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

501–510 of 535 posts

Re: Facebook to Buy Giphy for $400M

#501

Post by anigbrowl »

zachrose wrote: post #200
yreg wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd just like this trend of sending reaction gifs to end. People keep posting them in Slack all the time, but I find it about as appropriate as that brief time when all my uni teachers decided that it's hip to include rage comic faces into every other slide of every presentation. , yes I know, I'm fun at parties…

Have you ever been in a mostly white office and noticed how many reaction GIFs are of black people? The term to Google here is “digital blackface”. If you bring this to more people’s attention my guess is that reaction GIFs will become less prevalent in your office.

Sure, Jan

I don't think there's any solid evidence of disproportional use of of one ethnic group by another. You can certainly find individuals who thoughtlessly or deliberately do that but generalizing that to some random population (eg of office workers) is likely wrong.

Re: Facebook to Buy Giphy for $400M

#502

Post by dingaling »

firloop wrote: post #441
Thorentis wrote: post #438

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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/

From Giphy's end they can still so useful traffic analysis by generating a unique URL for the search result obtained by User A and subsequently sent to his chat cohort. Each cohort app retrieving the same URL could then be enumerated. It's not user-identifying but it would generate a sort of contact graph.

Also the Signal service could do a transparent TLS MitM between the app and Giphy instead of a passthrough TLS tunnel and the user apps would be unaware. In fact from that page I'm not sure they're even doing a tunnel anyway.

Re: Facebook to Buy Giphy for $400M

#503

Post by jodrellblank »

parliament32 wrote: post #366
bcrosby95 wrote: post #199

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

It's definitely a "praying" emoji, the whole high five thing is an urban myth. The official spec[1] calls it "PERSON WITH FOLDED HANDS".. the keyword there is "person" (in contrast to, for example, "1FAC2;PEOPLE HUGGING" when there is multiple people). The emoji is of a single person folding their hands, which really isn't a high five unless you're somehow high five-ing yourself. [1]ftp://ftp.unicode.org/Public/UNIDA…

Never heard of it beign a high five before but it's hard to trust the reasoning that "PERSON" means singular, when the "FOLDED HANDS" aren't folded.

Re: Facebook to Buy Giphy for $400M

#504

Post by draven »

bertman wrote: post #144

I wonder if Signal will now remove their Giphy integration... edit: Guess they won't ... We have always used a proxy for our requests to GIPHY, and will continue to do so. There should be no harm in continuing to use it. https://signal.org/blog/signal-and-giphy-update/ Quote from a Signal dev https://github.com/signalapp/Signal-Android/issues/9628#issu...

I saw this on my twitter feed this morning. They don't include the Giphy SDK. They act as a proxy and (ab)use range requests so they don't even see the size of the returned GIF. It's a really interesting read.

And that blog post is from 2017 so those measures have been in place for 2.5 years already.

Re: Facebook to Buy Giphy for $400M

#505

Post by wyclif »

pbhjpbhj wrote: post #387
Doctor_Fegg wrote: post #374

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“Comprehend” works, in British English at least.

It's more "fully comprehend all aspects". You could also say "get" or "understand" or "know" as synonyms for comprehend (in the right context). Grok works in English, I've been reading it for, what, 20 years in English texts. It mightn't be in dictionaries but they're not the sole arbiters of language. It comes from US English, AFAIK, a neonym from Heinlein (the sci-fi writer).

I use "grok" in my writing. Sometimes an older person (usually a boomer or Greatest Generation reader) doesn't get it. Usually the Gen X and younger people understand what it means. Anecdotal, FWIW...

Re: Facebook to Buy Giphy for $400M

#506

Post by ehsankia »

judge2020 wrote: post #472
ehsankia wrote: post #305

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm fairly sure this is False. GBoard uses Tenor (the next largest Giphy competitor), which Google also happens to have bought 2 years ago (undisclosed amount of money). I also just tested Messages and can confirm that the results look like Tenor too. For Discord, while they initially used Giphy and has a /giphy command, it now uses Tenor too in the GIF picker.

The only difference with this acquisition and Discord is that Discord might now start proxying Giphy (they previously didn't to save bandwidth).

Again, Discord uses Tenor, not Giphy (unless you manually use /giphy instead of the GIF picker, which most people don't).

Re: Facebook to Buy Giphy for $400M

#507

Post by Aeolun »

Gene_Parmesan wrote: post #415
Aeolun wrote: post #379

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I the only time I need giphy is when there is no appropriate (custom) emoticon. Giphy takes way too much space. Also, why does Teams not have a :shrug: icon. Seriously?

If you're on Windows, windows key + period brings up the system-level emoji picker. Just thought I'd let you know in case you weren't aware there was even such a thing as a system-level emoji picker (I sure wasn't until someone on my team told me about it).

Unfortunately I’m on mac, but maybe I can just copy the emoji from a website and paste it. It didn’t occur to me it might get displayed correctly but not be selectable.

Re: Facebook to Buy Giphy for $400M

#508

Post by matheusmoreira »

artificial wrote: post #145
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.

Hah, great anaology. Pretty crazy that 2chan/4chan popularized the reaction gif.

Chans have WebM support as well! Much better format in every way!

Re: Facebook to Buy Giphy for $400M

#509

Post by p49k »

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 would guess their success is due almost entirely to solving the licensing issues with the content, and doing so with such competence that major services want to work with them without fear of exposing themselves to liability.

Re: Facebook to Buy Giphy for $400M

#510

Post by Cthulhu_ »

yreg wrote: post #80
txcwpalpha wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I'd just like this trend of sending reaction gifs to end. People keep posting them in Slack all the time, but I find it about as appropriate as that brief time when all my uni teachers decided that it's hip to include rage comic faces into every other slide of every presentation. , yes I know, I'm fun at parties…

Urgh I agree, I've seen people twice my age use them in presentations, it did not improve the presentation.
Post reply on HN