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Facebook to Buy Giphy for $400M

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Re: Facebook to Buy Giphy for $400M

#271
post #6

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 up…

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.

Re: Facebook to Buy Giphy for $400M

#272
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.

Re: Facebook to Buy Giphy for $400M

#273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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]

Re: Facebook to Buy Giphy for $400M

#274
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

Re: Facebook to Buy Giphy for $400M

#277
post #169
post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

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"

Re: Facebook to Buy Giphy for $400M

#278
post #6

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 up…

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 h…

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?

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