famous gifs or famous clips of some movie/series that are relevant to the conversation... 19 out of 20 I can't find it, results are irrelevant, and I have to search something like "site:imgur.com <thing>" in google images and select type: animated. If at least this worked half of the time, I may say it is valuable.

bunderbunder 9y ago

Sure, but they don't even do the gif search all that well. I tend to go just about anywhere else to hunt for gifs. When I go to giphy, my computer slows to a crawl and the fan starts blasting on high as a result of the webpage trying to immediately load way. too. many. animated gifs all at once. And I wouldn't even dream of going there when I'm using my cell phone's data plan; a single page load would probably chew through a couple bucks' worth of my monthly allotment. Other sites (Google image search, for example) let me look at a single frame static preview, and only look at the animated versions of the gifs that look promising. That works quite a bit better for me. It's even faster, since it's hard to browse anything when your browser's become unresponsive. They may have captured the hearts of some segments of the market, but things like that leave me thinking they've got a long way to go before wider appeal is a realistic possibility. Meanwhile, challengers are sprouting like mushrooms.

DiThi 9y ago

Since it's integrated in Telegram as "@gif", I tried to use it many times to search for famous gifs or famous clips of some movie/series that are relevant to the conversation... 19 out of 20 I can't find it, results are irrelevant, and I have to search something like "site:imgur.com <thing>" in google images and select type: animated. If at least this worked half of the time, I may say it is valuable.