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Meta to sell Giphy after UK watchdog confirms ruling

theguardian.com

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Re: Meta to sell Giphy after UK watchdog confirms ruling

#151

Post by ch4s3 »

lovich wrote: post #150
ch4s3 wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The phrase "cutting off the supply of gifs to rivals" may be one of the dumbest things I've ever read in my life. I honestly can't believe someone wrote that in a legal opinion. To me this smacks of our leaders, broadly, in the West being too old and too far removed from how people operate and live in the world today. This is like Lindsey Graham, who was once on the senate technology committee, admitting that he had…

It’s a library of content for a feature that’s considered table stakes for modern chat clients. If it wasn’t worth anything why would Facebook have paid so much for it?

> considered table stakes for modern chat clients

I'm not so sure about that. I rarely see anyone using them anymore and have read reports that usage is declining. Even if it is table stakes, nothing stops you from rendering gifs without gify integration.

Re: Meta to sell Giphy after UK watchdog confirms ruling

#152

Post by ch4s3 »

Apocryphon wrote: post #129
ch4s3 wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> One the other hand, the owner of Giphy absolutely does get to limit which websites get to continue displaying the gifs that several years' of their user-generated content backlinked to Giphy.com I guess my question would be so what? You can cache them on your own system, if you wanted. However, I doubt historical shit posts and reaction gifs have any real value to anyone. Frankly it seems laughable that Facebook pa…

> Frankly it seems laughable that Facebook paid $660m for Gify in the first place. It's another vector for collecting user analytics.

I question the value there. Who cares that someone likes Seinfeld clips with George? Is that worth anything at all? You can get basically that data from Experian anyway without all of the hassle.

Re: Meta to sell Giphy after UK watchdog confirms ruling

#153

Post by lovich »

ch4s3 wrote: post #151
lovich wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s a library of content for a feature that’s considered table stakes for modern chat clients. If it wasn’t worth anything why would Facebook have paid so much for it?

> considered table stakes for modern chat clients I'm not so sure about that. I rarely see anyone using them anymore and have read reports that usage is declining. Even if it is table stakes, nothing stops you from rendering gifs without gify integration.

Nothing stops you from starting a new service for any sort of content library. The moat is in the content creation/curation, and in this case that content is centered around gifs.

If you want to get really reductive we could point towards any sort of content based business on the internet as merely moving files over http/https but I don’t think anyone would find it reasonable to compare Netflix and Kindle’s book library as competing in the same market

Re: Meta to sell Giphy after UK watchdog confirms ruling

#154

Post by squeaky-clean »

lovich wrote: post #150
ch4s3 wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The phrase "cutting off the supply of gifs to rivals" may be one of the dumbest things I've ever read in my life. I honestly can't believe someone wrote that in a legal opinion. To me this smacks of our leaders, broadly, in the West being too old and too far removed from how people operate and live in the world today. This is like Lindsey Graham, who was once on the senate technology committee, admitting that he had…

It’s a library of content for a feature that’s considered table stakes for modern chat clients. If it wasn’t worth anything why would Facebook have paid so much for it?

Facebook doesn't own any of the gifs in giphy. So "cutting off the supply" doesn't really make sense. Lots of them could probably be considered copyright infringement if a company wanted to be litigious enough. I'm pretty sure they don't have a license for all the thousands of subtitled Star Wars clips you can find on there, for example.

Re: Meta to sell Giphy after UK watchdog confirms ruling

#155

Post by squeaky-clean »

lovich wrote: post #153
ch4s3 wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> considered table stakes for modern chat clients I'm not so sure about that. I rarely see anyone using them anymore and have read reports that usage is declining. Even if it is table stakes, nothing stops you from rendering gifs without gify integration.

Nothing stops you from starting a new service for any sort of content library. The moat is in the content creation/curation, and in this case that content is centered around gifs. If you want to get really reductive we could point towards any sort of content based business on the internet as merely moving files over http/https but I don’t think anyone would find it reasonable to compare Netflix and Kindle’s book libr…

> Nothing stops you from starting a new service for any sort of content library.

Content licensing does. Try creating an alternative streaming platform that has the entire Netflix library and see how quickly you get shut down.

