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Thanks for the discouragement, but I'll continue trying. We aren't doing so bad now: http://www.reddit.com/domain/mediacru.sh/new http://www.reddit.com/domain/m

Thanks for the discouragement, but I'll continue trying. We aren't doing so bad now: http://www.reddit.com/domain/mediacru.sh/new http://www.reddit.com/domain/mediacru.sh/new There has been a great response to "HTML5 GIFs", though. Many people are very eager to use them instead of Imgur. The problem we face there is that a competing service has shown up and attracted more attention without consequence from the Reddit admins, so we're trying to get back into that area.

thenewbtg 13y ago
@Sir as a long time reddit user, your total blameshifting of your services inability to compete with gfycat, coming right after listening to you blameshift on why you couldn't compete with imgur, stinks to high heaven from here. At what point do you accept responsibility for the success and failure of your ability to create a service and make it popular? At what point do you stop externalizing the blame and get down to the hard task (or simply lucky outcome) of succeeding? For what it's worth, I just made a gfycat of a youtube video to share with my mom. So I decided to do the exact same process for your service that you tout as superior to gfycat. With gfycat, it was super simple to paste the youtube link, select the time frame and output the html5 video/gif. Done in under a minute. Your service has not actually completed an "upload" of the youtube video from a link no matter how long I've waited. Whenever I click on the random floating microphone near the top left of your services homepage, I simply see "an error occurred". I don't know how long I'm supposed to wait for this to work, but I just made 3 more youtube->gfycats while waiting. I'm not lying, here are the 3 youtube -> gfycats that finished while your service says "uploading" without a progress bar at all (gfycat has a working progress bar so I can helpfully tell that it downloads the youtube video in about 10-15 seconds). http://gfycat.com/UnitedGoodnaturedArcherfish http://gfycat.com/UnitedGoodnaturedArcherfish http://www.gfycat.com/RemoteWelltodoLadybird http://www.gfycat.com/RemoteWelltodoLadybird http://www.gfycat.com/FeminineCapitalCob http://www.gfycat.com/FeminineCapitalCob No offense but gfycat obviously blows your service out of the water, so perhaps you should play catch-up instead of blaming reddit admins? Which is silly anyway, because gfycat succeeds through comments and people sharing it and talking about it, not through owner spam or something else. For the record it's been over 10 minutes since I began a youtube -> html5 conversion on your site and it still says "uploading" and I think it's broken.
- Sir_Cmpwn 13y ago
  Here's the thing. I thought for a long, long time (MediaCrush has been around for 9 months, you know), about why gfycat might be more popular. I cannot arrive at an answer. MediaCrush is an objectively better service in almost every way imaginable. We tried to be better by making a better service, and it didn't work. So, I start looking for other reasons. The biggest reason I can think of is that our launch was botched on Reddit because the admins came down on us, and they did not come down on gfycat. More people know about gfycat. As for imgur, I haven't thought nearly as much about how to compete with them, they're just too ingrained in Reddit culture. YouTube uploads are not supported, intentionally. That's legal hot water we don't want to be in, and frankly, neither should gfycat. The fact that it's not giving a user-friendly error is a problem - I will investigate it. Saying gfycat blows our service out of the water is nonsense. Stop spewing nonsense. That's a single simple feature that is intentionally not supported. Do some actual research.
  - xcntktn 13y ago
    I think it's simply a branding issue. "gfycat" is a catchier name which also hints at the GIF-related features. I have a pretty good idea of what it does from the name alone. "MediaCrush" on the other hand could be just about anything.
  - underwater 13y ago
    Quality and success are not directly related. Growing a product is a grind. A good launch can help build momentum, but is not critical for success. It sounds like you are blaming others for your failures when you could be looking for other opportunities. There are undoubtably reddit competitiors that you could target.
- thenewbtg 13y ago
  "MediaCrush is an objectively better service in almost every way imaginable. " I disagree. You're very protective of your work and obviously deluded to the quality. It's a shame. As a reddit user I will continue to use gfycat as in my 25 minutes of testing over 5 different sources, gfycat worked in under 15 seconds and for 100% of the time, and provides an objectively superior feature set at every stage of the process. At this point I don't even know what you support. You don't list it on your webpage (gfycat does), and you don't fail when bad input is brought in (gfycat does). You don't give a progress report for uploads (gfycat does) and you don't support speed changing on html5 videos (gfycat does). Your service brands all pages with your logo and naviagation links, gfycat hides the entire UI except for at certain times, for a much much cleaner look that almost appears like a native gif. Just did multiple gifs as a test and gfycat is just objectively much faster at uploading and encoding. Gfycat finishes the whole process while your service says "pending" before it begins! I'm sorry, I don't see a single way your service is better. Maybe outline them instead of just claiming it is? Sorry you don't agree. Keep blaming admins, I'm sure that'll help you build a truly competitive service.
nacs 13y ago
Theres a lot of naysayers on HN :) Don't be discouraged and continue on -- I think you have a good service at least in the technical sense. PS: I'm guessing the competing service you're referring to is gfycat? They do seem to be increasing in popularity even though they offer a similar feature set to yours.
- Sir_Cmpwn 13y ago
  Yes, I am referring to gfycat. They actually don't really have a similar feature set - the only feature they have from us is the "HTML5 GIF" thing. MediaCrush does a lot more than that - but we do compete with them in that HTML5 GIF space.

