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From their website: 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.

This has been a strange year.

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[-] Flicsmo@rammy.site 165 points 1 year ago

This certainly has been a strange year. The reckoning for these big unprofitable sites was inevitable in retrospect, but it's wild how much is happening all at once.

[-] Cube6392@beehaw.org 71 points 1 year ago

I think it has a lot to do with Silicon Valley Bank failing. These companies were running on loans with the promise of "the profits will come, some day." Whether they meant to or not, many of our most relied upon services were being run as venture capital scams. Whether these companies turned profits or not didn't matter so much as long as the executives were getting paid salaries, and could show the investors graphs that showed something was happening to grow the company, it didn't matter if the service was bleeding investor money into the cloud giants like Amazon, Microsoft, and Google.

And if we want to trace the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank back further, look no farther than Sam Bankman-Fried, Cara Ellison, and FTX. That one was very expressly a venture capital scam and a ponzi scheme rolled into one. I'm not going to say all cryptocoins are scamcoins, but I will happily say that enough of then are that the collapse of FTX has done permanent harm to the kinds of confidence people will be willing to put into digital fiat currencies. But what I more want to point out is that Sam Bankman-Fried was an intensified version of the kinds of people who have been showing growth charts and promising "profits, someday" while drawing massive salaries and bleeding investor money. He was playing video games on meetings and it was building his reputation, not harming it

The investors who knew SBF was playing games in meetings were the investors who backed Reddit and Gfycat. Now that their SVB money and their FTX money is never coming back, they need to withdraw money from other investments, while at the same time Reddit and Gfycat are no longer receiving their stream of money to pay their cloud bills. The result? Corporate web 2.0 is dead as of July 1st, 2023. Sure. There are still corporate web 2.0 services shambling across this earth, including Twitter and Reddit whose actions yesterday marked the end of corporate web 2.0, but they're zombies. Their hearts have stopped beating. They're dead ans they don't even know it.

Whether you call it small web, web0, or my personal choice, Web 2.0.1, we are currently experiencing a rise of user owned web services that are picking up the slack left by corporate web 2.0 while in many ways rejecting web 3.0 as not being ready, or outright being a scam. We have a critical opportunity right now. We have the chance to realize that Mark Zuckerberg, Jack Dorsey, Alexis Ohanian, Stephen Huffman, or Elon Musk don't have exclusive rights to enable us or empower us to interact online. They were holding a magic feather. We can use the tools of the fediverse to replace them. Its a little more work, yes, but so is everything when you take your own ownership of things. Making your own meals is more work than going to McDonalds, but its cheaper and healthier. Growing your own tomatoes is more work than going to the store, but you get the enjoyment of doing it and lesson your environmental impact. Owning your own home is more work than renting, but you get to keep the equity you build.

This federated internet experiment is worth the work. While we're still experiencing some reliance in the cloud providers, they're at least providing us with a service we might not have been able to figure out on our own. Twitter, Facebook, and reddit, though? Their value was a shared hallucination. They were useful to us because we collectively convinced ourselves they were useful. Now we just need to convince ourselves that the bug fix to web 2.0, web 2.0.1, removing the corporations, is worthwhile.

If you're reading this, it means you've taken a big first step. Now take the second: tell a friend

[-] snakesnakewhale@sh.itjust.works 20 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

This was great to read, and reminds me of the joke that the stock market is just astrology for dudes.

[-] MashingBundle@lemmy.fmhy.ml 8 points 1 year ago

Great read, and right on the nose. Louis Rossman has a good video discussing this issue, especially Reddit's role in all of it. Forgot the title, but its pretty recent.

The "golden days" of internet social media platforms are gone. It was fun while it lasted, but these companies were BLEEDING venture capitalist money, and at some point they have to show a profit. That time is now, and it's ugly.

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[-] curryandbeans@lemmy.world 59 points 1 year ago

Web 2.0 was a house of cards all this time I suppose

[-] fongaboo@lemmy.fmhy.ml 48 points 1 year ago

As a Web 1.0 survivor, I can tell you it's always been a house of cards. They keep trying to shoehorn a circular, communal, socialist invention (the Internet itself) into a square, capitalist hole. And it doesn't work.

