[HN Gopher] Facebook to Buy Giphy for $400M
___________________________________________________________________
Facebook to Buy Giphy for $400M
Author : coloneltcb
Score : 723 points
Date : 2020-05-15 14:27 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.axios.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.axios.com)
| floatingatoll wrote:
| Imagine how many billions of Referrer headers Giphy gets every
| day. Imagine all the AI training material that comes in when
| people try to turn a search term into an image. $400mil for a
| human-curated dataset that pays dividends in ongoing harvestable
| data over time is chump change for Facebook.
| jondubois wrote:
| The title is misleading. It should be "Facebook executives give
| free money and Facebook shares to Giphy executives and save Giphy
| from bankruptcy."
| antibland wrote:
| FB can utilize Giphy for pixel tracking (similar to FB Like
| button) since these low-brow, comedic incantations appear all
| across the webosphere.
| stephencoyner wrote:
| - "New York-based Giphy had raised around $150 million in VC
| funding."
|
| - "Its most recent private valuation was around $600 million."
|
| Seems like Giphy took quite a haircut to pull this off. Their
| outlook must have looked pretty bleak.
| geocrasher wrote:
| Welp. There goes the neighborhood.
| ivanstame wrote:
| Facebook and others should be put on hold for buying companies
| for a while...
| paxys wrote:
| Why on earth would they do that? There's practically a fire
| sale of startups unable to raise more cash.
| jcutrell wrote:
| The amount of nuanced information available in this dataset is
| incredible.
| loceng wrote:
| I don't understand why someone downvoted you. Giphy is used by
| many services and Facebook owning, having access to that data
| and the insights it could provide into the whole landscape
| would lead me to looking for another solution, although them
| purchasing it will give them all of the historical data they'd
| need to find new niches, successful and growing competitors or
| market segments that they can just copy into FB. The laws
| certainly haven't caught up with this new age of anti-
| competitiveness that's possible with how a single entity is
| tied into so many competing companies, and so just a big
| competitor buying up that resource certainly gives an arguably
| unfair competitive advantage.
|
| Edit to add - TLDR: this essentially gives a backdoor to
| Facebook for usage at other companies who integrated the
| service.
| djsumdog wrote:
| Hmm .. wonder if this is primarily a acquisition to get
| training data and ML devs.
| yalogin wrote:
| Do slack and others pay Giphy when they integrate? Is that their
| main source of revenue or is it ads?
|
| I am wondering what makes them more attractive than someone like
| imgur for example.
| FalconSensei wrote:
| Yes, they pay. Because it helps keeping users active, in case
| of Instagram, for example. And in slack's case, I think when
| you install the app you can have it for free (with
| limitations), or pay to remove said limitations. In that case,
| slack may not (IMO) pay then.
| Causality1 wrote:
| For me Giphy is the poster child of Google's infuriating decision
| to put videos in the image search results. It's almost impossible
| to find a gif you can properly embed an HTML these days. Sure,
| you can use search terms to filter out giphy.com but then a
| hundred other copycat websites only fill the void with more
| videos masquerading as image files.
| minimaxir wrote:
| Per Crunchbase, they raised $150M total, with the last raise
| being $72M in 2016: https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/giphy
|
| This might not have been a 10x acquisition.
|
| EDIT: The Information is saying the price was $300M + bonus, and
| a 50% drop from the valuation in 2016.
| https://www.theinformation.com/briefings/4fbc4a
| KaiserPro wrote:
| having gone through an acquisition, one thing that is for
| certain is that the acutal money handed over was not anything
| near 400million.
|
| I suspect that actually it was closer to 75-150 range.
| nojito wrote:
| Most likely because their operational costs are borderline
| obscene due to reliance on Google Cloud for their ML pipeline
| and moving all their metadata to dynamodb.
| anbotero wrote:
| ML? For what? It's not like it finds the GIF you're looking
| for. Serious question.
| nojito wrote:
| https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/gcp/building-a-
| better...
|
| They are literally setting money on fire.
| projektfu wrote:
| It chooses the appropriate gif based on a thorough analysis
| of your personality and preferences. Share and Enjoy!
| vorpalhex wrote:
| If you're not paying for it, you are the product. The ML
| isn't for us, it's for their customers.
| tiborsaas wrote:
| I would guess automatic tagging and content recognition.
| 908087 wrote:
| Most likely for buzzword value.
| EE84M3i wrote:
| They use both GCP and AWS? Hopefully they're not moving large
| volumes of data between clouds.
| iambateman wrote:
| Giphy...by Facebook.
| https://www.dropbox.com/s/2zmo6nl7mmtnhzf/giphy.png?dl=0
|
| Maybe they keep the ephemeral absurdity that was giphy...but it
| feels like the beginning of the end.
| cityzen wrote:
| http://i.imgur.com/e8a5w9s.gif
| raiyu wrote:
| Last private raise - https://techcrunch.com/2016/10/31/giphy-the-
| platform-for-all...
|
| - $600MM
|
| - $150MM raised
|
| - $400MM sale price
|
| - $400MM - $150MM 1x preferred = $250MM (assuming not ratchet up
| for selling below last preferred price)
|
| - $250MM net to shareholders.
|
| - 50% for preferred investor share holders
|
| - 25% to founders
|
| - 25% to individual contributors
|
| - 25% of $250MM = $62.5MM
|
| These are all just estimates
| [deleted]
| nostromo wrote:
| So did the last round of investors lose 1/3rd of their
| investment (and after waiting four years, too)? Was this a fire
| sale?
| pisarzp wrote:
| No, usually investors stock is preferred with 1x liquidation
| preference. This means they get their money back, then the
| rest is split among other shareholders
| nimish wrote:
| I wonder what happened to employees who joined later on, with
| underwater options.
| nostromo wrote:
| With "later on" in this case being the past four years.
| jychang wrote:
| Not much, I'd imagine. It'd be like getting FB stock options
| upon joining and having it drop in price when the stock
| market tanked in March. That's the point of stock.
| nimish wrote:
| Presumably they were accelerated/repurchased out for $0?
| Replaced by ... what exactly? As a giphy employee what do
| you get out of the acquisiton beyond maybe some job
| security?
| mikeryan wrote:
| I've been watching this a bit in other sectors, but I'm
| fascinated to see if there's a real uptick in "Vulture Buying" as
| the effects of the financial markets really settle in. This may
| have been something in the works for a while but you have to
| wonder as some companies that have likely weathered the storm
| well start on a spree of discount shopping.
| dannyw wrote:
| Public markets are low down 15% now. It's hardly a discount.
| basch wrote:
| Public markets (especially SP500) don't really reflect impact
| to small companies. There's a ton of constantly amplifying
| risk and bleed happening all over, it's just not evenly
| distributed.
| mikeryan wrote:
| I've not been looking really there, most of my thoughts have
| been around the commercial real estate market and media
| entertainment private equity companies.
|
| Giphy, could (total spitballing here) could be a company that
| was a bit overvalued in VC terms, and might not have
| consistent cash flows and solid fundamentals where an
| acquisition makes sense to take their money off the table
| now. There might be others.
|
| Or this marriage has been in the works since December and
| just got pushed through now. Strange times.
| cecilpl wrote:
| Every time Facebook is buying something I feel sad and imagine
| Facebook like the black plague that will swallow that normal
| organism.
| eloc49 wrote:
| This exactly. Kara Swisher's interview with Sarah Frier on how
| Instagram went really paints the picture.
| https://overcast.fm/+QLdurp-A8
| jondubois wrote:
| It's a great match. They're both hype-mongering companies which
| add no value whatsoever to society.
| kgin wrote:
| Am I out of touch? No, it's the 1.6B daily active users who
| are wrong.
| [deleted]
| thendrill wrote:
| Sooo wait... You mean if more people smoke and more people
| drank, and more people did drugs... Then that means that it
| is good ?
| nine_k wrote:
| Look at it as at a bad but addictive habit.
|
| Hundreds of millions of smokers do harm their health, and
| through it their own and their neighbors' wealth. But
| quitting is indeed hard.
| hk__2 wrote:
| You can't seriously compare smoking and keeping up with
| friends and family, which is the reason that drives most
| of the usage of Facebook.
| gizmodo59 wrote:
| I'd argue a gif sent to someone during a heated
| conversation can make it light and end up funny. This
| goes for anything that anyone uses. I wouldn't compare
| this with smoking though.
| meIias wrote:
| You know what else could have the same effect? the right
| set of words. those are untraceable and they take up
| little bandwidth.
| randomsearch wrote:
| Agreed. This isn't a whatsapp or an instagram, let Facebook
| eat it who cares.
| missedthecue wrote:
| FB has dramatically reduced ad spend waste. Not sure how
| anyone can call that valueless. Moreover, though you may be
| annoyed by your mother-in-law's minion memes, Facebook is a
| (free) vital communication tool for millions who are less
| privileged than you.
|
| The facebook hate really just gets out of hand sometimes.
| jcroll wrote:
| The owners of giphy don't feel the same pangs I'm sure
| M2Ys4U wrote:
| And if they do I'm sure they'll have enough cash to dry their
| eyes with
| moufestaphio wrote:
| I'm pretty sure there is a woody harrelson gif for that
| saagarjha wrote:
| There is: https://giphy.com/gifs/94EQmVHkveNck
| arcadeparade wrote:
| giphy has a .gif of that
| timdiggerm wrote:
| I mean, it worked out great for the Instagram guys, right?
| baddox wrote:
| Not just for the personal finances of the Instagram
| founders and team. The Instagram acquisition has been, as
| far as I can tell, a huge success for Facebook.
| nostromo wrote:
| Maybe..?
|
| I can imagine an alternate 2020 where an independent
| Instagram is growing like a weed and the founders are much
| more wealthy.
| flunhat wrote:
| Most people on this site couldn't imagine it back then:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3817850
| annadane wrote:
| They will once they see what Facebook turns them into.
| ryandrake wrote:
| Immensely wealthy people? I'm sure those pangs are awful.
