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After September 1, 2023, all Gfycat content and data will be deleted
- veqq 3y agoI like the 2 sign up popups when reading about the very service disappearing! Does anyone have a view into why? Did they run out of outside funding? Another interest rate kill?
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- abracadaniel 3y ago8 year old company. Sad to see them go, they’ve become a bit of an internet institution at this point. I suppose there are no prospective buyers, but how can there be nothing of value? And if there’s nothing of value, why not dump the dataset?
- ramesh31 3y ago>but how can there be nothing of value? All independent image hosts suffer the same fate. There's simply no money in it. The moment you try to monetize people will move to a new free service, and the cycle starts over.
- luuurker 3y agoThere's some money on it, but not enough to get rich. For example, Imgur was profitable in 2014, but they had to raise money and expand... Maybe a service like this should start with ads and paid plans (that unlock restrictions), keep their running costs low, and never stop being an image hosting site? Too many start without ads, get users and some investment and then spend it all on expensive AWS hosting/CDN bills and employees that are hired to create a social media platform... and then they stop being an image hosting website, fill the site with ads, focus too much on growth, and so on. I don't blame them for taking a big pay check, but I don't think the entrepreneur type works well for image hosting.
- ikekkdcjkfke 3y agoJust sell peoples IP adresses and browser fingerprints and what they were looking at in text format
- goolz 3y agoI hope this is sarcasm. Please do not do this. The world is crappy enough as is, no need for more spam and more privacy loss to keep an image site afloat.
- toyg 3y agoIt's cute that you think this doesn't happen already. The problem is that it's just not that profitable. What is an advertiser going to do, with the knowledge that internet people like to look at cats?
- hsjqllzlfkf 3y ago> Imgur was profitable in 2014, but they had to raise money and expand... Why did they "have" to raise money and expand? Maybe this was sarcasm and I missed it in which case ignore.
- ilyt 3y agoCoz owners wanted more money
- 3y ago
- dehrmann 3y agoI'm a little surprised because in the era of CDNs, you'd think image distribution would be much easier and cheaper.
- pinkcan 3y agoas long as there's any cost and no one else willing to support we'll have these services disappearing
- autoexec 3y agothat's only true because they all try to monetize by making their service obnoxious or even hostile to users. Even if they were to insist on making their money by pushing ads, doing it in a way that doesn't degrade the service would go a long way toward keeping users around. When I think about the massive amount of data image hosts collect, I have to imagine there should be ways to make money from that information without any impact on the user's experience uploading or viewing photos. As far as I can tell the biggest problem image hosts have is dealing with our insane copyright laws. Users just want to share information, while companies want to act as gatekeepers and toll collectors which often leaves image hosts caught in the middle. They hold massive data sets of our collective culture and interests, but have a lot of limits on what can be done with it. Most of their content was uploaded to them in violation of copyright laws to start with.
- lotsofpulp 3y agoDon’t businesses that host also have to pay for moderators that deal with removing media of abuse and other illegal content? That cannot be cheap once you are popular.
- yareally 3y agoSnapchat bought them last year. Probably related.
- rafark 3y agoWhy would they buy something only to shit it down? Why would you burn money like that?
- turmacar 3y agoThis is SOP for businesses, especially internet businesses, trying to lock down competition so they don't have to compete but can just be the only relevant business. Getting bought up has not generally been a positive thing for anyone but the founders cashing out in a long time.
- ChrisArchitect 3y agoText on homepage in case it changes: Service Notice The Gfycat service is being discontinued. Please save or delete your Gfycat content by visiting https://www.gfycat.com https://www.gfycat.com and logging in to your account. After September 1, 2023, all Gfycat content and data will be deleted from gfycat.com
- LordShredda 3y agoThat's rather sudden, is this a defacement or something?
- indrora 3y agoThey're being closed by Snap, who bought them.
- ProAm 3y ago[flagged]
- birdyrooster 3y ago[flagged]
- boomboomsubban 3y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snap_Inc https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snap_Inc.
- birdyrooster 3y ago[flagged]
- ilyt 3y ago[flagged]
- flangola7 3y agoI didn't realize Snapchat still existed
- hbn 3y agoYou are very out of touch then. I went to check the top charts in the iOS App Store to see where it sat, and I didn’t even get that far because it was at the top of the Apps tab as the 4th thing listed by Apple under “iPhone essentials”
- btown 3y agohttps://www.reddit.com/r/gfycat/comments/13lfb1j/psa_gfycat_is_not_really_down_you_can_still/ https://www.reddit.com/r/gfycat/comments/13lfb1j/psa_gfycat_... provides context and some information on alternate access methods and archival techniques. (The irony of posting a Reddit link about a service with rich content history becoming permanently inaccessible to many of its users is not lost on me, to be sure.)
- ChrisArchitect 3y agoSome related discussion about the woes and downloading etc from last month https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36014778 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36014778
- ck2 3y agoI wonder how long imgur will be around and how many broken links on reddit and the web after that. Then there are all the short links on the web, what happens when t.co breaks when someone refuses to pay the bill?
- saurik 3y agoFWIW, imgur already decided to delete "older images not tied to an account" a few months ago. https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/04/hosting-site-imgur-will-remove-explicit-and-anonymous-content-next-month/amp/ https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/04/hosting-site-imgur-w...
