- cross-posted to:
- technology@beehaw.org
- cross-posted to:
- technology@beehaw.org
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
I’m not sure if it’s dying because this constantly happens. Practically all the image hosts I grew up died ages ago (and many of their replacements, too). Dead image links in older forums are more common than working links. I think it’s very difficult to create a sustainable image and video host, especially when people want to use it mostly in embedded or direct links, which really limits the ability to monetize.
I think websites hosting their own images is often ideal because:
That said, the big downsides are inefficiency and tooling. Central hosts meant more efficient caching. Stuff like GIFs in particular are often common memes. I bet the 1000 most common memes are reused by thousands of sites worldwide and thus work great in a CDN (content delivery network – basically a distributed cache for media files). As well, central sites can build embeddable widgets or stuff like GIF keyboards (e.g., the default Android keyboard, GBoard, has GIF support with I think GIPHY and Discord seems to use Tenor). If every site has to host their own, that’s a lot of reinventing the wheel. Common libraries can help, but not to the extent that a managed cloud service can.
As an aside, I wonder if Google and Discord pay for that GIF integration into their products?
The current wave seems more severe due to centralization and coincidence.
Twitter, Reddit, Imgur, Gfycat and a bunch of others seem to all crash themselves practically over night - and the same night at that. And due to centralization/monopolies, that means a significant chunk of the respective niches are gone without a clear replacement. And especially reddit was a niche aggregator.