| volkk wrote:
| Congrats to giphy I guess? But I'll be honest, any time I've ever
| used them as an extension in slack or anywhere, and tried to get
| relevant gifs, I got back some really bad results. I'll never
| fully understand why they're so successful short of just
| dominating the market through sheer popularity. I remember
| switching our team over to rightgif and the difference was
| astounding given the fact that giphy has millions upon millions
| and loads of developers.
| wuliwong wrote:
| I've had a 100% opposite experience. Compared to /gif, /giphy
| is far superior in slack.
| sabertoothed wrote:
| The most ridiculous thing, I find, is that giphy on Slack
| prints your search term as well, so others can read it. That
| completely takes the fun out of the *.gif for me.
| EForEndeavour wrote:
| For me, seeing the original search term only increases the
| hilarity. It often leads to amusing juxtapositions between
| what the sender wanted to search and the gif they chose, or
| maybe they included an in-joke or excessively detailed
| description of something, etc.
| willart4food wrote:
| You need to lower your standards, lowering the bar is key to
| happines.
|
| 1/2 joking
| naravara wrote:
| They prioritized showing up on searches over really precisely
| tuned results. If you search for an animated gif on any image
| search GIPHY hits are the main ones. It's all about that SEO.
|
| And then they manage to make it hard to actually post the gif
| you found via the search engine, so you end up using the giphy
| platform to do it.
| karatestomp wrote:
| Like Pinterest, I don't understand why they show up on image
| searches at all. They make it almost impossible to actually
| get at the image.
| cannedslime wrote:
| Yeah I can never find the clip im looking for with Giphy, and
| if its even slightly controversial of edgy you can forget about
| it. I also turn gifs off on slack, its a waste of resources and
| the gifs are pretty lame anyways.
| roldie wrote:
| Thanks, never knew about rightgif. Their search is so good!
| Thuswindburn wrote:
| In my opinion, the big draw to Giphy is the massive volume of
| available gifs. Quantity over quality.
| 83457 wrote:
| Seeing what comes back is half the fun. I have more respect for
| coworkers who /giphy instead of posting a gif link :)
| nkcmr wrote:
| > I'll never fully understand why they're so successful short
| of just dominating the market through sheer popularity.
|
| Sounds like a perfect match for Facebook :)
| jondubois wrote:
| Clearly this acquisition has nothing to do with either
| Facebook's or Giphy's businesses... Not sure you can even call
| Giphy a 'business' because that would imply that an attempt had
| been made at creating value.
| Jestar342 wrote:
| That's what happens when Joe Public sets the tags. There's
| nothing "smart" about giphy's search, it's just a tag match.
| txcwpalpha wrote:
| I've always thought part of the "charm" of Giphy in Slack is
| that does give you those somewhat silly or "not exactly what I
| was looking for but actually this is funnier" type of GIFs.
|
| The couple of times I have tried to use it to search for a very
| specific GIF (like searching for a specific clip from a movie)
| it hasn't really worked, but whenever I use it for more general
| stuff like "/giphy cardio sucks" or "/giphy hooray" I get some
| pretty pleasing results.
| bduerst wrote:
| I honestly thought Giphy was vyying for an acquisition from
| Slack that never materialized.
| harikb wrote:
| May be it is just me. The worry that typing /giphy without
| knowing whether I am doing the "I am feeling lucky" version
| or "let me choose" version and end up embarrassing myself has
| kept me away from..... well I guess embarrassing myself.
| 6gvONxR4sf7o wrote:
| That's a huge part of it, and what makes a huge difference
| compared to discord where all you get is the gif. In slack,
| you see a random gif and the intended message, so a weird gif
| just adds fun. In discord you just get a gif, so the gif has
| to convey more, which is hard.
| rkuykendall-com wrote:
| Running `/giphy cardio sucks` on my work slack (thankfully
| just to Slackbot) yields a very NSFW result:
| https://giphy.com/gifs/old-school-bj-
| oldschool-111XK1CCmGNwI...
|
| So... confirmed?
| EE84M3i wrote:
| I would consider this "NSFW" but not "very NSFW"
| taytus wrote:
| NSFW depending on where you work at.
| mylons wrote:
| If you can't fix it, feature it!
| badwolf wrote:
| This is kind of the charm we like in our slack. We have
| preview turned off so you can't cycle through, you just get
| whichever one it picks. It can be amusing.
| JoBrad wrote:
| That's a great idea, haha. Giphy Roulette
| harikb wrote:
| Omg! This was a setting change! Now I am mad at my admin
| See my other comment
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23193900
| yreg wrote:
| I'd just like this trend of sending reaction gifs to end.
|
| <rant> People keep posting them in Slack all the time, but I
| find it about as appropriate as that brief time when all my
| uni teachers decided that it's hip to include rage comic
| faces into every other slide of every presentation.
|
| </rant>, yes I know, I'm fun at parties...
| Freak_NL wrote:
| I can't grok this trend at all. All these replies in the
| form of memes make me feel like I'm in the Darmok episode
| of Star Trek: The Next Generation.
|
| I'm grateful communication on MatterMost at my company has
| not seen the need for reaction gifs emerge; the wildest
| thing we have is a custom emoji of a dancing banana.
| lovegoblin wrote:
| > All these replies in the form of memes make me feel
| like I'm in the Darmok episode of Star Trek: The Next
| Generation.
|
| If this is an ironic joke, it's a good one. If not, it's
| painfully un-self-aware.
|
| Because "feels like I'm in Darmok" is just an meaningless
| in isolation as "Temba, his arms wide."
| thebigshane wrote:
| ```It is a genuine source of hilarity to me that "Darmok
| and Jalad at Tanagra" is a potentially really useful
| popcultural-reference shorthand for "a situation where
| two groups face a difficulty communicating because one
| group speaks exclusively in memes and popculture
| references"```
|
| -- https://twitter.com/venatrixlunaris/status/11852863701
| 068595...
| tempestn wrote:
| Whether ironic or not, I found both the initial
| observation and your reply hilarious. Meme replies really
| _are_ Darmok, and the meta nature of that is perfect.
| lovegoblin wrote:
| Exactly.
| Aeolun wrote:
| I the only time I need giphy is when there is no
| appropriate (custom) emoticon.
|
| Giphy takes way too much space.
|
| Also, why does Teams not have a :shrug: icon. Seriously?
| Gene_Parmesan wrote:
| If you're on Windows, windows key + period brings up the
| system-level emoji picker. Just thought I'd let you know
| in case you weren't aware there was even such a thing as
| a system-level emoji picker (I sure wasn't until someone
| on my team told me about it).
| wfleming wrote:
| I don't disagree, but as an aside I think the references
| to that Star Trek episode (which I've been seeing a lot
| lately) is interesting. I find it amusingly ironic that
| the most effective way to describe the growing tendency
| to communicate mainly in cultural references is... a
| cultural reference.
| Icathian wrote:
| Double irony points for using a Heinlein-ism in the post
| too.
| searchableguy wrote:
| Maybe there isn't a culture left anymore to communicate
| so they end up reusing parts of the older culture.
| artificial wrote:
| Hah, great anaology. Pretty crazy that 2chan/4chan
| popularized the reaction gif.
| anon73044 wrote:
| and folders full of canned reaction images long before
| every board supported gifs....
|
| and before that, plaintext emoticons... tth_tth
| smegger001 wrote:
| if only more system would leave my plain text emotes
| alone an not try to convert it to a emoji
| teddyh wrote:
| "Grok" is actually a cultural reference; it is a made-up
| word from a very famous science fiction book.
|
| When people use it, it looks the same to me like if they
| were using "Live long and prosper" in casual
| conversation.
| ghaff wrote:
| I think one difference with "grok" is that, the way it's
| normally used, there really isn't IMO a perfect English
| replacement. To me at least, it implies a deeper and
| broader internalizing of something than saying "I
| understand it" or "I get it" necessarily implies.
| whichquestion wrote:
| Grokking being beyond understanding something is central
| to Valentine Michael Smiths understanding of the world,
| and therefore the plot, in "Stranger in a Strange Land".
|
| Grok is not simply understanding or knowing a thing, it's
| knowing that thing so well and all the things related to
| that thing, and understanding all of your feelings
| associated with that thing, that it becomes a part of
| you. At least, that was my interpretation of it.
|
| Heinlein's explanation and exposition is more detailed in
| the actual book. If you have not read it, highly
| recommended.
| ghaff wrote:
| Oh, I've read it and it's on my bookshelf. Just something
| like 3 or 4 decades ago :-) It was never actually a
| particularly favorite Heinlein for me though so I haven't
| re-read in a very long time if ever.
| qorrect wrote:
| Hey same here, and Heinlein was my favorite author for a
| very long time. That particular book just never really
| did it for me.
| ghaff wrote:
| Stranger in a Stranger Land was probably more of
| particular time and place that a lot of Heinlein's works.
| Although it came out at in 1961--mostly predating the
| counterculture era in the US, its mainstream cross-over
| appeal was definitely tied in with the Summer of Love
| etc. later in the decade.
| trhway wrote:
| happens that it was banned in TX schools until 2003, so i
| guess some share of population just doesn't grok it :)
| Doctor_Fegg wrote:
| "Comprehend" works, in British English at least.
| pbhjpbhj wrote:
| It's more "fully comprehend all aspects". You could also
| say "get" or "understand" or "know" as synonyms for
| comprehend (in the right context).
|
| Grok works in English, I've been reading it for, what, 20
| years in English texts. It mightn't be in dictionaries
| but they're not the sole arbiters of language.
|
| It comes from US English, AFAIK, a neonym from Heinlein
| (the sci-fi writer).
| slg wrote:
| Or to put it another way, it is basically a reaction gif
| in word form.
| [deleted]
| jshevek wrote:
| Several subcultures adopted this word in the US decades
| ago, leading to it being commonly used by people who had
| never heard of the book.
| jagged-chisel wrote:
| How long before forms requesting personal data allow us
| to upload our own list of acceptable vocabulary to be
| used in our presence?
| Roritharr wrote:
| You could basically have this as an user-agent setting,
| so it just translates it down to the accepted language
| level of the reader.
|
| Sounds beautifully dystopian.
| stuartd wrote:
| .. and (as Michael explains on the book) it's literal
| meaning in Martian is "drink", or in other words "to make
| part of yourself". It used to really annoy me when people
| used it to mean "understand", but I've got over that now.
