The Link Rot Spreads: GIF-hosting Site Gfycat Shutting Down Sept. 1 (arstechnica.com) 27
Gfycat, a place where users uploaded, created, and distributed GIFs of all sorts, is shutting down as of Sept. 1, according to a message on its homepage. From a report: Users of the Snap-owned service are asked to "Please save or delete your Gfycat content." "After September 1, 2023, all Gfycat content and data will be deleted from gfycat.com." Gfycat rose as a service during a period where, like Imgur, it was easier to use than any native tools provided by content sites like Facebook or Reddit.
As CEO and co-founcer Richard Rabbat told TechCrunch in 2016, after raising $10 million from investors, GIFs were "hard to make, slow to upload, and when you shared them, the quality wasn't very good." Gfycat created looped, linked Webm videos that, while compressed, retained an HD quality to them. They were easier to share than actual GIF-format files, and offered an API for other sites to tap in. "I see Gfycat as the ultimate platform for all short-form content, the way that YouTube is the platform for longer videos and Twitter is the platform for text-based news and media discussions," VC funder Ernestine Fu told TechCrunch in 2016, long before TikTok, YouTube shorts, and Elon Musk's Twitter ownership came to pass.
As CEO and co-founcer Richard Rabbat told TechCrunch in 2016, after raising $10 million from investors, GIFs were "hard to make, slow to upload, and when you shared them, the quality wasn't very good." Gfycat created looped, linked Webm videos that, while compressed, retained an HD quality to them. They were easier to share than actual GIF-format files, and offered an API for other sites to tap in. "I see Gfycat as the ultimate platform for all short-form content, the way that YouTube is the platform for longer videos and Twitter is the platform for text-based news and media discussions," VC funder Ernestine Fu told TechCrunch in 2016, long before TikTok, YouTube shorts, and Elon Musk's Twitter ownership came to pass.
HTTP is broken by design (Score:5, Interesting)
The fundamental flaw of HTTP is that it does not implicitly support distribution. You can certainly extended HTTP in amazing ways, but without a wide buy-in it's just not going to happen. That there is no profit motive to preserve the Internet doesn't help. The more we let corporations drive us into walled off sections of the Internet either so they can collect subscription fees or to escape the incessant spam, the further we move away from the ideal of a world-wide web of highly linked information.
I don't have any real solutions, just observation. I have set up some of my own collection of my old pages and docs with IPFS [ipfs.tech], but time will tell if that is really a solution or not.
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As far as public content, there is nothing preventing you from cloning everything that's online and proxying it through your own. Whether you find it worth it is another question. Never heard of or seen anything related to this website, so whether it exists is irrelevant to me. I do make clones of some specific things on archive.org that are worth preserving, but thousands of iterations on the same set of cat memes is pointless, just make a database of all the words and the overlay structure and the site wo
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Never heard of or seen anything related to this website, so whether it exists is irrelevant to me.
Huh, and here I thought I was the last to know. You made my day.
As cat memes, there is a truly special corner of Internet Archive called GifCities [gifcities.org] and it is stuffed full of 90's and 2000's images from GeoCities (and presumably MySpace). A real treasure trove if someone is looking for an animated "under construction" GIF.
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The more we let corporations drive us into walled off sections of the Internet
Without corporations the content being discussed wouldn't exist. It became very clear that no one was willing to actually pay to host it themselves unless their content was obscure enough to not generate any significant traffic.
Most of the things you see today are paid for by a corporation selling personal data and serving ads. We often remember here the internet of old where Slashdot took down sites due to insane traffic. What we don't remember (though was discussed here enough at the time) is the stories
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The probl
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Link-Rot isn't spreading (Score:1)
Link-rot doesn't spread so much as exists in part of a larger, evolving interenet ecosystem. Nothing lasts forever, as was anticipated by http not freaking out when an asset isn't available.
As for gfycat itself, who even noticed it lasted this long?
Future fix (Score:4, Interesting)
<img src="..." hash="sha256:...">
Proposal to add a cryptographic hash to the img tag so that browsers have a chance of fixing broken resource links with the help of a search engine.
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The problem isn't broken links. It's that nobody wants to pay for hosting so the content just disappears. If this were actually "link rot", hashes could help find mirrored content, but what we're really seeing these days is "content rot".
Back in my day, people said the Internet never forgets. Well, that was only true back when people didn't give a damn about copyrights. 8)
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Proposal to add a cryptographic hash to the img tag so that browsers have a chance of fixing broken resource links with the help of a search engine.
I just threw up in my mouth. I do not want my browser making 20+ searches to Google or Bing or whatever every time I load a webpage. I don't even want Google Analytics or a tracking pixel to be present.
RIP to a real one (Score:3)
I actually still use Gfycat occasionally - for simple optimization, rotation, or trimming of animated gifs it's far more intuitive and streamlined than any client-side application I've come across.
Re: RIP to a real one (Score:1)
each day is a gif (Score:2)
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Thanks for the stream of incoherent gibberish. It sucks shit to read but you really put your heart into creating it and I'll pretend to respect that.
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Re: Simple mind, Simple pleasures (Score:2)
Re: Non-Cloud Technology FTW! (Score:1)
ChatGPT: "The passage expresses a negative view of the current state of the internet and technology. It suggests that the current technology is only marginally innovative, with increased privacy and security concerns. The author believes that automation, robotics, and technology advancements can thrive without relying on the compromised features and services of the internet. They argue that cloud storage and TCP/IP are outdated platforms, and new protocols and networks are needed. The author also mentions f
Fuck A Duck. (Score:1)
Let them go... (Score:2)
Let the universe re-consume it.
If missed, it will be sought and probably found or made anew maybe better, but I give it 90% chance of being crap again.