Gfycat.com shuts down on September 1 and all Gifs will be taken down
3 years ago by L4sBot to c/technology
Just like the good old times of internet. When every kid had a hobby and installed a forum software into a shared hosting to spend time with others. "If you build it, he/they will come."
The only thing that sucked about having my own PHPBB forum was the lack of actual users to communicate with.
But it looked and did everything just the way I wanted, so that was nice. ๐ฅน
Sadly public self hosting comes with a lot of legalities. And sure, I can hide behind cloudflare ( and I do) but that still puts all of my eggs into Cloudflare's basket
Don't forget about YouTube! https://www.techradar.com/...
I expect adblockers will find a way around that. If nothing else, AdNauseam should work, as it tells the site that you clicked all of the ads it's blocking (making it much harder for them to build a profile on you).
I don't really understand AdNauseam. Can't they also not build a profile with a normal ad blocker, but you also completely avoid interacting with the trackers (so better for performance, data usage, etc)?
Yes and no. It's harder, but even with an adblocker, your internet signature (things like browser size, are you blocking ads, did you send a "do not track" header, etc) is enough to identify you in a lot of cases. AdNauseam goes the opposite direction, instead of hiding your data, it fills their data collection with so much garbage that they'll have a hard time figuring anything out about you. From what I understand, it doesn't actually load the ads, just sees where the ad points to, and tells the ad provider that you clicked it while at the same time blocking it. So it would be very slightly worse in terms of performance and data usage compared to uBlock Origin, but not in any noticeable way, since the stuff it sends is much smaller than any actual content.
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.
Removing porn and all images not uploaded from an imgur account
There's just too damn much of it, and the people accessing it generally aren't stopping to be advertised to. That's a lot of storage and bandwidth costs with very little ability to make money back.
Nsfw images can't be monitised with ads.
From April but explains it
It seems that the high latency on this instance often causes people to receive an error saying their message wasn't posted, when it actually was. This happened to me the other day, I ended up with like 4 repeated comments, and I've also seen it all across different communities on lemmy.world.
The best way to destroy the establishment is from within. The sleeper cells have been activated, ushering us into the new uncensorable decentralized era.
The Great Internet Recessionโข has begun
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.
Adding to what you said about interest rates: We're at the end of a long period of cheap borrowing (very low interest rates) during which overvalued assets were used as collateral to secure loans for investments. These propped-up assets are beginning to drop to their true (intrinsic) values. In other words, speculation and irresponsible practices were propping up a house of cards that's starting to collapse, and now investors are scrambling to cash in or cut losses wherever they can. So they're deciding that time has run out for online platforms that promised to grow but still haven't hit their numbers/monetization goals.
tl;dr: Infinite money glitch got patched (because it was wreaking all sorts of financial havoc) and now investors need to end life-support for risky/unprofitable investments.
Same thing is happening to streaming services
The internet was far more enjoyable 20 years ago, so if content goes back to being user hosted instead of corporation hosted I'll be happy.
Our entire Internet enjoyment has been heavily subsidized by venture capital for the last 30 years which hoped to monetize us more than they have been able (believe it or not).
Now they are calling in their bets...
How will enjoying the internet look like in the future? Lots of things we took for granted clearly weren't, and now we're used to a kind of internet that might just not be sustainable.
I guess things aren't looking too good.
Interesting question...probably going to be a lot more expensive for us, which will result in fewer services being used, and therefore higher amounts of service lock-in due to personal investment into specific service(s)...
Question is what do you do then? First, you try to reach profitability. Get out of the red by milking users and reducing costs, but there is little chance to get that really sweet ROI that you dreamt of in the last decade. What do you do next? My guess is that we will see some websites change ownership into some shadier hands in the next years. The personal data collected could still be worth something after all.
Do websites even make much from collecting data? There are so many trackers and only so many people. Ads are obvious, but it's clear that relying on those two isn't enough for revenue.
I'm guessing that websites with a large userbase will start charging for access to their sites. It might look like the NYT, where you get your 3 free articles, sign in for more, then you're required to pay. Free tiers won't be a reasonable compromise like they are now.
Will people stay and pay, or will they migrate? Most likely the former, especially for the older demo. Moving to the fediverse has been confusing enough for many of us who actually committed to learning about it. An average Twitter user wouldn't put in this much effort.
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.
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.
Hey, but self-checkouts are good. Dunno how they use them at target, but at shops I go to they allow me to get to the shop, grab what I need and leave within 5 minutes.
And not so sure with cheaper. Again from my experience, shops have a setup of 6 self-checkouts per 1 employee.