| traverseda wrote:
| I think that's (part of) the joke.
| neltnerb wrote:
| I mean, the most obvious difference is that grok is
| actually in the dictionary. It's totally fair game
| compared to ST:TNG references. I don't use it in
| professional writing though, of course.
|
| https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/grok
| kingbirdy wrote:
| I think grok has escaped it's sci-fi niche now - I
| learned it as a vocab word in English class when I was in
| school over a decade ago.
| cheez wrote:
| It is an incredibly efficient way to communicate. Try it.
| farns wrote:
| Sokath! His eyes uncovered! Temba, his arms wide.
| ProAm wrote:
| I turn off all images and gifs in slack. Makes it much more
| usable.
| seph-reed wrote:
| How to choose a reaction gif:
|
| 1. Type a couple words relevant to the topic or your
| feelings on the topic into a gif search engine.
|
| 2. Pick whichever gif suits the context best.
|
| 3. Watch as everyone thinks you're super clever.
|
| ------
|
| I mean, I get it. Most people just want funny pictures, and
| I love sharing memes with friends. But something about
| reaction gifs just boils my blood. I'm very, very bothered
| by them. If someone posts a relevant comment, or video:
| great. If there's something really clever about the
| reaction gif: good job. But most of the time it's just kind
| of related, and not really a discussion at all. Or worst of
| all, a "wow" "lol" or "wtf" expressing funny face.
| benignslime wrote:
| they ruin all flow of conversation and serve as distraction
| rather than substance. It's mindblowing to see some Discord
| and Slack channels just bombarded with fancy moving
| pictures. It's particularly worse when people won't use the
| "Thread" feature to contain reactions and sub-conversation
| to specific comments. It can result in lost information if
| people aren't careful, but it's almost always better than
| littering the feed with semi-relevant reaction gifs.
| gsich wrote:
| The meme market agrees with you.
| anamexis wrote:
| I don't mind the sentiment, but they're so visually
| distracting.
|
| /collapse is your friend here.
| ProAm wrote:
| Just turn them off my default, its easier to uncollapse
| if you need to see something.
| cletus wrote:
| Ok, boomer.
|
| In all seriousness, I and a lot of colleagues use GIFs a
| lot at work. You can convey a lot of meaning/nuance with a
| single GIF I find. Honestly I never understand the need to
| use emojis. I just found that annoying but GIFs are
| incredibly succinct forms of communication. Or at least
| they can be.
| servercobra wrote:
| I use emojis a lot in Slack and texting. They can remove
| some accidental ambiguity in your writing, by making your
| intent clear. For example, the tongue out emoji can work
| to make sure people know you're being sarcastic.
| dkdk8283 wrote:
| Call me old school but I have to look up almost every
| single emoji. I find them frustrating /creepy
| Aeolun wrote:
| Most common ones in my environment are various forms of
| smiles. What do you see that means you have to look it
| up? (genuinely curious)
| xnyan wrote:
| Use of emoji is the new "don't trust anyone over 30"
| bchanudet wrote:
| Emojis can have ambiguity too. My friends and have been
| using the eye roll emoji to signal we're being sarcastic
| for about 10 years. The un-animated version of this emoji
| looks like "I'm not really thinking what I'm saying",
| especially on Discord/Twitter.
|
| I've recently a colleague who used the tongue out emoji
| for sarcasm and the eye roll one for, well, eye rolling
| with disdain in reaction to something.
|
| The first chat discussions were then quite awkward,
| because when I were to write something like "You should
| have tested your code before deploying it... :eyeroll:",
| he was thinking I was openly looking down on him in front
| of the team.
|
| We had to have a real discussion about it. It made me
| tone down my use of emojis - and sarcasm. I suppose using
| animated emojis (they were in MSN I think?), or GIF
| reactions would have made the things clearer.
| anyfoo wrote:
| That really is interesting, because as far as I'm aware,
| I've only seen (and used) the eye roll emoji for, well,
| eye rolling. At least the iOS one also looks very
| disdainful to me. So if you had written "you should have
| tested this " to me, I would indeed have felt pretty bad
| about it. A more appropriate use would be something like
| "I walked all the way to there, but they turned me away
| because they bungled up my appointment ", i.e. something
| commiserate about. And based on my observation and
| recollection, I really don't think I'm in the minority
| here.
| Aeolun wrote:
| > My friends and have been using the eye roll emoji to
| signal we're being sarcastic for about 10 years.
|
| But why would you assume this works for a random
| stranger? It seems much more logical to assume they'll
| interpret the thing you've written as being said while
| actually rolling your eyes.
|
| That said, it seems entirely appropriate to look down on
| someone that doesn't test their code before deploying.
| bchanudet wrote:
| I think at some point you "forget" what some emoji really
| mean. I've kept my circle of friends quite small in the
| last couple decades, and we're all using this emoji for
| sarcasm. It's akin to private jokes, that crack you and
| your friends up every time, and then when you try one of
| those with other people, you're the only one laughing.
|
| My other colleagues were not confused by my usage of the
| emoji, although they've known me for some time now, and
| they know that I'm not the type of person to actually
| roll my eyes while talking to someone, or even look down
| on them.
|
| At least it was a nice reminder that our ways, customs
| and habits, no matter how normal they seem to ourselves,
| can still look crazy from the outside.
|
| But I agree with you, it may have been one of the best
| sentence to use this emoji with. :)
| kinleyd wrote:
| I've come to appreciate emojis a lot for that reason.
| gifs, not so much - although the really good gifs go down
| well with me.
| bcrosby95 wrote:
| They can also be ambiguous. Some people think "high five"
| emojis are actually "prayer hands". Which convey _wildly_
| different reactions to something. Told your friend your
| Dad was diagnosed with cancer? _high five_
| NoodleIncident wrote:
| I don't think there's a high five emoji. When I search
| it, I only get the praying/folded hands, and it says that
| it's rarely interpreted as a high five.
|
| https://emojipedia.org/folded-hands/
| [deleted]
| parliament32 wrote:
| It's definitely a "praying" emoji, the whole high five
| thing is an urban myth.
|
| The official spec[1] calls it "PERSON WITH FOLDED
| HANDS".. the keyword there is "person" (in contrast to,
| for example, "1FAC2;PEOPLE HUGGING" when there is
| multiple people). The emoji is of a single person folding
| their hands, which really isn't a high five unless you're
| somehow high five-ing yourself.
|
| [1]ftp://ftp.unicode.org/Public/UNIDATA/UnicodeData.txt
| monkeywork wrote:
| that's only ambiguous if you have no cultural
| understanding at all ...
| dijit wrote:
| I'm even "uncooler" than you. I wrote a bot that denigrates
| employees for using gifs in slack.
|
| And that persistent dancing parrot animated emoji.
|
| Luckily the bot ended up doing more valuable things too,
| but the original design of the bot was purely for abusing
| the colleagues on my team.
|
| And it had the intended effect, people still joke but slack
| is not pegging my CPU, rendering animated images anymore.
| joejerryronnie wrote:
| That would necessitate a separate bot which posts random
| gifs to your slack thread every hour on the hour ;-)
| zachrose wrote:
| Have you ever been in a mostly white office and noticed how
| many reaction GIFs are of black people?
|
| The term to Google here is "digital blackface".
|
| If you bring this to more people's attention my guess is
| that reaction GIFs will become less prevalent in your
| office.
| somehnguy wrote:
| Geez people find a new thing every day to get offended
| about. Amazing.
| monkeywork wrote:
| It is amazing the lengths people will go to find
| something to complain about.
| Volt wrote:
| Like... "other people using reaction GIFs".
| busterarm wrote:
| We need a Godwin's law for things being described as
| "-ism".
| benignslime wrote:
| I think that's just some form of confirmation bias you've
| formed, as I've never noticed that. I will say most of my
| offices have been multi-cultural, but even then, I've
| been on and led teams of white-only males that never
| succumbed to even posting these gifs. I guess guilting
| people into censoring their choices is a point of action,
| but I think the entire process should just be faded out.
| Slack admins don't need to allow these plugins. Theres
| nothing stopping people from literally going to giphy.com
| or whatever, but that's not why it's popular -- and it's
| definitely not why FB is shelling 400 million for it.
| zachrose wrote:
| Digital blackface is not my idea, nor is it something I
| noticed. (I am white.) Someone else explained it to me. I
| was probably a bit skeptical that a funny GIF of Oprah
| could be linked to Jim Crow, but in the historical
| context of blackface there are some unavoidable
| similarities.
| J5892 wrote:
| No, the term to Google here would be "misinterpreting
| inclusive cultural norms as appropriation".
| zachrose wrote:
| One of these has 57,000 results and the other one has
| zero.
| Aeolun wrote:
| You kind of need to search without quotes, and you'll get
| very appropriate results.
| codemonkey-zeta wrote:
| I'm confused by the plurality of this single overly-
| aggressive cultural perspective that any intercourse even
| vaguely race-related necessarily is a transgression
| against the minority race involved.
|
| Your analysis of the anecdote(!) that white offices seem
| to use people of color in gifs more often is concerning.
| It doesn't seem reasonable to think that working-class
| whites -- through meme communication at work -- oppress
| anybody in any meaningful way. Of course I understand
| _why_ someone would think that, and I largely agree with
| it.
|
| That is the theory that modern white culture consists of
| microaggressions which enforce a race-order in society
| while outwardly appearing "equal" and "inclusive". But
| the memes at work? Aren't there more important
| institutionalized racist policies to tackle? When you
| argue that the individual's choice to use memes with
| people of color is itself a problem worth addressing, we
| lose the more important issues that need to be fixed to
| the noise.
|
| If you really want to convince someone (or society) that
| something needs to change, you don't ask them to change a
| million things, you ask them for one thing. That's why
| we've been divided on race issues for so long, but it's
| even worse what's happening now. Now, the left (or those
| whites "in power" who say they are "woke" and want
| change) realizes it's easier to sit back and claim
| martyrdom for failing to convince the right (or those
| whites "in power" whose support is needed to make
| systematic racial change) because of some fundamental
| flaw in our opponent, rather than because of some flaw in
| the completely incoherent message of "change" that we are
| maintaining.