- Shekelphile 3y agoThat already feels like the norm tbh. Nearly every imgur link in an old reddit post or chatlog seems to be dead these days.
- contr-error 3y agoHelp run an ArchiveTeam Warrior VM pointed to the URLTeam project. They’re archiving all URL shorteners. https://wiki.archiveteam.org/index.php/URLTeam https://wiki.archiveteam.org/index.php/URLTeam
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- dbeley 3y agoThe link rot resulting from this will be pretty bad all over the internet. Sad they didn't manage to be sustainable.
- charcircuit 3y agoI disagree. Gyfcats don't really contain anything of value in my opinion. It's much different compared to other image hosts which can contain the only copy of something. Most gyfcats are illegal reproductions of other material.
- whateveracct 3y agoYou're wrong. There's wealths of information on gfycat. Maybe just not for things you know about. For instance, smash melee used gfycat heavily. There is in depth analysis of the game using gfycat as visuals. There will be knowledge loss in that community in Sept 1.
- dragontamer 3y agoThe Smash community is technologically adept and will migrate and/or archive in time. Honestly, I expected most of the information to be locally hosted on smashboards or their wiki. (And if not now, they will be soon). I'm worried about other communities though.
- whateveracct 3y agoA lot of this niche stuff isn't hosted anywhere else. Smashboards doesn't have extensive content hosting and has always relied on other services. No way it's all archived by this deletion deadline.
- ilyt 3y ago> The Smash community is technologically adept and will migrate and/or archive in time. "technologically adept" and "uses gfycat instead of wiki or forum" is mutually exclusive
- Seattle3503 3y agoWow. It really seems like liquidity drying up is causing a sea change in the tech sector. In other spaces changes are quantitative; prices are higher. In tech, without prices, entire business models are changing.
- trollied 3y agoBusinesses actually having to break even. Who’d have thought!?
- yieldcrv 3y agowhat a concept
- candiodari 3y agoWith that you mean that in tech the value extraction has been in the hands of only a few players (which is exactly what you'd expect in a global market with near-perfect competition. To some extent you could say the entire cause of this is that governments allow multinational companies to exist at all). Value production for the internet was mostly done for free. Both where it comes to end users and the hosting they needed. And yes, sometimes by "wasting investor dollars" (of course investigating new things, wasting dollars, is exactly what investment is supposed to do, that it does that is why investment is allowed). And ironically this goes multiple steps up the value chain. Users and mods are complaining to reddit that they don't "pay" them enough. Reddit is complaining that Google/FB/even OpenAI at the moment don't "pay" them enough by trying to take in ads directly, and presumably training their own AIs soon on "their" data. Elon Musk is complaining that he's providing data for free (it's even costing him some money, even though not anywhere close to the amount he implies) and not getting the dollars AI companies are attracting with "his (users)" data. The real value in OpenAI is that Google's position is that they are the arbiter of where users go. Users decide where to put their attention 99% ... and Google 1% (and FB 0.1%, and reddit 0.01%). But OpenAI is a serious threat to Google's 1%, because it can give better answers and therefore will have the perfect, most expensive, place to put ads if things keep going the way they're going. For Google this is a lose-lose proposition. Either they win, get to keep their position because they get the best Chatbot. However, running this chatbot is much more expensive than Google search (and they will need to restart their revenue optimization with angry shareholders screaming at them. There is no adwordsLLM yet). So they'll need to run a much more expensive internet scrape on a regular basis, and figure out how to run ads on this new platform, just to maintain the position they currently still have. Shareholders don't care, they just want to see Google's dollar amounts go up 20% per year as they did for a decade. And if Google doesn't do this massive investment? Well, they may lose everything. Funny how apt the old Futurama joke has become "the internet has always been about the free and open exchange of somebody else's ideas". Futurama meant Napster. But Reddit has exactly this business model. Google has exactly this business model. Twitter ... etc. I bet the tech sector has actually made more money on this than even the most absurd claims of the RIAA say Napster has cost them.
- captn3m0 3y agoinstead of the usual archiving, I wonder if you could find the same GIFs on Giphy and build a cheap redirect service.
- pauby 3y agoStrangely their 'Pro' page is still listing subscriptions https://gfycat.com/pro https://gfycat.com/pro (I haven't gone further than the login to try and actually purchase one).
- rvba 3y agoAnother "tinypic" situation. Where you search for a guide and get nothing... Also why did snapchat shareholders allow the compaby to spend money on a service and then just kill it. Was gfycat a snapchat competitor? How dothr anti competition offices allow it. Why do the shareholders allow it.
- joeythedolphin 3y agoThey may have absorbed tech, offering a counter service, or prefer customers to be invested in one service form over another service form. Or C-levels or replaced. Or or.... (tons of reasons)
- dehrmann 3y ago> They may have absorbed tech At Snap's scale, I doubt there's tech they're interested in.
- mercurialsolo 3y agoOh for the good ol days of Napster, Torrents & Skype!
- mo5 3y agoVery unfortunate they had to go down this way. There's so much content hosted on it and plenty of support for embedding in all sorts of platforms