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.
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."
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).
The best way to destroy the establishment is from within. The sleeper cells have been activated, ushering us into the new uncensorable decentralized era.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 that’s 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?)
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.
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.
It’s 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?”
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
Kinda glad GIFs are dying.. they were beyond annoying specially in discussions. didn't help that reddit started incorporating them into the comment section.