|
| And it's disgusting because the left revels in this self-
| righteousness while actively sabotaging our own "goals"
| in order to reserve for ourselves this position of
| universality.
|
| If we really want to make any change we would pick ONE
| policy. We would push and push until it HAD to become
| _law_. Then we would continue to push that program until
| that law HAD to become a _success_, and we would use that
| success to push ONE more policy. But we muddy the
| conversation with inane demands like "the (anecdotal!)
| tendency of white people to use people of color in gifs
| to communicate on Slack must be addressed," not so that
| we will actually _change_ that behavior, but once again
| to reserve the moral high-ground for, you guessed it,
| WHITES IN POWER (US).
|
| I think this is the most sinister and disgusting forms of
| racism, and it's being perpetuated by US! Most
| progressive whites I know really ARE good people, and
| really DO want social change, but they (you, OP, you)
| don't realize that they're participating in a much more
| dangerous form of oppression, because it _feels good_.
|
| It probably made you feel really good that you "educated"
| all of us on HN on this super important racial topic that
| you just happen to be "woke" on. You probably thought
| that was you "doing your part to end racism." Well your
| moralist masturbation just perpetuated the very cycle of
| racism that you espouse to despise.
| redshirtrob wrote:
| I hear ya. I had to disable animations on gifs and emojis.
| I keep Slack on a workspace in my peripheral vision. The
| animations trigger some reptilian fight or flight part of
| my brain that kills my focus.
|
| I got tired of collapsing them
| NoodleIncident wrote:
| Google spreadsheets (and maybe docs) insist on smoothly
| animating a black dot in the bottom right back and forth.
| It's in the exact spot of my peripheral vision to make me
| react as if it's a bug, every single time
| vitaflo wrote:
| How do you do this?
| hoorayimhelping wrote:
| Settings -> Accessibility.
| yreg wrote:
| Thank you, didn't know there's an option for that. I
| might give it a try.
| [deleted]
| t-writescode wrote:
| Have you changed the settings to pg-13 or lower? You can!
| black_puppydog wrote:
| I was hyped when I read that there's a reasonable alternative
| with better search. Then I realized that they're exclusively on
| slack.
|
| Do gifs really only happen on slack for y'all? That's the place
| I encounter them the least, and I think that's a good thing. On
| the other hand, a ton of other places are more suitable for
| gifs, and (even) less suitable for using a facebook service, so
| this really hurts right now.
|
| Overall I'm quite sad to see how centralized freaking gif-
| sharing is, and that it's happenind mostly in walled gardens?!
| ronjouch wrote:
| > _" I realized that they're exclusively on slack"_
|
| What do you mean? https://giphy.com/search/it-works works for
| me.
| black_puppydog wrote:
| I meant rightgif, which the parent mentioned as an
| alternative.
| jjoonathan wrote:
| Do any of these services let you share your own gifs over
| slack?
|
| Last time I tried: dragging in gifs (or mp4s or webps) resulted
| in an attachment, not an inline gif, giphy wanted money to
| upload your own gifs, and gfycat had some kind of slow and
| inconsistent review process so that your gifs don't show up in
| search (or in the slack plugin) for weeks to months after you
| upload them.
| kennxfl wrote:
| This is the kind of the issue Facebook will help sort out. On
| the other hand, they will collect a lot of data about
| trending topics/searches in a bid to sell/suggest more trendy
| ads to advertisers.
| whalesalad wrote:
| Couldn't you just... drag the gif into Slack?
| ninkendo wrote:
| Just typing /giphy <search term> is so easy though.
| 867-5309 wrote:
| > dragging in gifs ... resulted in an attachment
| lovegoblin wrote:
| I've never had this problem, and I do it all the time. It
| embeds just fine.
| jjoonathan wrote:
| Non-animated GIFs embed just fine, if that's what you
| mean. I just tried animated again, and sure enough,
| attachment.
| prophetjohn wrote:
| Copy and paste it into slack instead
| jjoonathan wrote:
| Uhh.... that creates an attachment.
|
| I'm begging to suspect that there's a setting, hidden
| size threshold, or something involved.
| RandallBrown wrote:
| Could be a setting in your organization or something I
| guess. Uploading a gif works fine for me and it's
| animated.
| whalesalad wrote:
| S3 bucket, FTP folder, imgur... for your custom gif's and
| then you can paste a URL and get animation. No frills.
| jjoonathan wrote:
| If I paste a URL, I get a URL, not an embedded image.
| Then people have to click it to see the gif, and they
| don't, so it defeats the purpose.
| whalesalad wrote:
| That is a preference you disabled. By default URLs are
| expanded inline.
| nojito wrote:
| They are very very quick at creating integrations with other
| services and as a result they were able to push their brand
| alongside the growth of gifs these past 5-8 years.
| wolco wrote:
| The growth of gifs? Did gifs ever leave critical mass?
| robbyking wrote:
| I had a recruiter from Giphy pursue me pretty hard, and all I
| could think was _there 's no way I'm going to go to a company
| that won't be around in a year._
| ChuckMcM wrote:
| My theory on why they were successful is that they made it
| possible for "anyone" to quickly respond with a gif response.
| Responding that way had become "cool" but it was difficult or
| impossible for people who didn't hoard a stash of gifs.
|
| This sort of solution "Make it easy for the rest of us" is a
| tried and true winner of traction for products.
| krat0sprakhar wrote:
| Rightgif looks great but sucks its not offered as an API and
| only as a slack bot
| anbotero wrote:
| Finally! THIS, rightgif, is exactly what at least 90% of people
| wanting to use. But another commenter on this very thread
| mentioned they pretty much just did SEO. Arrgh, hate it.
| sneeuwpopsneeuw wrote:
| A friend of me added support for sending Giphy animations to a
| school project 2 years ago. He finished that in 2 or 3 hours.
| The API is basically give us 1 word and we give you givs /
| jif's / jivs / gif's idk. I atleast I understand why developers
| want to use it.
|
| For users it can be useless because they do not seam to
| understand multiple words and they do not have localized memes,
| so they for example don't understand dutch words and they don't
| have dutch memes.
| whatsmyusername wrote:
| RIP giphy
| solarkraft wrote:
| Was it ever good?
| loceng wrote:
| Define good? The data's worth at least $400M to Facebook.
| maest wrote:
| They probably mean from a user perspective. Most users
| don't care about the value of the data.
| mrkramer wrote:
| "Most users don't care about the value of the data." In a
| world of micro transactions every user could for example
| be paid fraction of a cent every time he or she sees an
| ad thus sharing revenue with Facebook.
| badrabbit wrote:
| Signal uses giphy. Hope they stop.
| schwag09 wrote:
| I had the same thought. Although it looks like Signal uses a
| proxy for GIPHY requests [1] and has at least thought about the
| privacy implications of GIPHY support [2].
|
| [1] https://github.com/signalapp/Signal-Android/issues/9628
|
| [2] https://signal.org/blog/signal-and-giphy-update/
| alberth wrote:
| There is a considerable amount of porn on Giphy.
|
| I wonder if FB will ban porn on Giphy like how Verizon banned
| porn on Tumblr after that acquisition.
| partiallypro wrote:
| I thought this too when I first read this, but I went on Giphy
| and did a quick search and couldn't find any.
| lovegoblin wrote:
| Are you thinking of gfycat? (Who, tangentially, is now moving
| all their adult content to redgif.)
| Mindwipe wrote:
| That was my first thought too.
|
| More censorship.
|
| Then again, I am very curious if Facebook's content board will
| do something about wearing a bikini being a account closure
| level offense for sex workers/cam models and completely okay
| for celeb influencers.
| tiborsaas wrote:
| It's a data grab. Just imagine how many places Giphy has
| "integration" with. And the contents of a gif might be really
| telling, they are already very well tagged.
| eecc wrote:
| So now the intention is to map corporate org charts?
| exabrial wrote:
| great, yet another way to get tracked
| lucideer wrote:
| The Giphy integration that Facebook put into WhatsApp lets Giphy
| track who sends what GIFs to whom, so while the message is
| transmitted encrypted, a lot of context can be gleaned.
|
| This acquisition makes a lot of sense.
| netsharc wrote:
| So no longer SIGINT, but GIFINT.
| loceng wrote:
| Certainly they can't claim that communication is private and/or
| encrypted then?
| gowld wrote:
| You are saying they can't lie about privacy?
| lucideer wrote:
| They can, as it is end-to-end encrypted; the ends are always
| the most likely points of leakage. In this case, it's the
| sender's end.
|
| This is part of the beauty of e2e encryption because you have
| reasonable access to the "ends". For unencrypted traffic you
| have no access to the "in transit" part so no knowledge about
| potential compromise. Since you're relatively confident with
| e2e that the message can't be read in transit, you only need
| to check the parts of the transaction you have access to.
|
| In this case, we can check the sender's end by looking at
| what external entities are accessed (network & API requests
| from the client). For WhatsApp, there's a total of three I'm
| aware of:
|
| 1. The OS keyboard API. This theoretically means Apple or
| Google can read everything you type (but not necessarily
| messages you receive).
|
| 2. The Giphy search API for retrieving a list of GIFs to
| choose from (notable as this means Giphy also gets metadata
| about your thought process in choosing a GIF, even if you
| never send one).
|
| 3. The HTTP request to Giphy to retrieve the chosen GIF (I'm
| not 100% sure if this is distinct from the above search
| request results, due to resolution differences, or if they're
| all one-in-the-same).
| stevewodil wrote:
| Also Snapchat uses Giphy for gif search, so this acquisition
| could be to prevent snap from using it moving forward
| l1ghthouse wrote:
| Users: time to delete your accounts :P
|
| Developers: Time to remove the Giphy integrations from your
| apps/services.
| winrid wrote:
| Haven't they already been selling the data?
| bertman wrote:
| I wonder if Signal will now remove their Giphy integration...
|
| edit: Guess they won't ... We have always used a
| proxy for our requests to GIPHY, and will continue to do so.
| There should be no harm in continuing to use it.
