Gfycat.com shuts down on September 1 and all Gifs will be taken down
Gfycat.com shuts down on September 1 and all Gifs will be taken down
211 comments
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The Great Internet Recessionโข has begun
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Forreal, what's going on? Why does it seem like so many separate sites are suddenly so much worse/going downhill quickly?
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Apparently they have been living on life-support.
I can't claim to fully understand how it worked, but apparently as long as sites could show user growth they could attract investments, but with inflation causing interest rates to go up (and other economy hocus pocus) , that money is quickly drying up.
I don't know if the investors believed that if the user base could grow large enough, someone would buy the companies, or they suddenly could come up with some fantastic monetization of said user-base.
Now as companies are listed on the stock exchange, and facing the falling investor interest, they are expected to react (aggressively) to secure future revenue.
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They are unable to find investment funding because boomers are retiring and taking their money out of stock market.
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So, twitter, Reddit, Imgur, and now Gfycat are all killing itself
Has the internet bubble finally popped?
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The privately-owned for-profit Internet is starting to pop. User-driven FOSS will reign supreme.
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Been wondering how they detect how many videos you've watched without being logged in.
Cookies can be cleared, IPs can be changed, and if we all use something like the Mullvad Browser fingerprinting will be far more difficult.
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You mean popped again? It has already popped back in 2002 with the dot-com bubble bursting. Seems investors never learn.
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Tumblr was just ahead of its time
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Wait what's happening with imgur?
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Removing porn and all images not uploaded from an imgur account
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Removing porn and all images not uploaded from an imgur account
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Removing porn and all images not uploaded from an imgur account
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Removing porn and all images not uploaded from an imgur account
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Removing porn and all images not uploaded from an imgur account
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The sleeper cells have been activated, ushering us into the new uncensorable decentralized era.
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Wait what's going on with Imgur? I'm aware of all the others. Also, you can add Stack Overflow to the list.
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Oh sweet, it's dot.com 2.0. Grab your popcorn, it's time for the internet to implode... again! Never ever underestimate shareholders' willingness to self-destruct a product for short-term profit.
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It's called fiduciary duty and it's why every mega company sucks.
Cut costs by replacing cashiers with self checkout? Write a fat check to the shareholders! Then, shoplifting is becoming an even bigger issue from the self checkout... Cut costs again by preventing shoplifting by having people man the self checkout! Write another fat check to the shareholders!
Nevermind that it would have been easier and cheaper to just keep the system we had. Looking at you, Target.
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Remember! You can't say "fiduciary duty" without saying "douche" and "doody."
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Fiduciary duty is an absolute circus. Obligating companies to maximize profits at the expense of the wider society is the exact opposite of how law should work.
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It's like the second implosion in a many weeks
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Next one will be human instrumentality!
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Similar to what happened after the last dot com crash, it'll be interesting to see how the internet evolves and what comes next.
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Wow, the 'enshittification' of the internet is really taking off now. Sites are either already dodgy, or well on their way there!
I know this has been a bit of a slow burn for a while now, but it really feels like it's all coming to a head suddenly.
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We really gotta back decentralized platforms if we don't want everything to become an overmonetized hellscape where all information and communication is skewed to suit business interests. I wouldn't pay for Reddit Gold and Twitter Blue but I should send some money to the Lemmy, Kbin and Mastodon folks.
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Things happen slowly, then all at once.
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The times, they are a changin'...
I've watched the internet evolve since I first logged on to CompuServe in 1990. I don't think I have seen such a dramatic and fast change since the beginning of the WWW over crap like CompuServ.
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What the hell is going on?
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Everything is falling down:
- Google is dropping Reddit and Twitter from their searches.
- Twitter is throttling Tweets and you have to signin to view anything. Which would be crazy antivaxxer radicals, so not missing anything. No more free API use.
- YouTube is blocking you after 3 videos if you use an adblocker.
- Reddit has killed all 3rd party apps among API changes
- Now Gfycat is going, man that's like most of the sites I used since a kid. Imgur seems to be around still at least.
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Imgur doesn't even load for me on Firefox Mobile + uBlockOrigin. It also tries to redirect me to their broken front end if I just want the .jpg file. I absolutely hate them and wish people would stop using it.
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After 2008, interest rates were set to zero and basically stayed there for the next 15 years. What that meant was that investing your money in literally anything was better than putting it in a savings account or loaning it to the government (bonds). What thatmeant is that any company with a dream and a product found themselves swimming in piles and piles of venture capital fund funds. And all that money meant that customers were getting a lot of stuff at or below cost from companies that had lots of cash to spend, and no real concern about making it back. Now the free ride is over and everyone is trying to cash in, only to find thatโs not as easy as they made it sound to their investors.
Enshittification is a sexy concept and I understand why everyone has glommed on to it. Unfortunately, the interest rate explanation is the much more complete and correct one.
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Gfycat was the only good gif hoster. The rest, tenor, giphy, etc, are all corporate buzzfeed slop, that were primarily used by dimwits to decorate their shitty blog posts with (remember the various reddit admin feature announcements that had like 300 stupid gifs in them?)
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Yeah but giphy usually lets me drop shit at work that is HR appropriate :)
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That's crazy. Things are moving fast these days. It seems every private company owning a big website is trying to squeeze money out of user or closing.
