Gfycat.com shuts down on September 1 and all Gifs will be taken down

Wow, the 'enshittification' of the internet is really taking off now. Sites are either already dodgy, or well on their way there!

I know this has been a bit of a slow burn for a while now, but it really feels like it's all coming to a head suddenly.

We really gotta back decentralized platforms if we don't want everything to become an overmonetized hellscape where all information and communication is skewed to suit business interests. I wouldn't pay for Reddit Gold and Twitter Blue but I should send some money to the Lemmy, Kbin and Mastodon folks.
Things happen slowly, then all at once.

This is insane. I wonder what other relatively large internet service will go down.

Apparently PornHub already lost 80% of their traffic due to age verification laws. I'll add the source when I'll get back to it.
Edit: https://www.theverge.com/2023/7/3/23782776/pornhub-blocks-mississippi-virginia-age-verification-laws
Edit 2: Maybe I misunderstood, see below comments
- Reading the article would make me believe it's 80% of traffic from Louisiana and not overall. So they will be fine lol.
- I feel like that can't be true, I imagine a huge amount of pornhubs users are international
- Still Though, when Pornhub falls, that's when we know were in trouble.

It’s like the enshitification cycle somehow synced! https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/#hey-guys

Not a coincidence. End of cheap money era.
- Yeah, no - it’s definitely not a coincidence, that was said tongue in cheek https://www.theregister.com/AMP/2023/04/07/vc_funding_falls/
On Baconreader it wouldn't show a gif, it would just be link, which was pretty good.
- His name was Bacon Reader.. His name was Bacon Reader..

So, twitter, Reddit, Imgur, and now Gfycat are all killing itself

Has the internet bubble finally popped?

Don't forget about YouTube! https://www.techradar.com/computing/social-media/youtubes-test-run-of-the-three-strikes-youre-out-policy-against-ad-blockers-seems-like-a-bit-much
- Been wondering how they detect how many videos you've watched without being logged in.
  Cookies can be cleared, IPs can be changed, and if we all use something like the Mullvad Browser fingerprinting will be far more difficult.
Wait what's happening with imgur?
- Removing porn and all images not uploaded from an imgur account

Had no idea this was even at risk of shutting down...

The Great Internet Recession™ has begun

Forreal, what's going on? Why does it seem like so many separate sites are suddenly so much worse/going downhill quickly?
- Billionaires bought the internet and now they're realizing that it isn't profitable.
- Our entire Internet enjoyment has been heavily subsidized by venture capital for the last 30 years which hoped to monetize us more than they have been able (believe it or not).
  Now they are calling in their bets...

Damn, and end of an era...

The times, they are a changin'...

I've watched the internet evolve since I first logged on to CompuServe in 1990. I don't think I have seen such a dramatic and fast change since the beginning of the WWW over crap like CompuServ.

Oh sweet, it's dot.com 2.0. Grab your popcorn, it's time for the internet to implode... again! Never ever underestimate shareholders' willingness to self-destruct a product for short-term profit.

It's like the second implosion in a many weeks
- Next one will be human instrumentality!
Similar to what happened after the last dot com crash, it'll be interesting to see how the internet evolves and what comes next.
It's called fiduciary duty and it's why every mega company sucks.
Cut costs by replacing cashiers with self checkout? Write a fat check to the shareholders! Then, shoplifting is becoming an even bigger issue from the self checkout... Cut costs again by preventing shoplifting by having people man the self checkout! Write another fat check to the shareholders!
Nevermind that it would have been easier and cheaper to just keep the system we had. Looking at you, Target.
- Hey, but self-checkouts are good. Dunno how they use them at target, but at shops I go to they allow me to get to the shop, grab what I need and leave within 5 minutes.
  And not so sure with cheaper. Again from my experience, shops have a setup of 6 self-checkouts per 1 employee.
- Fiduciary duty is an absolute circus. Obligating companies to maximize profits at the expense of the wider society is the exact opposite of how law should work.
- Remember! You can't say "fiduciary duty" without saying "douche" and "doody."

So what's the open-source alternative for gfycat? We got a trend started here let's keep it going!

The problem with something like gfycat isn't the source code, it's the storage and bandwidth. That shit is expensive and there's no way to do it for free without showing ads and not go broke.

The other comment already mentioned that Discord uses Tenor, but you're probably thinking of Giphy, which is another service similar to Tenor. Gfycat is a bit different, and was more like Imgur.

The death of the old internet continues..

Most likely the new internet. That, where every website was created with money in mind.

Kinda glad GIFs are dying.. they were beyond annoying specially in discussions. didn't help that reddit started incorporating them into the comment section.

okay

What the hell is going on?

Everything is falling down:
Google is dropping Reddit and Twitter from their searches.
Twitter is throttling Tweets and you have to signin to view anything. Which would be crazy antivaxxer radicals, so not missing anything. No more free API use.
YouTube is blocking you after 3 videos if you use an adblocker.
Reddit has killed all 3rd party apps among API changes
Now Gfycat is going, man that's like most of the sites I used since a kid. Imgur seems to be around still at least.
- Do ya remember photobucket? .. Pepperidge Farm remembers.
- Imgur doesn't even load for me on Firefox Mobile + uBlockOrigin. It also tries to redirect me to their broken front end if I just want the .jpg file. I absolutely hate them and wish people would stop using it.
- Imgur banned and purged NSFW images