| https://signal.org/blog/signal-and-giphy-update/
|
| Quote from a Signal dev https://github.com/signalapp/Signal-
| Android/issues/9628#issu...
| andy_ppp wrote:
| The web of surveillance capitalism Giphy has in every integration
| is worth _at least_ $400m to Facebook... Crazy!
| reubensutton wrote:
| It's a significant discount from previous funding rounds
| according to Techcrunch: "Giphy last raised $72 million at a
| reported $600 million valuation at the end of 2016"
|
| [1] https://techcrunch.com/2018/03/09/giphy-held-talks-to-
| raise-...
| lx0741 wrote:
| why on earth does fb exist?
| jawns wrote:
| I would not be surprised if the blatant copyright infringement
| that is rampant on Giphy has scared off potential buyers in the
| past.
|
| I know, I know, there's an argument that it's fair use, but that
| doesn't mean that legal costs won't be incurred to make that
| argument, nor that the argument will be ultimately successful.
|
| I suppose if there's any company that's able to take on that
| legal risk, it's Facebook.
| paxys wrote:
| Copyright holders don't care about users sharing seconds' worth
| of content and bringing them free advertising. And even if they
| do, Facebook already handles DMCA requests at a massive scale.
| There's no legal risk for them.
| im3w1l wrote:
| Ianal but isn't this what the DMCA safe harbor is about? Comply
| with takedown requests and you are fine.
| henryfjordan wrote:
| Not when your whole business relies on exploiting copyrighted
| content, which someone from Disney might argue about Giphy.
| duxup wrote:
| Are short clips that you see on Giphy a legal risk?
| huac wrote:
| IANAL, probably fall under fair use?
| petercooper wrote:
| Instagram seemed expensive at $1bn in 2012 and ultimately turned
| out to be a very savvy buy, so I feel like I should trust
| Facebook on this one.
|
| I'm kinda surprised Imgur hasn't sold in a similar way yet, it
| seems to have slightly more sense of community than Giphy which
| is more broadly known as a search engine for GIFs.
| bottled_poe wrote:
| Yikes. Feels like my privacy is leaking again. Time to find
| some alternative.
| nindalf wrote:
| How many times are you going to make the same comment on this
| thread? This is a pretty good angle for farming karma on HN
| but you have to be more subtle about it.
|
| Other comment - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23192779
| FalconSensei wrote:
| if you were already using giphy, it's not like you had your
| privacy before the acquisition...
| OctopusSandwich wrote:
| Now that Giphy has a rich owner, will hollywood try to sue them
| for using their intellectual property?
| squnch wrote:
| How do the IP issues work here? I would think that Giphy is a
| massive copyright violation entity. Is Facebook just big enough
| to drop the lawyer-hammer on any rightsholders who complain?
| ArmandGrillet wrote:
| Giphy shows good results but the search is quite slow IMO, I hope
| this improves in the future.
|
| If you haven't read Facebook by Steven Levy I recommend it, the
| book explains quite well what happened after the acquisitions of
| Instagram, Whatsapp, and Oculus.
| sjg007 wrote:
| Facebook search is still.. terrible... I don't get it.. They
| should have enough hires from Google that they could make it
| rock. I am not talking about regular Google style search but
| contextual person search etc... So much opportunity here.
| marban wrote:
| Founders at work is really the only anecdotal startup stories
| book you'll ever need.
| bottled_poe wrote:
| Yikes. Feels like my privacy is leaking again. Time to find
| some alternative.
| CamelCaseName wrote:
| > If you haven't read Facebook by...
|
| Thanks! This is exactly the sort of thing I love to read. Got
| anything else you can recommend?
| avipars wrote:
| Hatching Twitter, Elon Musk - Biography, The everything store
| (amazon)
| ArmandGrillet wrote:
| Hatching Twitter is very interesting and has a lot of
| drama, I loved it. I found that Elon Musk had a boring
| writing style (very slow to start). I also recommend Bad
| Blood, it's hard to stop reading it once started.
|
| One great aspect of Facebook is that Zuckerberg interviewed
| with the author for years and the cut into parts makes a
| lot of sense (Harvard and before, "Move fast and break
| things", Trump, aftermath).
| savrajsingh wrote:
| Congrats Alex Chung! Met him a couple times in NYC and he was
| gracious and kind. I remember him mentioning that Giphy is the
| largest search engine behind google or so, which makes sense as
| everyone's searching for cool gifs in chat whenever they can. :)
| maest wrote:
| Bigger than Bing?
| ronnieoverby wrote:
| https://gph.is/g/a99MK06
| loceng wrote:
| I tried to find a The Social Network movie overlay with the
| words "Dumb fucks" on Giphy - though it doesn't seem to have
| it; https://www.theguardian.com/film/2010/oct/20/mark-
| zuckerberg...
| wdb wrote:
| The only GIF you need in Slack is this one:
| https://media.giphy.com/media/n59dQcO9yaaaY/giphy.gif for when a
| new user signs up :)
| kentosi wrote:
| I feel so bitter right now.
|
| A recruiter asked me to join them back in 2016 and they were
| paying $200k+ for a senior backend role. I turned them down
| because I was on a visa and wanted a company with financial
| stability. A gif-search engine startup sounded ludicrous.
|
| Well, here we are...
| annadane wrote:
| Be glad. You do _not_ want to be associated with Facebook.
| KaiserPro wrote:
| yeah but the pay is good and the share package would have
| been stella.
| paxys wrote:
| Facebook has a lot of amazing engineers and developer tools,
| and many of them have great reputations in the industry. I
| know a lot of people working at Facebook in a variety of
| roles and they are all happy and proud of the work they do.
|
| You're trying to make it sound like it'll put a black mark on
| your resume or something.
| seemuch wrote:
| Were you offered any stock/options? How much would that worth
| now? (If you don't mind sharing..)
| jklm wrote:
| Their series D was in 2016, so the options would probably be
| underwater.
| kentosi wrote:
| I can't remember tbh this was 4 years ago.
| likpok wrote:
| Giphy was valued at 600M in 2016 according to The
| Information, so the equity might not be worth much.
| chadlavi wrote:
| I'm sorry but... what? you turned down a 200k salary?
| dtrailin wrote:
| 200k is fairly normal if not low for a senior backed role in
| SF. Especially considering that any stock options you got
| would end up being worthless.
| Negitivefrags wrote:
| I feel like you can quote just about arbitrarily high
| number for an SF engineer salary and someone will come out
| of the woodwork to tell you that it's actually low.
| kentosi wrote:
| (a) I was young(er), (b) I recall other highly-funded
| startups failing at the time, (c) at the time the whole thing
| just sounded laughable/sketchy.
|
| Not to mention I was on a visa...
| meestaahjoshee wrote:
| 200k salary or total comp?
|
| four years is a decent chunk of time im sure youve done fine
| since then dont beat yourself up over it - most startups arent
| really worth joining for the upside potential at IPO or
| acquisition anyway.
| BeautifulOrb wrote:
| Giphy does not make an effort to pay or credit the artists whose
| gifs are on their site.
| 9wzYQbTYsAIc wrote:
| Any good alternatives to GIPHY?
| waylandsmithers wrote:
| In my experience on slack I always thought RightGIF returned
| the gif I was thinking of more often than giphy.
| hckr_news wrote:
| Gyfcat?
| cannedslime wrote:
| Yeah, nothing... What do you even need giphy for? gifs on
| forums / social media is nothing new, we used to upload them
| manually.
|
| Just ffmpeg your own clips, you can't find what you are looking
| for on giphy anyways.
| scared2 wrote:
| These kinds of acquisitions intrigue me. what is valuation
| crieteria?
|
| from technical and innovation perspective, what part of it is
| worth millions?
| dopamean wrote:
| You must not actually believe that the "technical perspective"
| is the only thing that drives value.
| johannes1234321 wrote:
| The fact that it is embedded in tons of software and delivers
| information about usage and trends.
| Nextgrid wrote:
| They don't have a "moat" though - no cutting-edge technology
| or even content licenses (it's all stolen). Anyone can build
| their own alternative to it very easily and I'm confident
| it'll quickly happen to any company that competes with and/or
| feels threatened by Facebook.
| colinmorelli wrote:
| Err, no. This is a serious underestimation of the
| difficulty involved in acquiring users. Networks effects
| are a moat. Market share can be a moat.
|
| You don't need to just "build your own alternative to it."
| You need to get all the content (this is actually not as
| easy as you make it seem - stolen or not), then integrate
| that into Instagram, WhatsApp, Slack, and hundreds of other
| platforms across the world as _the_ supported way of
| sharing gifs. Then you 'll have to build a brand around the
| product that people remember, and whose website they
| actually visit when they want images and aren't using one
| of the hundreds of platforms that already natively
| integrates giphy.
|
| And in order to do all that, you'll have to somehow manage
| to convince everyone out there that your gif search system
| is better than their gif search system that they already
| know, are comfortable with, and generally happy with. Your
| pitch will probably be that theirs is owned by Facebook,
| and is therefore a violation of their privacy. But you know
| who else is owned by Facebook? Facebook. And yet Facebook
| is pushing close to 2 billion daily active users.
|
| Convenience trumps privacy in modern society most of the
| time. I'm sure there will be a changing of the winds -
| there always is - but there likely will not be significant
| competition for
| Facebook/Twitter/Instagram/Giphy/Google/(put any other
| company in here) until that comes. The network effects are
| too strong, and the convenience is too great.
|
| There are so many posts about "(Twitter/Facebook/Giphy)
| clone in a (day/weekend/week/month)" and yet there's a
| distinct lack of commercial successes in these spaces.
|
| Edit: a word.
| askafriend wrote:
| The part where 300M people use it per month and the part where
| it's embedded into a large number of widely used apps.
| pot8n wrote:
| And I thought Coronavirus would end that kind of deals.
| whoisjuan wrote:
| Quite the contrary. Expect to see a lot of M&A activity this
| year. These are times where companies with positive cash flow
| can do strategic acquisitions at a discount.
| codegladiator wrote:
| Ah shit, another site for my /etc/hosts
|
| I wonder reddit would be even more useless for me since half the
| content is from giphy.