Aron Swartz knew that, and maybe even Tom from MySpace. He knew when to get out and leave someone else holding the bag.

[-] dan@lemm.ee 23 points 1 year ago

They’re all jumping to get their bad news out while there’s a lot of other drama going on, in the hopes it’ll go less noticed.

[-] fgjbvdrgbbb@lemmynsfw.com 8 points 1 year ago

Its because credits got expensive. You cant get money that easily anymore.

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[-] Quark95@lemmy.fmhy.ml 107 points 1 year ago

Man, this really isn’t a good year for the internet

[-] dan@lemm.ee 125 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Or it could be a really fucking great year. It could mark the end of commercialised social media and the beginnings of truly widespread adoption of free and open alternatives.

[-] Flicsmo@rammy.site 53 points 1 year ago

While this year has been painful for the data preservationist part of me, I also couldn't be more excited for the rise of the small web and open platforms.

[-] dan@lemm.ee 20 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Yeah all that information disappearing is a huge disappointment.

But realistically while Reddit Inc own that data it was always going to happen eventually. If it wasn't the demand from LLMs pushing them to lock it away so they can monetise it, it'd have been a move like Twitter blocking non logged in users, or just them purging old data to save money or something.

[-] snakesnakewhale@sh.itjust.works 16 points 1 year ago

I keep saying that it's like losing a shitty Library of Alexandria.

[-] Quark95@lemmy.fmhy.ml 18 points 1 year ago

I appreciate your optimistic view on the situation. I really hope Lemmy will one day reach the same level of popularity as Reddit.

[-] Akasazh@feddit.nl 6 points 1 year ago

I hope it will remain a bit more niche, but yeah.

You gave a hopeless soul some hope today. Thank you.

[-] FistfulOfStars@kbin.social 22 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Just wait until the "targeted ad" bubble pops because people realize it's all a fraudulently inflated market with little to no true value.

There will be wailing, and gnashing of teeth.

[-] Clairvoidance@kbin.social 7 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Entirely speculation, but I think this might be why some of the dominoes are already falling?
Like maybe all the ads pulled out of Twitter and saw that it didn't impact the ad companies very much?
If so, it could be the true end to Web 2.0

[-] iopq@vlemmy.net 6 points 1 year ago

Or maybe the best year?

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[-] XanXic@lemmy.world 80 points 1 year ago

They really were foolish to sell off Redgifs. Idk how they thought a normal gif hosting service was more profitable in the long run than their porn gifs site that caught on like wildfire. Everyone at the time was like 'wtf, sell the gify knockoff'

[-] BananaTrifleViolin@kbin.social 18 points 1 year ago

Typical corporate moralising. Tumblr blocked adult content to keep advertisers and it's corporate owners happy and the site died. Snapchat sold off the adult part of their Gif business even though - let's face it - what is Snapchat used for?

There seems to be a lack of acceptance in business that adults will be adults and you can't sanatise the Internet to make it acceptable for advertisers or to impose the morals of minority religious groups on the majority.

Gfycat is presumably very difficult to monetise. We're in another wave of the history of dotcoms where companies and investors realise being an Internet based country is not a license to print money.

Its not clear though how to make a free alternative to something like Gfycat. Someone has to pay for the hosting and bandwidth. Are we moving to a subscription based model for the Internet? For example the fediverse but with premium fast servers for those who pay and slow advertiser funded servers for this who don't? Or Wikipedia like foundations for image hosting? Who knows.

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[-] jray4559@lemmy.fmhy.ml 46 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Man this year has just been a total collapse of everything:

character,ai filtrations

GPT slowly being neutered thanks to societal concerns

Twitter being fucked by Mr. Elon "I know everything" Musk

Imgur cleaning house for no reason

Reddit dropping a nuke on 3rd Party apps

Netflix killing password sharing

Youtube feeling in to kill adblockers

-and now gfycat is about to collapse entirely.

What the actual fuck?

[-] Vlhacs@reddthat.com 23 points 1 year ago

Yet another step toward end game capitalism where nothing's free/affordable anymore and only way to consume basic entertainment is either through a paid service or absolutely ridiculous ads everywhere. Where CEOs are squeezed by shareholders for every last extra % in their returns and in turn makes their product as anti consumer as possible except for the top 1% that can afford it.