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I sure hope it'll make people realise how these business are not on their side.
Many people are giving everything to them because "this is Google and this is safe". Well it might be safe but the company doesn't care about you or your experience. Not anymore at least.
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Itโs like the enshitification cycle somehow synced! https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/#hey-guys
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Not a coincidence. End of cheap money era.
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Yeah, no - itโs definitely not a coincidence, that was said tongue in cheek https://www.theregister.com/AMP/2023/04/07/vc_funding_falls/
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On Baconreader it wouldn't show a gif, it would just be link, which was pretty good.
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His name was Bacon Reader.. His name was Bacon Reader..
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so do we also know why they're shutting down?
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They've never found a viable business model.
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Was there an agreement somewhere that I donโt know about to kill off half of the internet in July?
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The other comment already mentioned that Discord uses Tenor, but you're probably thinking of Giphy, which is another service similar to Tenor. Gfycat is a bit different, and was more like Imgur.
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Pretty sure Gboard uses GIFY, so stock Android should be okay
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I don't think so. I think Discord uses tenor gifs
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Had no idea this was even at risk of shutting down...
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The death of the old internet continues..
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Most likely the new internet. That, where every website was created with money in mind.
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No, the death of the internet that killed the old Internet continues.
edit: and maybe that's a good thing.
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This is insane. I wonder what other relatively large internet service will go down.
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Apparently PornHub already lost 80% of their traffic due to age verification laws. I'll add the source when I'll get back to it.
Edit: https://www.theverge.com/2023/7/3/23782776/pornhub-blocks-mississippi-virginia-age-verification-laws
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Reading the article would make me believe it's 80% of traffic from Louisiana and not overall. So they will be fine lol.
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Still Though, when Pornhub falls, that's when we know were in trouble.
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I feel like that can't be true, I imagine a huge amount of pornhubs users are international
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RIP Nippy Kind Langur
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And the custom https://gfycat.com/brutalsavagerekt in response to its popularity.
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Where are my data horders??
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Damn, and end of an era...
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Nippy. Kind. Langur.
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Goddammit. Could the internet not break all at once for 5 minutes please?
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I think we're living in the bad place.
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Always have been.
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So what's the open-source alternative for gfycat? We got a trend started here let's keep it going!
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The problem with something like gfycat isn't the source code, it's the storage and bandwidth. That shit is expensive and there's no way to do it for free without showing ads and not go broke.
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Aw damnit, time to downloading whole gifs
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That means I have to go on gfycat and start saving all the funny Planetside GIFs recorded over the years. Sad times :(
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Share them with me I love Planetside!
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Quite sad indeed... But I guess most of them already got with the subreddit closure :(
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anyone have an archive?
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Itโs not a very informative article, it barely hints at why this is happening. Presumably Snapchat wants to shut it down, and rebuild it themselves?
Popular animated gifs hosting service gfycat.com is shutting down on September 1, 2023 and all hosted content will no longer be accessible at that point.
The service is one of many that is used by Internet users to upload and share animated gifs on the Internet. Founded more than eight years ago, Gfycat has risen to popularity and is widely used in some Internet communities.
The official website of the service informs users about the shutdown. There, the company writes: "The Gfycat service is being discontinued. Please save or delete your Gfycat content by visiting 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" Existing users have time until September 1, 2023 to save their uploaded animated gifs for safekeeping. On September 2, 2023, all data will be deleted from the company's servers and will no longer be accessible.
Any image embedded on third-party sites will no longer display either and show an error instead. Uploaders may download their animated gifs from the service and upload it to another, and then change the embed codes of their posts to keep the images visible.
Gyfcat banned adult content in 2019 in the app and created a new service, called redgifs, for that. This service was later sold to another company.
The service was acquired last year by Snap, makers of Snapchat. Gfycat is not the only animated gif service that has been acquired recently. Meta, owner of Facebook, tried to acquire the popular service Giphy but was blocked to go forward by regulators. Meta had to sell Giphy at a $260 million loss to Shutterstock as a consequence.
Snap has not made an official announcement regarding the shutdown of Gfycat.
Here are some Gfycat alternatives
- Giphy -- While now part of Shutterstock, Giphy remains available at the moment on the Internet.
- Imgur -- One of the oldest standing sites that allows users to upload animated gifs and images.
- Kikliko -- Animated Gifs with sounds support is what sets this site apart from many others.
- Tenor -- Another site that allows users to upload animated gifs and embed them into third-party sites.
Now You: do you use another site for hosting animated gifs?โ
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Things should be hosted on IPFS
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That way it really emulates true reddit performance!
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Might just as well use GNUTella
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Or go back to Napster where if the person you were leaching off for the past 4 hours get a phone call and the whole download is broken for 80% of that song
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Isn't ipfs in alpha right now?
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I think the same. I wonder if lemmy (and other fediverse applications) will one day support ipfs. It would also be cool if cloud storage providers started to support the protocol so you could make your cloud storage (some of it or all) into an ipfs node.
There's an experimental reddit alternative called plebbit that uses ipfs so people are exploring it
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Time to buy puts.
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Kinda glad GIFs are dying.. they were beyond annoying specially in discussions. didn't help that reddit started incorporating them into the comment section.
211 comments