Theyโre only good if they pass the savings of not having to pay a person to ring up your groceries onto you
I'm with the other person on this one. Self checkouts have really reduced the queues where I live. They're much more compact than the cash registers and the shop near me basically doubled its cash register capacity because of them. I rarely have to wait in a queue these days.
Tesco even has a scan as you shop service which is really convenient. You get a barcode scanner before you start shopping, then scan all products you want to buy and place them directly in your bags. At the checkout, you scan a barcode attached to the checkout machine, it prompts you to pay, you pay and leave. All your things are already bagged.
Remember! You can't say "fiduciary duty" without saying "douche" and "doody."
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.
It's like the second implosion in a many weeks
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.
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.
Things happen slowly, then all at once.
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.
How did you get that bitchin username graphic?
I see you fixed the "I" so it doesn't read like a "|"
Test test
Test test
Test test
What the hell is going on?
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.
Pepperidge farm remembers pepperidge farm these days
Our new Terms of Service will go into effect on May 15, 2023. We will be focused on removing old, unused, and inactive content that is not tied to a user account from our platform as well as nudity, pornography, & sexually explicit content. You will need to download/save any images that you wish to save if they no longer adhere to these Terms. Most notably, this would include explicit/pornographic content.
Huh. I didn't know they were keeping the active ones. Though one has to wonder how they define active.
- Imgur banned and purged NSFW images
Damn. Imgur was so awesome when it first came around. I remember the creator doing an AMA when he made it. It mainly served as a image hosting site, just for Reddit... Then it gradually went to shit
There's been a lot of talk about this, but I've yet to see it. It's either being A/B tested and not fully rolled out, or whatever way they're detecting adblock isn't catching me.
There's plenty of pictures online though of people getting the message.
Who is YouTubeโs competitor ?
That's because the only thing anyone uses it for is the marketplace, event listings and as a messenger
Imgur seems to be around still at least.
For now
Oh damn that YouTube bit is news to me. Mostly I just watch on my phone or ipad on my break at work, but always use an ad blocker at home.
Honestly, you don't even really need an ad blocker for YouTube. I just report every ad immediately and it skips through them.
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.
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.
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?)
Itโs like the enshitification cycle somehow synced! https://pluralistic.net/...
Not a coincidence. End of cheap money era.
Yeah, no - itโs definitely not a coincidence, that was said tongue in cheek https://www.theregister.com/...
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.
Money. Always.
Gfycat had the excellent business model of hosting a load of high bandwidth content and not making any money from anyone
You forgot the excellent idea of being highly integratable to the point end users don't even know the gifs they're seeing are from gfycat
How is a gif hosters main competitior a app mainly used by teenagers for sexting?
@ChrisFhey @L4s @stebo02 @dedido @Alexmitter
Snap(chat) is Gfycat's parent company. The short version is they're hemorrhaging money and have been for years so they're cutting this as part of cost saving measures.
Yea me too i am a bit wondering why. People kept saying this was the reason, but idk if they really mean that or if its just 'saying what sounds possible as a half joke' (like when people answer any question about any shady business or very expensive auctions as "its money laundering" even tho there may be other explanations. I think ppl say it half jokinly?) Idk what reason snap would do this tho? Maybe theyre planning to make a gif hosting thingy by theirself?
Gfycat is owned by Snapchat.
I think the idea is that with things you could use snapchat for, people are using gfycat instead and users using snapchat are more profitable.
Pretty sure Gboard uses GIFY, so stock Android should be okay
This is insane. I wonder what other relatively large internet service will go down.
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/...
Edit 2: Maybe I misunderstood, see below comments
Itโs a poorly written sentence (not surprising as itโs The Verge lol) but I think they mean they lost 80% of traffic from Louisiana when they started enforcing age verification in that state which is why they now just block access entirely to states that enact these laws instead of bothering with the age verification.
Still Though, when Pornhub falls, that's when we know were in trouble.
Most likely the new internet. That, where every website was created with money in mind.
And the custom https://gfycat.com/brutalsavagerekt in response to its popularity.
I think we're living in the bad place.
So what's the open-source alternative for gfycat? We got a trend started here let's keep it going!
Side side to side
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
I imagine ArchiveTeam will set up a project for this if they havenโt already. Theyโve done so for Imgur and Reddit already.
That means I have to go on gfycat and start saving all the funny Planetside GIFs recorded over the years. Sad times :(
F
F
Time to buy puts.
Things should be hosted on IPFS
That way it really emulates true reddit performance!
Might just as well use GNUTella
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
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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This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
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So, twitter, Reddit, Imgur, and now Gfycat are all killing itself
Has the internet bubble finally popped?
save