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Facebook to Buy Giphy for $400M

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Re: Facebook to Buy Giphy for $400M

#441

Post by firloop »

Thorentis wrote: post #438
cosmie wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 tra…

Woah, that's a great point. Imagine sharing a gif in Signal and still being tracked by Facebook because every person that loads it needs to first download it from FB servers. It really is getting to the point that if you want privacy, don't touch anything owned by the top 5 tech companies. Better yet, only use Open Source. I never used to be a OSS only person, but the past few months I've started to go that way.

>Imagine sharing a gif in Signal and still being tracked by Facebook because every person that loads it needs to first download it from FB servers.

Signal's integration is specifically engineered to _not_ do this: https://signal.org/blog/signal-and-giphy-update/

Re: Facebook to Buy Giphy for $400M

#442

Post by chrisstanchak »

ChuckMcM wrote: post #271
volkk wrote: 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.

Great summary! A blog post condensed into a perfect comment.

Re: Facebook to Buy Giphy for $400M

#443

Post by respawnzero »

volkk wrote: 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 agree. Whenever I search Giphy, unless it's already an extremely popular Gif, I just get terrible results, completely irrelevant to the search term.

Re: Facebook to Buy Giphy for $400M

#444

Post by seppin »

throwaway4715 wrote: post #432
eloc49 wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This exactly. Kara Swisher's interview with Sarah Frier on how Instagram went really paints the picture. https://overcast.fm/+QLdurp-A8

That interview was bad. They're trying to make you feel bad for the Instagram founders because they were too stupid to realize that after you _sell_ your company you don't own it anymore. Also, per that interview, Instagram only became sustainable under Facebook. Hard to feel bad about it.

> Instagram only became sustainable under Facebook.

That's an incredible leap to say IG couldn't develop their own ad network as a stand alone company. Hire a few people away from Google with options in a growing company the same way FB did.

If IG didn't sell they would have fully killed Facebook's relevancy by now.

Re: Facebook to Buy Giphy for $400M

#445

Post by nimish »

thebradbain wrote: post #422
nimish wrote: post #348

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder what happened to employees who joined later on, with underwater options.

Why would any of their options be underwater? Going off of those estimates above, the pot split between shareholders after liquidation preference is 250million. Anyone who has shares is able to cash them out I imagine (how much profit dependent on how many shares someone is granted, which varies obviously but is still a positive net) — unless you’re implying the strike price is less than the share value?

Their last round valued the company at $600MM, so anyone with options at that strike isn't going to make any money.

Re: Facebook to Buy Giphy for $400M

#446

Post by rosstex »

bchanudet wrote: post #268
joshgachnang wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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 cha…

I read this and immediately thought "Holy crap, you eye rolled at him with that comment?! I'd be devastated." Interesting how it works for different people.

Re: Facebook to Buy Giphy for $400M

#447

Post by [deleted] »

adjkant wrote: post #427
throwaway4715 wrote: post #426

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you saying that Facebook shouldn't be allowed to own any product that can be shared on a competitors platform? Seems kinda ridiculous.

No, I am saying that them retroactively buying it without warning and getting access to the historical data, which users and developers did not intend to give to Facebook, is the off part. If Facebook bought this or developed it themselves and then these companies integrated Giphy, it's obviously very different. Basically this implies that any data you give to any third party can then basically be bought by your comp…

[deleted]

Re: Facebook to Buy Giphy for $400M

#448

Post by zarriak »

pbhjpbhj wrote: post #391
gundmc wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 sy…

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…

no their problem is that the DMCA system sucks as it wasn't even written this century (1998), so they created ContentID as a response. They do benefit from the way the system exists currently because of this since the cost of developing a competitor to ContentID is so seemingly prohibitively expensive that nobody else tries to do what YouTube does.

Re: Facebook to Buy Giphy for $400M

#449

Post by thekyle »

hk__2 wrote: post #417
nine_k wrote: post #335

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

No doubt that smoking is way worse than using Facebook. But using Facebook (and similar sites) can cause mental health issues which should be taken seriously.

Re: Facebook to Buy Giphy for $400M

#450

Post by djjsjdjsjsjs »

ghaff wrote: post #188
teddyh wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“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.

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.

Grok is a bullshit fucking word that people who have been in the tech space too long use to sound cool and obfuscate an otherwise easy concept.

"Do you understand it really well?" is infinitely fucking better than "can you grok that?". The first sentence doesn't have all of the disgusting pretentiousness of a tech interview whiteboarding flame session associated with it, where one person has done the problem 100 times and the other has done it precisely never.

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