| pwython wrote:
| You're probably thinking of imgur, which lost some steam when
| Reddit added their own image hosting. Only a few dozen giphy
| links get posed each day:
| https://www.reddit.com/domain/giphy.com/new/
| FalconSensei wrote:
| Adding to that, I think gfycat should be more used than
| giphy, at least based on how much gfycat content I see there
| lx0741 wrote:
| use cases: - monetize gifs - suggest gifs to their users based on
| their feeds - nothing relevant just #deletefb and save your brain
| and the planet
| davidwitt415 wrote:
| Gifs may be fun to watch the first time, but I have to say it
| drives me crazy to have a bunch of looping animations running all
| over the screen when i'm trying to focus on something.
| frusciante29 wrote:
| Guys, I' telling you. Gif is the next instagram.
| annadane wrote:
| https://overcast.fm/+QLdurp-A8 for a good overview of how
| Facebook treats its acquisitions. Absolutely disgusting. Throw
| Zuck in prison.
| annadane wrote:
| I notice someone went around downvoting _all_ critical FB
| comments I 've posted recently. They legitimately have shills
| patrolling HN.
| tombert wrote:
| Damnit, I turned down a follow-up interview with Giphy years ago
| since I didn't think they were sustainable and I had been burned
| by startups in the past. Shows how much business sense I have!
| maximente wrote:
| this is a horribly irrational and generally unwise way to live
| your life, imo
| tombert wrote:
| I mean, I'm not really crying over it, just mildly annoying.
| sashavingardt2 wrote:
| I've got a few stories like this. One was with Peloton. People
| buying expensive stationary bikes to work out at home?
| Ridiculous! )))
| mangatmodi wrote:
| I would say never regret your decision when the future turns
| out unexpected. You made an educated guess, and you could have
| no idea that they would be success.
| curiousllama wrote:
| If it makes you feel any better, "business sense" is nonsense
| in situations like that. No need to feel bad about buying the
| wrong lottery ticket.
| derwiki wrote:
| Statistically you were still right
| djsumdog wrote:
| eh, it's silly to have those kinds of regrets. You can't
| predict the future, and you made a reasonable decision based on
| the information you had. I wrote this a few years back when
| thinking about what it means to regret something:
| https://battlepenguin.com/philosophy/science/time/
| rwmj wrote:
| It happens. I turned down a job at Shazam very early on because
| I couldn't understand what on earth their business model was.
| They were recently acquired by Apple for (coincidentally)
| $400m. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shazam_(application) The
| actual start up I founded instead fizzled into administration.
| gowld wrote:
| Those were innocent times. When it founded it seemed like a
| stupid toy, and no one on the general public was talking
| about it's now obvious eventual use case as a surveillance
| tool.
| pcthrowaway wrote:
| Well to be fair, no one still talks about that publicly as
| a selling point, they use other words instead like
| "collecting aggregate data on user purchasing trends"
| askafriend wrote:
| Right but Shazam was founded in 1999 and took almost 20 years
| to exit.
|
| You can't look at these numbers in a vacuum.
| rwmj wrote:
| But also Shazam took about $100m in funding with no down
| rounds.
| rosywoozlechan wrote:
| It wouldn't have been life-changing money for you, it
| would have been a minor bonus. Usually, only the founders
| make life-changing money from big deals except in very
| rare instances, like Microsoft and Google. I doubt any
| but a few very early employees did well at Shazam.
| Meanwhile, I'm sure what you learned at the startup you
| joined was far more valuable than whatever the bonus was.
| You made the choice with the information at hand.
|
| Equity for employees is trash value. You would do well to
| just pretend it doesn't even exist when factoring
| decisions about where to work or if to change jobs. I
| never ask for equity, I never care about equity. I care
| about the salary.
| aisengard wrote:
| Unless you wanted to be acquihired into Google/Instagram, you
| likely wouldn't have made any money in equity. This acquisition
| is $200M less than their most recent valuation from 4 years
| ago, the investors are probably taking everything and most
| employee options are likely underwater.
| jondubois wrote:
| I can't help but think of all the millions of economically useful
| people who lost their jobs over the past couple of months because
| of COVID19... And contrast that with all the economically useless
| Giphy employees and executives who not only get to keep their
| jobs but get massive bonuses.
| dang wrote:
| Could you please not post flamewar style comments to HN? We're
| looking for curious conversation, not denunciatory rants, and
| you've done this 4 times in this thread alone.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
| oiasdjfoiasd wrote:
| lol sour grape juice with pinch of salt
| PopeDotNinja wrote:
| I wonder what happens to Giphy porn.
| FalconSensei wrote:
| probably it'll be gone. gfycat already banned it, creating
| another service (redgifs I think) and moving that content there
| mrkramer wrote:
| Zuckerberg is really desperate paying $400m for this, this is
| worth $100m max. Like somebody said earlier Imgur would make more
| sense. And btw VCs who invested late stage in Giphy lost money.
| zumachase wrote:
| No they didn't: liquidation preference.
| dblock wrote:
| Time to finally remove support for it, https://github.com/slack-
| ruby/slack-ruby-bot/issues/261
| infused wrote:
| One more app removed from my phone now. Thanks Facebook.
| block_dagger wrote:
| Gifs in Slack (or anywhere) are a distraction imo. I disable them
| where possible and never post them. I encourage others to do the
| same :)
| Sevaris wrote:
| And the inexorable march towards tech companies owning everything
| continues. I wish anti-trust law wasn't such a joke across the
| globe.
| missedthecue wrote:
| Big company != monopoly.
|
| Facebook does not have a monopoly on anything, and neither does
| Giphy.
| Nextgrid wrote:
| In this case I'm not sure anti-trust would help? Giphy doesn't
| have a monopoly and the product is straightforward to replicate
| by doing the same thing they did - ie scraping and stealing
| content at scale.
| atonse wrote:
| It would because giphy is a great proxy to find out what
| people are CURRENTLY talking about, or how they are feeling,
| based on the gifs they're searching for.
|
| This can fuel better ads. So consolidating this stuff further
| could have that effect.
|
| To me it is so creepy how much of even our casual thoughts
| outside of facebook now are going into facebook servers.
| There's just no escaping these data addicts. That's the
| concern.
| xoxoy wrote:
| It's a Trojan horse play. Giphy is used by all of FB's
| competitors, including Tik Tok.
|
| Scummy imo.
| pier25 wrote:
| So it's a way for FB to get metrics from its competitors?
| xoxoy wrote:
| Yes. It's Maybe even higher signal than the shady VPN they
| bought
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| marmshallow wrote:
| Both are extremely valuable. Giphy data would include a
| wider user-base, but Onavo has much deeper data (all of
| someone's mobile data traffic, which would include seeing
| what someone is searching on Giphy and in which app)
| sjg007 wrote:
| So we should expect TikTok to either replace or phase out
| giphy right? I mean the historical analytics would still
| be good for a while but....
| saagarjha wrote:
| Giphy wouldn't be banned on the App Store, though.
| lukevp wrote:
| Why wouldn't they just buy the data under the table if they
| wanted this info instead of publicly acquiring the company?
| Would be less likely to cause immediate move off the service by
| competitors and would be cheaper?
| [deleted]
| calimac wrote:
| When are regulators going to realize this is antitrust and put
| a stop to it?
| nanna wrote:
| Let's not forget Signal, a competitor to WhatsApp.
| ylk wrote:
| Signal apparently solved (parts of) that issue when they
| implemented it? from https://signal.org/blog/giphy-
| experiment/:
|
| > Since communication is done via TLS all the way to GIPHY,
| the Signal service never sees the plaintext contents of what
| is transmitted or received. Since the TCP connection is
| proxied through the Signal service, GIPHY doesn't know who
| issued the request.
|
| > While this does hide your IP address from GIPHY and your
| search terms from Signal, there are some caveats. The GIPHY
| service could use subtleties like TLS session resume or cache
| hits to try to correlate multiple requests as having come
| from the same client, even if they don't know the origin.
|
| edit: more here https://signal.org/blog/signal-and-giphy-
| update/
|
| previous discussion:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12853248
| encom wrote:
| And Telegram.
| partiallypro wrote:
| Does Signal have enough of a userbase for Facebook to even
| care about? I doubt it.
| nanna wrote:
| I don't really know about that, but the more important
| question is could it.
| est31 wrote:
| Signal MAU is probably in the low two digit million range
| (probably because there are no public data), while Whatsapp
| MAU is 2 billion as of March [1]. So Signal has maybe 1% of
| Whatsapp's market share.
|
| [1]: https://www.statista.com/statistics/260819/number-of-
| monthly...
| snazz wrote:
| TikTok could switch to Tenor, which is already what Discord and
| a few other services use.
| gkop wrote:
| Note that Tenor is owned by Google.
| ChrisArchitect wrote:
| didn't realize that Google already bought other gif
| 'service' Tenor (aka Riffsy!) a few years back.
|
| Interesting/not interesting all just services for
| integration and tracking in various platforms. Will FB stop
| Twitter from using Giphy?
| ori_b wrote:
| Why would they do that, when they could correlate Twitter
| accounts with Facebook accounts instead?
| FalconSensei wrote:
| Google doesn't have anything competing with TikTok, as far
| as I know
| sokoloff wrote:
| Isn't YouTube a (rough) competitor to TikTok?
| skinnymuch wrote:
| It's a rough direct competitor imo before. Now they're
| copying TikTok too. Already been announced.
| ganoushoreilly wrote:
| https://mobilesyrup.com/2020/04/01/google-youtube-shorts-
| tik...
| skinnymuch wrote:
| Google is launching a copy of TikTok with Youtube
| branding. Directly competing with them.
| FalconSensei wrote:
| Wasn't aware of that, thanks
| znpy wrote:
| giphy is also what Telegram uses when you as for a gif via
| @gif
| xoxoy wrote:
| I assume they must. Otherwise analytics sent to Giphy would
| make it too easy for FB to track growth.
| Nextgrid wrote:
| Doesn't TikTok include the Facebook SDK already, thus
| giving them the metrics already (the SDK pings every time
| the app is brought into foreground)?
| xoxoy wrote:
| I assume there's some Great Wall that prevents growth
| teams from using data from the FB SDK to spy on
| competitors. Wouldn't be true of Giphy analytics.