thenewbtg 13y ago

@Sir as a long time reddit user, your total blameshifting of your services inability to compete with gfycat, coming right after listening to you blameshift on why you couldn't compete with imgur, stinks to high heaven from here. At what point do you accept responsibility for the success and failure of your ability to create a service and make it popular? At what point do you stop externalizing the blame and get down to the hard task (or simply lucky outcome) of succeeding? For what it's worth, I just made a gfycat of a youtube video to share with my mom. So I decided to do the exact same process for your service that you tout as superior to gfycat. With gfycat, it was super simple to paste the youtube link, select the time frame and output the html5 video/gif. Done in under a minute. Your service has not actually completed an "upload" of the youtube video from a link no matter how long I've waited. Whenever I click on the random floating microphone near the top left of your services homepage, I simply see "an error occurred". I don't know how long I'm supposed to wait for this to work, but I just made 3 more youtube->gfycats while waiting. I'm not lying, here are the 3 youtube -> gfycats that finished while your service says "uploading" without a progress bar at all (gfycat has a working progress bar so I can helpfully tell that it downloads the youtube video in about 10-15 seconds). http://gfycat.com/UnitedGoodnaturedArcherfish http://gfycat.com/UnitedGoodnaturedArcherfish http://www.gfycat.com/RemoteWelltodoLadybird http://www.gfycat.com/RemoteWelltodoLadybird http://www.gfycat.com/FeminineCapitalCob http://www.gfycat.com/FeminineCapitalCob No offense but gfycat obviously blows your service out of the water, so perhaps you should play catch-up instead of blaming reddit admins? Which is silly anyway, because gfycat succeeds through comments and people sharing it and talking about it, not through owner spam or something else. For the record it's been over 10 minutes since I began a youtube -> html5 conversion on your site and it still says "uploading" and I think it's broken.

Sir_Cmpwn 13y ago
Here's the thing. I thought for a long, long time (MediaCrush has been around for 9 months, you know), about why gfycat might be more popular. I cannot arrive at an answer. MediaCrush is an objectively better service in almost every way imaginable. We tried to be better by making a better service, and it didn't work. So, I start looking for other reasons. The biggest reason I can think of is that our launch was botched on Reddit because the admins came down on us, and they did not come down on gfycat. More people know about gfycat. As for imgur, I haven't thought nearly as much about how to compete with them, they're just too ingrained in Reddit culture. YouTube uploads are not supported, intentionally. That's legal hot water we don't want to be in, and frankly, neither should gfycat. The fact that it's not giving a user-friendly error is a problem - I will investigate it. Saying gfycat blows our service out of the water is nonsense. Stop spewing nonsense. That's a single simple feature that is intentionally not supported. Do some actual research.
- xcntktn 13y ago
  I think it's simply a branding issue. "gfycat" is a catchier name which also hints at the GIF-related features. I have a pretty good idea of what it does from the name alone. "MediaCrush" on the other hand could be just about anything.
- underwater 13y ago
  Quality and success are not directly related. Growing a product is a grind. A good launch can help build momentum, but is not critical for success. It sounds like you are blaming others for your failures when you could be looking for other opportunities. There are undoubtably reddit competitiors that you could target.
thenewbtg 13y ago
"MediaCrush is an objectively better service in almost every way imaginable. " I disagree. You're very protective of your work and obviously deluded to the quality. It's a shame. As a reddit user I will continue to use gfycat as in my 25 minutes of testing over 5 different sources, gfycat worked in under 15 seconds and for 100% of the time, and provides an objectively superior feature set at every stage of the process. At this point I don't even know what you support. You don't list it on your webpage (gfycat does), and you don't fail when bad input is brought in (gfycat does). You don't give a progress report for uploads (gfycat does) and you don't support speed changing on html5 videos (gfycat does). Your service brands all pages with your logo and naviagation links, gfycat hides the entire UI except for at certain times, for a much much cleaner look that almost appears like a native gif. Just did multiple gifs as a test and gfycat is just objectively much faster at uploading and encoding. Gfycat finishes the whole process while your service says "pending" before it begins! I'm sorry, I don't see a single way your service is better. Maybe outline them instead of just claiming it is? Sorry you don't agree. Keep blaming admins, I'm sure that'll help you build a truly competitive service.

nacs 13y ago

Theres a lot of naysayers on HN :) Don't be discouraged and continue on -- I think you have a good service at least in the technical sense. PS: I'm guessing the competing service you're referring to is gfycat? They do seem to be increasing in popularity even though they offer a similar feature set to yours.

Sir_Cmpwn 13y ago
Yes, I am referring to gfycat. They actually don't really have a similar feature set - the only feature they have from us is the "HTML5 GIF" thing. MediaCrush does a lot more than that - but we do compete with them in that HTML5 GIF space.