[-] sweBers@lemmy.fmhy.ml 6 points 1 year ago

Tech CEOs: Turns out the cloud costs money. Who knew? What next, credits are going to send me bills, lol? I already spent that money.

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[-] nostalgicgamerz@lemmy.world 45 points 1 year ago

Probably couldn’t make money and the VC funds dried up….

[-] TechnoBabble@lemmy.world 13 points 1 year ago

All the VC money is being dumped into AI right now.

Tech companies of yesteryear are starting to have to prove themselves in order to get funding, instead of relying on the wishy washy promises of old.

We can already see with Lemmy, that this phenomenon is giving breathing room to FOSS services.

I think it's awesome, even if we'll have to deal with growing pains for a while.

[-] GunnarRunnar@kbin.social 10 points 1 year ago

What even was their business plan? I never understood how'd they make money. I guess advertising is always the answer but how...

[-] n3m4c@kbin.social 8 points 1 year ago

That’s why this year everything is going down. VCs demand you start making some money or shut down and nobody bothered figuring out how to make money

[-] VoxAdActa@kbin.social 8 points 1 year ago

I am not a finance guy; this is my kindergarten-level understanding of the situation:

When the interest rates were hovering down around 0%, it was a no-brainer for VC firms to shotgun money out to everyone who walked past their office building. Most VC money doesn't come from some rich dude's pocket; it comes from banks and hedge funds and other deeply-market-tied entities. If any one startup they've invested in can win the profit lottery, the VCers will massively beat the rate of return they'd get for anything else. One big success can cover a dozen small failures, and, anyway, a business isn't a failure until it's a failure.

Now that interest rates are rapidly moving higher, those startup investments are less of a good deal. VC money is more expensive. VC firms are starting to close out their positions on start-ups that aren't beating them market, because they want to stick their money somewhere more reliably profitable.

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[-] homesnatch@lemmy.one 6 points 1 year ago

Business plan... That was the problem, the business plan was just a bunch of cat pics in a binder. Cute, but not so profitable.

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[-] CriticalMiss@lemmy.world 22 points 1 year ago

So much porn, gone, reduced to ashes.

[-] 676@lemmy.ca 42 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

I don't think gfycat had very much porn anymore. Most if not all went to redgifs.com

[-] 01189998819991197253@infosec.pub 21 points 1 year ago

I've never heard of gyfcat. Or so I thought. I opened the website and immediately went "oh! I know this site! I love this site! Oh wait... Aw man...." What a rollercoaster

[-] vqsv@lemm.ee 20 points 1 year ago

The internet is dying. Federated is the last stand.

[-] Cycro@vlemmy.net 39 points 1 year ago

Web 2.0* is dying, and good riddance imo. I'm ready for the return of grassroots social media and decentralized communities.

[-] OngoGablogian@sh.itjust.works 16 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

I started out on usenet and shitty ezboard web forums. Web 2.0 collapsing is just another inflection point, there's always a replacement

[-] lemmyvore@feddit.nl 7 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

The way things have been going I keep expecting to hear BBS's are coming back.

[-] LemUrun@lemmy.fmhy.ml 17 points 1 year ago

What the fuck is happening with everything?

[-] hydra@lemmy.world 24 points 1 year ago

No more VC free money + enshittification

[-] american_defector@lemmy.world 16 points 1 year ago

The theme this year is that anything that doesn’t fit the IPO mold goes out the window I guess.

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[-] AndreTelevise@lemmy.world 15 points 1 year ago

Gfycat was innovative for its time. Rest in peace...

[-] n3m4c@kbin.social 14 points 1 year ago

So Reddit now becomes even more useless. Collection of DNS not resolving

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[-] mo_lave@reddthat.com 13 points 1 year ago
[-] Nusm@beehaw.org 12 points 1 year ago

Man, that’s a shame.

[-] zedtronic@kbin.social 11 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Hey wait I’ve seen this one before!

“ The dotcom bubble burst when capital began to dry up. In the years preceding the bubble, record-low interest rates, the adoption of the Internet, and interest in technology companies allowed capital to flow freely, especially to startup companies that had no track record of success.”

[-] jim@programming.dev 8 points 1 year ago
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this post was submitted on 02 Jul 2023
624 points (98.6% liked)

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