| iphone_elegance wrote:
| Makes sense, it seems like a great way to inject ads coupled with
| facebooks profile information it's likely a goldmine
|
| You start a campaign and suddenly you have people inserting meme-
| like-ads feature your content into their chat threads
|
| It'll have a personal and convincing touch ( esp. with facebooks
| ad targeting) it's going to be amazing for our industry reaching
| customers, Pepe/Trump memes did win an election afterall
|
| Also a great way to get ads into whatsapp messages without
| seeming intrusive
| scared2 wrote:
| These kinds of acquisitions intrigue me. what is valuation
| crieteria? from technical and innovation perspective, what part
| of it is worth millions?
| squnch wrote:
| The part that is worth millions is the user base. It's like
| asking why a famous movie actor makes so much more money than
| an equally skilled nobody out of acting school -- it's because
| people want what they already know.
| yreg wrote:
| Another commenter pointed out that Giphy is integrated into
| many products and buying Giphy is a way to get metrics about
| those products.
| Macha wrote:
| For $400m?
| rhacker wrote:
| Eyeballs. It's used casually by many millions of people
| daily. That's all that's needed to justify price.
| scared2 wrote:
| Makes more sense. But it is easy to replace it with another
| giphy. Especially when there is privacy reason.
| johannes1234321 wrote:
| Question os: How many will switch it out? Giphy has a big
| collection of images and works ... swapping is effort and
| brings different (unexpected?) results.
| kevin_thibedeau wrote:
| Create a proxy that exfiltrates their active database
| while providing anonymity.
| 0az wrote:
| I'm guessing Data. Trends, among others.
| macintux wrote:
| Makes me wonder whether you could use trends in use by
| employees at a large company to do some trading. If their
| gifs turn negative in advance of an earnings report, that's
| probably not a good sign.
| scoot_718 wrote:
| This is the first (and I'm guessing last) I've ever heard of
| giphy.
| zemo wrote:
| weird flex but ok
| annadane wrote:
| Could you stop? Don't you have enough? Let me guess. Giphy will
| now be used to spy on people, it won't be chronological any more,
| Zuck bought this because it threatens his internet empire, etc
| etc...
| didip wrote:
| For a silly product, this is a great success despite its "down
| round". Congrats to everyone who has equities.
| schoolornot wrote:
| Struggling to understand the value-add for Facebook here. For a
| while they were buying businesses for the coveted "screen time" -
| VR, messaging, etc. Everyone expected that they would monetize or
| integrate those platforms, and they did for most apps.
|
| So I guess if I post a giphy in a work chat they will now get an
| extra few seconds of ~100 people's screen time/day. What's the
| point? I doubt they will overlay ads. So what else? Some form of
| content control? Only show pics that ascribe to Facebook's
| agenda?
| ComodoHacker wrote:
| What kind of gifs you like/share/post would be a useful
| addition to your [shadow] profile, won't it? More training
| material for their AI projects.
| crankylinuxuser wrote:
| Giphy was the reason why at my last job, a manager inadvertently
| posted porn to our slack channel.
|
| Nevertheless, giphy was just a gif image host. They do have
| access to current meme culture, which I imagine is useful to FB.
| But for me, thats just a less of a reason to use them. Im data-
| mined enough already.
| agigao wrote:
| A few weeks ago I decided to completely stop using gifs and
| emojis in conversations, and goes what conversations got more
| meaningful and thoughtful.
| holler wrote:
| Im working on a new conversation app and I'm explicitly never
| going to allow gifs or emojis as they degrade the conversation
| , distract, and prevent meaningful dialog.
| jdkee wrote:
| I hope this transaction undergoes a deep antitrust review. As
| Instagram should have.
| lowdose wrote:
| Its a multisided platform inside every app.
| xd_dino wrote:
| Duh. I am sure of one thing what is going to happen for pretty
| little Giphy service. Instagram was cool. now, I see sponsored
| Ads for every two posts. It is annoying to be in Insta nowadays.
| I suppose this is going to happen for Giphy as well. How
| frustrating if you are searching for quick witty gif and you see
| a sponsored ads in it.. you never know FB monster can do this.
| scared2 wrote:
| How many gifs does it host and does it have rights to It??
| zemo wrote:
| at least six
| autokad wrote:
| i hate giphy, its a SV solution to a problem that never existed.
|
| gifs were fine, now some silicon tech forced them out and we get
| all the fun of copy rights and lack of saving the gifs for our
| personal use /s
| chadlavi wrote:
| Well, frig. Time to find a new very good gif source.
| dumbfounder wrote:
| Congrats to Giphy, but honestly it baffles me they are worth this
| much money. Do they actually bring in decent revenue, or was this
| all about eyeballs? Is this content even decently monetizable?
|
| Disclaimer: I am the jaded creator of Twicsy, a Twitter picture
| engine with many millions of visitors over its lifetime, and I
| apparently missed the boat on this trends and had to shut it
| down.
| snissn wrote:
| They're integrated into a lot of apps and maybe even apple's
| OS. In addition to those integration and business relationships
| they probably have some sort of data sharing / ad tech thingy
| that's worth some money on its own.
| kennxfl wrote:
| Makes sense because Whatsapp is a client.
| trizzle21 wrote:
| they do embed Ads into your gif searches... however, who knows
| what is happening to ad spend in these Covid times.
| cosmie wrote:
| Read the privacy policy[1].
|
| Think of Giphy images as a giant, organically shared version of
| web tracking software. Which complements the coverage of the FB
| Pixel[2] well, as it worms its way into privacy-conscious areas
| they might not have FB Pixel coverage such as private
| communications and security/privacy-minded apps. And without
| implementing something like a proxy server to pre-
| cache/sanitize images and strip tracking identifiers in both
| directions, it's a tracking vector that's hard to keep out of
| your app without introducing user friction.
|
| Given that cynical viewpoint, the valuation makes a ton of
| sense.
|
| [1] https://support.giphy.com/hc/en-
| us/articles/360032872931-GIP...
|
| [2]
| https://www.facebook.com/business/help/742478679120153?id=12...
| cced wrote:
| Does the fact that it is integrated into iOS keyboard have
| any implications? WlWhat kind of data does this have access
| to when I send gifs from iOS keyboard?
| nullbyte wrote:
| iOS keyboards given "full access" in settings can see
| literally everything you type. That's why I don't use
| GBoard on my iPhone, also why I don't enable "enhanced
| spellcheck" in Chrome.
| impalallama wrote:
| Hmm, I guess I know why SwiftKey became free. Probably
| want to check on their privacy policy now
| RandallBrown wrote:
| Not sure if the iOS keyboard uses Giphy. I get very
| different results searching for the same things in the
| keyboard and on the Giphy website.
| degenerate wrote:
| Google messenger (the default texting app) has a gif search
| that includes giphy, and Discord and slack also use giphy.
| What I don't see is what data FB is getting when the gif
| loads. OK, so they can see I am using giphy in Discord. Now
| what?
|
| _edit: apparently wrong /outdated information._
| cosmie wrote:
| They can also see that you use Discord, as well as how
| often and how heavily. And potentially other facets that
| can be derived from whatever metadata is provided to
| Facebook in the course of serving that image request.
|
| There's also all kinds of shenanigans that they can play
| in the process of serving that request to harvest other
| meta data and help fingerprint you. Which Giphy's privacy
| policy mentions is already done to an extent, in the form
| of dropping cookies while servicing your request. Cookie
| abuse itself is a bit of a losing battle, as browser
| vendors increasingly layer on limitations and
| restrictions for cookies. But they're far from the only
| method of fingerprinting possible during the servicing of
| a web request.
| ehsankia wrote:
| I'm fairly sure this is False. GBoard uses Tenor (the
| next largest Giphy competitor), which Google also happens
| to have bought 2 years ago (undisclosed amount of money).
| I also just tested Messages and can confirm that the
| results look like Tenor too.
|
| For Discord, while they initially used Giphy and has a
| /giphy command, it now uses Tenor too in the GIF picker.
| bndw wrote:
| Hypothetically speaking, fb gets a request for an image
| for each person in a chat at roughly the same time. Now
| they know know what chat platform you're using and who is
| participating in the chat. I'd venture a guess those
| participant identities could be de-referenced with data
| collected from their various [other] trackers. Now they
| can extend their social graph to include communication
| patterns on 3rd party platforms.
| calmworm wrote:
| > Given that cynical viewpoint
|
| I wouldn't even call that cynical. It's just the state of
| things.
| [deleted]
| tantalor wrote:
| It absolutely is cynical. Just another "If you're not
| paying for it, you're not the customer; you're the product
| being sold."
| kelnos wrote:
| "Cynical" usually implies an element of assuming the
| worst when such an assumption is far from certain. In
| this case I think the assumption is spot-on and not at
| all surprising.
| rexpop wrote:
| Just because you've heard it before doesn't make it
| false. I hope your naivete represents a minority
| perspective.
| Drakim wrote:
| While you aren't wrong, in this day and age it's _not_
| enough to simply pay. Even if you pay for something, you
| are still the product being sold. Why would a company
| leave money on the table, when violating people 's
| privacy is profitable and there is no backlash?
| Aeolun wrote:
| Ethics?
| chispamed wrote:
| In a society which doesn't care enough and a legal system
| that doesn't punish unethical behaviour any company
| tapping unethical revenue streams in addition to the
| ethical ones will have a competitive advantage and given
| otherwise similar conditions eventually outperform
| ethical companies. Once a sole actor goes down that path
| it puts a lot of pressure on all other actors to throw
| ethics overboard as well as otherwise their company's
| survival and in extension their livelihood will be
| threatened. This is why we can't just rely on market
| forces sorting everything out, consumers making decision,
| etc. but have to actively legislate to protect our
| privacy and personal rights.
| justapassenger wrote:
| It's not this day and age. Analytics and data mining of
| customers data is as old as business. 2000 years ago
| merchants were also tracking who's buying what, in what
| city, what time of the year, etc.
|
| It's waaaaay more efficient nowadays and way more creepy,
| but it's not a new invention.
| calmworm wrote:
| What you're describing with that quote isn't cynicism.