Facebook can't sue you if you create a rival gif service. None of the value is in their "content". All the value is in the search and ui

Re: Meta to sell Giphy after UK watchdog confirms ruling

#156

Post by lovich »

squeaky-clean wrote: post #154
lovich wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s a library of content for a feature that’s considered table stakes for modern chat clients. If it wasn’t worth anything why would Facebook have paid so much for it?

Facebook doesn't own any of the gifs in giphy. So "cutting off the supply" doesn't really make sense. Lots of them could probably be considered copyright infringement if a company wanted to be litigious enough. I'm pretty sure they don't have a license for all the thousands of subtitled Star Wars clips you can find on there, for example.

Cutting off the easy to use single place for content can have the same affect on usage rates as actually legally limiting access. Most people on this forum work in an industry where it’s common knowledge that even an extra second of initial load time will drastically increase your bounce rate. The frictionless experience you get with giphy is part of the content curation that is the moat for them

Re: Meta to sell Giphy after UK watchdog confirms ruling

#157

Post by mathstuf »

joshmanders wrote: post #139
mathstuf wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If Meta wants to not be subject to UK or EU rules, they could certainly stop doing business there… Personally, I'm really tired of seeing good products get subsumed into these faceless conglomerates, watered down, then finally borg'd into some tiny feature in the corner of the main app. Plenty of good ideas get tossed in the bin by these companies because they don't make 7-figure revenues out of the gate instead of b…

> If businesses are looking for a buyout, I'd appreciate some up-front notice that I'll have to look for another solution once their dream is attained instead of being slapped in the face with a "hey, we got bought, but we're sticking around!" to "uh, we lied, it's going away; you have a week to save any data, hope you're not on vacation" a few months later. Your upfront notice is not paying for the service. If you u…

Sure. If they want the free tier to be a taste, then build it that way (see `sr.ht` for a service I believe to be doing this well though I don't use it personally). If it is sold as a loss-leader to capture "growth", that just sounds like bad business planning to me.

FWIW, I pay for the services I highly value (news sites, media, email, etc.), but other times there's just a gap of "free and mostly suitable" to "expensive and overkill" that's too hard to justify knowing that my contributions aren't going to prevent the first bucket from overloading the boat at some point and leaving "everyone" out to sea in the process.

I'd much rather see "sorry, we can't maintain the status quo into the future; we'll grandfather the early believers in at their current level (or some X% over their current usage up to whatever cap existed) and the free tier now has Y% fewer features so that we can continue to maintain what we do into the future" instead of "we sold out to Meta" leaving even paying customers holding the sadness that entails.

Re: Meta to sell Giphy after UK watchdog confirms ruling

#158

Post by aliqot »

smegsicle wrote: post #134
aliqot wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I get that a lot. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33039793

its like the english don't even want to understand

> the english don't even want to understand

I've never found this to be the case, people are generally curious and courteous.

Re: Meta to sell Giphy after UK watchdog confirms ruling

#159

Post by bpye »

handelaar wrote: post #102
hunterb123 wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The question is if the UK wants to really destroy thousands of jobs over a gif service acquisition, especially in this economy. I would hope they wouldn't do that to their own people. You're not really hurting FB, you're hurting your own citizens. Is that really the best use of regulation, political power, etc? Can FB buy Tenor then? Is any gif service off limits? Who can buy Giphy? Any other social media?

Someone's clearly not familiar with the UK government's approach to jobs and the economy

Boris "Fuck Business" Johnson was only recently PM - https://www.ft.com/content/8075e68c-7857-11e8-8e67-1e1a0846c...

Re: Meta to sell Giphy after UK watchdog confirms ruling

#160

Post by pipeline_peak »

Apocryphon wrote: post #130
pipeline_peak wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And my response to the article is that there are way bigger fish to fry than splitting up a dying social media conglomerate. Google and Amazon are far more powerful and dominant than Meta and you know it. Sent from my Android phone through Chrome. BRB, I just got a package and I need to check my AWS config.

The dying social media conglomerate can be warmup before going after more powerful companies. Like a vaccine to stimulate the antitrust immune system, if you will.

Any experience gained cab also be said for the opponent. Facebook and Amazon are completely different entities.
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