Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Facebook to Buy Giphy for $400M

axios.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

481–490 of 535 posts

Re: Facebook to Buy Giphy for $400M

#481

Post by ori_b »

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.

> You can’t seriously compare smoking and keeping up with friends and family

You're right: It's easy to smoke outside without harming anyone but yourself -- and even if you smoke indoors, you only harm one room full of people at a time.

Re: Facebook to Buy Giphy for $400M

#482

Post by JoshTriplett »

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.

And most memes have a meaning that goes beyond the apparent literal one. For instance, see https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/11/engli... , talking about the use of "because thing" being more than just "because of thing". For instance, "rough and dough don't rhyme, because English". It started as a meme, and now it's in dictionaries.

This is how new forms of communication develop. Sometimes they're random images (images that'll probably be used for even more extensive tracking now), sometimes they're playful changes to language, sometimes they're intentionally invented or modified words because the language lacked a word for a given purpose, and if they catch on enough with enough people they'll become part of communication. Because brains and pattern matching.

Re: Facebook to Buy Giphy for $400M

#483

Post by 3131s »

henryfjordan wrote: post #302
im3w1l wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ianal but isn't this what the DMCA safe harbor is about? Comply with takedown requests and you are fine.

Not when your whole business relies on exploiting copyrighted content, which someone from Disney might argue about Giphy.

Well, Facebook gets away with absolute murder in regard to copyrighted infringement (especially in the non-English parts of the site) so it's a good fit.

Re: Facebook to Buy Giphy for $400M

#484

Post by JakeStone »

teddyh wrote: post #183
Freak_NL wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't grok this trend at all. All these replies in the form of memes make me feel like I'm in the Darmok episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation. I'm grateful communication on MatterMost at my company has not seen the need for reaction gifs emerge; the wildest thing we have is a custom emoji of a dancing banana.

“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.

"To grok is to drink."

Re: Facebook to Buy Giphy for $400M

#485

Post by softwarejosh »

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…

they are way too censored, I get that theyre embedded in everything so not much if a choice but just garbage results from them

Re: Facebook to Buy Giphy for $400M

#486

Post by zuhayeer »

Wow, this is crazy to hear about! Back in college I worked on a fun way to share snippets of music with friends directly in iMessage called RapBits (essentially audio gifs). I reached out to Adam Leibsohn who was the COO of Giphy at the time. He immediately replied to my cold email excited about the idea and offered to help. He also asked about how we were handling legal. We didn't have an answer, in fact UMG had basically threatened to shut our app down in a meeting we had with them in LA originally thinking it'd be a great partnership meeting (the music industry kinda sucks). Really appreciated his response in that moment, he basically told us to keep going and see what we could do with it and just have fun!

Kind of wild to see such a fun / not-so-serious seeming product have such a huge exit and profound impact on the way we communicate now

Anyways, here's a quick demo of RapBits: https://rapbits.com/video/ad.mp4

Even had a brief stint of fame on /r/hiphopheads: https://www.reddit.com/r/hiphopheads/comments/64ea1v/my_room...

Re: Facebook to Buy Giphy for $400M

#487

Post by ghettoimp »

raindropm wrote: post #478
kgin wrote: post #314

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Am I out of touch? No, it's the 1.6B daily active users who are wrong.

Hmmm, 1.6B do what exactly? Scrolling mindlessly through algorithm-curated feed that ensure users always got the right amount to dopamine to keep them scrolling for hours? Look around you, people that glue to their screen all the time without realized they are being engineered to do what Facebook want them to do, is that really actually good for society? Don't get me wrong, I use Facebook once in a while to keep in t…

So... yeah.

I log into FB about once a day and see some pictures of friends who live far away and their children. Sometimes people post funny things. A couple of friends occasionally post interesting or thought provoking articles. My experience as a user is almost entirely positive.

Meanwhile at some level I know it can and is being used in abusive and bad ways. Cyber-bullying, sure. The ever-present outrage machine, pitting the God-loving Americans against the God-hating ones, certainly thrives there. And I once read something or other about enabling horrible hate crimes in Myanmar. And the company itself seems to be a scandal factory, bent on a kind of dystopian mission of collecting data on everyone.

I do struggle a bit with how much to blame the company versus, well, the people who are misusing it. I think a constant lesson of this whole internet thing has been: you can develop the most utterly amazing tools ever, but at least some of your users will take them and use them to be absolute shits.

Re: Facebook to Buy Giphy for $400M

#488

Post by Jakob »

cosmie wrote: post #181
nerdponx wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

proxy server to pre-cache/sanitize images and strip tracking identifiers in both directions Developing such a tool might be valuable for privacy-conscious application developers.

Google already does it with Gmail[1][2], so it's not unheard of. But it adds another layer of complexity, plus is somewhat antithetical to the privacy viewpoint as it then exposes all of the images to the app developer now since it's routed through the proxy server instead of direct end-user -> image server requests. [1] Can't find a page specifically detailing it, but [2] gives a basic synopsis on it in the context…

> it then exposes all of the images to the _app developer_

Not if the app developer proxies the encrypted traffic.

That way the app dev does not know the content and the third party does not know which original IP requested it.

This is akin to the Signal-Giphy implementation.

Post reply on HN