| Especially as far as FB is concerned. That is absolutely
| business as usual for them and has been for years.
| nerdponx wrote:
| _proxy server to pre-cache /sanitize images and strip
| tracking identifiers in both directions_
|
| Developing such a tool might be valuable for privacy-
| conscious application developers.
| cosmie wrote:
| Google already does it with Gmail[1][2], so it's not
| unheard of. But it adds another layer of complexity, plus
| is somewhat antithetical to the privacy viewpoint as it
| then exposes all of the images to the _app developer_ now
| since it 's routed through the proxy server instead of
| direct end-user -> image server requests.
|
| [1] Can't find a page specifically detailing it, but [2]
| gives a basic synopsis on it in the context of allowing
| GSuite admins to whitelist internal domains from routing
| through the proxy.
|
| [2] https://support.google.com/a/answer/3299041?hl=en
| tootie wrote:
| I'm still dubious. Giphy hit it's peak of power 2-3 years ago
| and has plateaued or even tapered since then. It was all over
| reddit and Slack for a while and then the novelty wore off
| and competitors popped up.
| 83457 wrote:
| Won't that tracking capability be going away pretty soon?
| cosmie wrote:
| Cookie-based tracking, sure. But there are plenty of other
| avenues for fingerprinting. This[1] help doc from Adobe
| Analytics even makes reference to a Subscriber ID header
| you can get mobile carriers to give you, if you get onto
| the carrier's whitelist. Nothing the vendors do
| device/browser-side to restrict tracking will help if your
| mobile carrier is transparently appending an identifying
| header to your request after it leaves your phone.
|
| [1] https://docs.adobe.com/content/help/en/analytics/techno
| tes/v...
| deadso wrote:
| This doesn't work for SSL enabled websites, right?
| cosmie wrote:
| I'm really not certain, as I've never seen an
| implementation that involved it. There was a lot of stink
| about it 5 years ago[1], which called out the exact
| argument of it not working for HTTPS traffic. Which, is a
| substantially larger portion of traffic now than it was
| at the time.
|
| But you still see nondescript references to the
| capability in places like that that up-to-date Adobe
| Analytics doc, and the carriers aren't trying to use
| legal means (a la lobbying) to slow down the uptick in
| HTTPS traffic and preserve their revenue stream. Which
| leads me to presume they've developed technical solutions
| that are compatible with HTTPS traffic. They can't really
| use the spray-and-pay method[2] they were using. But all
| bets are off when they destination site and the carriers
| are coordinating with each other, as that coordination
| can involve technical modifications to facilitate it in
| addition to just the whitelisting itself.
|
| [1] https://www.ghacks.net/2015/08/31/are-mobile-carrier-
| injecte...
|
| [2] Some carriers would inject a header into all traffic,
| and any interested party could slurp them up. But you'd
| have to pay the carrier to access any of the other
| information the carrier had for that particular
| identifier.
| specialist wrote:
| Keen analysis, thank you.
|
| Paraphrasing: emojis serving as web bugs.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_beacon
| ogre_codes wrote:
| I was surprised it it carried this kind of valuation too, but I
| think this is a matter of finding the right buyer. This isn't
| about revenue, it's another way for Facebook to harvest
| metrics, this time across competing products.
| basch wrote:
| The other interesting thing about this one, is that they dont
| even attempt to license content do they? They dont have any
| content costs?
|
| Theres been this fake (steal) it till you make it, wild west
| approach to growth. Youtube, Buzzfeed, Imgur. You just host
| anybodys content regardless of if the poster is the owner, and
| once you get to scale, then you handle copyright and creating
| your own content so you arent as dependent on external
| creators.
|
| But in Giphys case, they never have to take the extra step.
| Because they are so short, they are much more likely to pass
| fair use, and they can just host anybodys anything, barring
| some illegal fringes, without having to pay for the rights.
| waylandsmithers wrote:
| Maybe this is a win for everyone then if content owners and
| creators are able to get paid as a result
| ikeyany wrote:
| Investors reward asking for forgiveness, not permission. Just
| ask Uber.
| giarc wrote:
| I wonder if it's similar to music, where you can play a short
| piece without compensating the artist? Since most gifs are <5
| seconds, it's not content stealing.
| basch wrote:
| it is still stealing[1].
|
| fair use is an affirmative defense, where you say "yes i
| stole it, but the government should not protect the content
| owner from me," similar to "yes i injured them, but it was
| self defense and they do not deserve compensation."
|
| [1]intellectual property violations are not theft in the
| strictest sense of the word, they don't remove the
| original. stealing in this context is colloquial.
| saagarjha wrote:
| Stealing is illegal, as is assault, and you are not
| convicted of assault in cases of self-defense. Similarly,
| calling fair use "government sanctioned stealing" is a
| bit of a stretch.
| basch wrote:
| That's exactly what it is. Fair use is a government
| granted exception to intellectual protectionism. The
| government is the one determining what counts as
| intellectual property violations, and what counts as
| exempt from punishment.
|
| Without intellectual property law, you would be free to
| copy anything. The barrier to copying is the government.
| The free pass to flaunt their rule, when qualified, is
| also the government.
| saagarjha wrote:
| I fail to see how this situation differs from the
| distinction between assault and self-defense.
| basch wrote:
| assault and self defense were my analogy of something
| similar. im saying they are not different in kind. akin
| to self defense being government sanctioned murder.
| rosywoozlechan wrote:
| I don't think fair use was meant to be something where you
| base your entire business around other people's content.
| rhizome wrote:
| Business models have been created upon flimsier
| foundations. Come on, capitalists: you've taught us for
| decades that if someone can make it work, it's above
| criticism. Are we now discovering moral constraints on
| profit?
| parineum wrote:
| Facebook, Twitter and Google (YouTube) have used that
| strategy to ignore their obligations to filter their content
| by getting into some type of "too bug to fail" situation and
| throwing their hands up when they are asked to do their duty.
| Those products didn't fill a niche by innovating, they filled
| a niche by ignoring the obligations that were preventing
| others from filling the niche.
| burrows wrote:
| I own and operate a flea market. I sell stall usage to
| merchants who sell their goods at the flea market.
|
| Am I responsible when stolen goods are sold from my stalls?
|
| I own and operate an RV park. Someone is selling illegal
| drugs from one of the RVs.
|
| Am I responsible for the illegal drug sales?
| esmi wrote:
| > Am I responsible for the illegal drug sales?
|
| You might not be liable for the sale itself but,
| depending on the details, you could definitely still have
| serious legal risk.
|
| https://www.nolo.com/legal-encyclopedia/criminal-acts-
| activi...
| gundmc wrote:
| > Facebook, Twitter and Google (YouTube) have used that
| strategy to ignore their obligations to filter their
| content by getting into some type of "too bug to fail"
| situation and throwing their hands up when they are asked
| to do their duty
|
| I don't think this is quite fair to YouTube. They've spent
| hundreds of millions of dollars developing ContentID. It's
| not perfect, but it's without a doubt the most
| sophisticated system to date. It's a difficult problem, but
| I don't see how you can say they've "thrown up their
| hands".
| pbhjpbhj wrote:
| I thought the DMCA reporting system was basically made
| for Google (maybe by Google???) so they could have a
| middle-ground. They shift responsibility to content
| owners, through the law; then sell themselves as virtuous
| through ContentID and keep enough infringing content to
| not too deleteriously effect their platform -- collecting
| ad revenue even on content they allow that's infringing.
|
| You can say what you like, but that's genius level
| politics-business IMO.
| rhizome wrote:
| "Behind every great fortune is a crime."
| timfrietas wrote:
| GIPHY has agreements with pretty much all the major content
| studios, including ones historically protective of their
| content, such as HBO, the NFL and Disney.
| Nextgrid wrote:
| I think the main problem is not movie studios (where fair
| use is likely to apply as we're talking about a 10-second
| GIF out of a 1h+ movie) but all the meme creators on Reddit
| and other social networks. I assume those make up the
| majority of GIFs out there and as of now they aren't being
| compensated or even credited properly.
| Dangeranger wrote:
| This is an unpopular opinion, but if the meme creator
| violated copyright when they made the meme, and they want
| credit for their "derived version" then they need a
| license.
| rhizome wrote:
| What would be the infringement? I would say any animated
| GIF (or whatever) should be defined as fair use across
| the board, since it's impossible to use it for anything
| other than criticism or comment. It's not exactly like
| Beastie Boys vs. Chambers Bros, but it rhymes with it.
| taejavu wrote:
| Isn't there a gif of the entire first Shrek movie?
| saagarjha wrote:
| Perhaps, but that's clearly not covered by fair use.
| Posting the entire Shrek movie as a GIF is not creating a
| "new meme".
| Nextgrid wrote:
| I disagree that they violated copyright. If they're using
| a screenshot or a short clip from a movie that is
| definitely fair use. On the other hand, what Giphy is
| doing is copying the _entire_ meme.
| mthoms wrote:
| >GIPHY has agreements with pretty much all the major
| content studios, including ones historically protective of
| their content, such as HBO, the NFL and Disney.
|
| Incredible. What a strange time we live in.
|
| This makes me wonder, does Disney have any say if someone
| uploads a home-made Mickey gif that is controversial or
| otherwise damaging to their brand?
| 101404 wrote:
| It's all about collecting user data and usage data. Not about
| serving images.
| rofws wrote:
| The only time I use giphy is through google keyboard (yes, I send
| a lot of memes). I guess google will have to pay them now? Or
| will keyboard stop supporting giphy?
| FalconSensei wrote:
| IMHO they will migrate to something else
| hetspookjee wrote:
| I read in this thread that Tenor is the Gif service owned by
| Google. I do wonder why they dont use it in the first place?
| stiray wrote:
| Nice to know, their domains are going directly to my banned sites
| list. They have acquired gliphy to extend reach of their pixels
| and well... I can live without gifs.
|
| (edit: they are already banned. Nothing to do.)
| [deleted]
| rodiger wrote:
| Gif trends are likely infinitely mineable for consumer trends.
| This makes sense for Facebook- the goliath grows another inch.
| gabagoo wrote:
| It's important to have hard data on how many people like The
| Office
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