6 ms·

It’s a Trojan horse play. Giphy is used by all of FB’s competitors, including Tik Tok. Scummy imo.

• snazz 6y ago
  TikTok could switch to Tenor, which is already what Discord and a few other services use.
  • xoxoy 6y ago
    I assume they must. Otherwise analytics sent to Giphy would make it too easy for FB to track growth.
    • Nextgrid 6y ago
      Doesn't TikTok include the Facebook SDK already, thus giving them the metrics already (the SDK pings every time the app is brought into foreground)?
      • xoxoy 6y ago
        I assume there’s some Great Wall that prevents growth teams from using data from the FB SDK to spy on competitors. Wouldn’t be true of Giphy analytics.
  • gkop 6y ago
    Note that Tenor is owned by Google.
    • FalconSensei 6y ago
      Google doesn't have anything competing with TikTok, as far as I know
      • sokoloff 6y ago
        Isn't YouTube a (rough) competitor to TikTok?
        • skinnymuch 6y ago
          It’s a rough direct competitor imo before. Now they’re copying TikTok too. Already been announced.
          • deleted 6y ago
            [deleted]
      • ganoushoreilly 6y ago
        https://mobilesyrup.com/2020/04/01/google-youtube-shorts-tiktok/ https://mobilesyrup.com/2020/04/01/google-youtube-shorts-tik...
      • skinnymuch 6y ago
        Google is launching a copy of TikTok with Youtube branding. Directly competing with them.
        • FalconSensei 6y ago
          Wasn't aware of that, thanks
    • ChrisArchitect 6y ago
      didn't realize that Google already bought other gif 'service' Tenor (aka Riffsy!) a few years back. Interesting/not interesting all just services for integration and tracking in various platforms. Will FB stop Twitter from using Giphy?
      • ori_b 6y ago
        Why would they do that, when they could correlate Twitter accounts with Facebook accounts instead?
  • znpy 6y ago
    giphy is also what Telegram uses when you as for a gif via @gif
• pier25 6y ago
  So it's a way for FB to get metrics from its competitors?
  • xoxoy 6y ago
    Yes. It’s Maybe even higher signal than the shady VPN they bought
    • deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
    • marmshallow 6y ago
      Both are extremely valuable. Giphy data would include a wider user-base, but Onavo has much deeper data (all of someone's mobile data traffic, which would include seeing what someone is searching on Giphy and in which app)
      • sjg007 6y ago
        So we should expect TikTok to either replace or phase out giphy right? I mean the historical analytics would still be good for a while but....
      • saagarjha 6y ago
        Giphy wouldn't be banned on the App Store, though.
    • deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
• calimac 6y ago
  When are regulators going to realize this is antitrust and put a stop to it?
• nanna 6y ago
  Let's not forget Signal, a competitor to WhatsApp.
  • partiallypro 6y ago
    Does Signal have enough of a userbase for Facebook to even care about? I doubt it.
    • nanna 6y ago
      I don't really know about that, but the more important question is could it.
    • est31 6y ago
      Signal MAU is probably in the low two digit million range (probably because there are no public data), while Whatsapp MAU is 2 billion as of March [1]. So Signal has maybe 1% of Whatsapp's market share. [1]: https://www.statista.com/statistics/260819/number-of-monthly-active-whatsapp-users/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/260819/number-of-monthly...
  • encom 6y ago
    And Telegram.
  • ylk 6y ago
    Signal apparently solved (parts of) that issue when they implemented it? from https://signal.org/blog/giphy-experiment/ https://signal.org/blog/giphy-experiment/: > Since communication is done via TLS all the way to GIPHY, the Signal service never sees the plaintext contents of what is transmitted or received. Since the TCP connection is proxied through the Signal service, GIPHY doesn’t know who issued the request. > While this does hide your IP address from GIPHY and your search terms from Signal, there are some caveats. The GIPHY service could use subtleties like TLS session resume or cache hits to try to correlate multiple requests as having come from the same client, even if they don’t know the origin. edit: more here https://signal.org/blog/signal-and-giphy-update/ https://signal.org/blog/signal-and-giphy-update/ previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12853248 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12853248
• lukevp 6y ago
  Why wouldn’t they just buy the data under the table if they wanted this info instead of publicly acquiring the company? Would be less likely to cause immediate move off the service by competitors and would be cheaper?
• deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
• kgin 6y ago
  Why scummy?