Prepare for a meme massacre: Snap snuffs out Gfycat in September

After months of speculation about its future, GIF hosting platform Gfycat is being put down by its parent Snap.  News of the site's impending end was announced on Gfycat's homepage, which was updated on June 30 with a message informing users that "after September 1, 2023, all Gfycat content and data will be deleted," and …

[b0llchit]

Ambivalent feelings about this...

It is sad that we progress to a 404 world and lose our collective heritage.

OTOH, fewer cat videos is a big win.

[Martin an gof]

The Digital Dark Age term is already in use...

[vekkq]

According to the Wikipedia article, Digital Dark Age doesn't really seem to refer to information loss through corps closing their libraries (or DRM servers shutting down). It should perhaps.

[Pascal Monett]

Once again

Yet another company providing a service that countless people used is going down without anything to hold the service up.

All of that because people love linking to something on someone else's server.

Yeah, well someone else's server never lasts.

[imanidiot]

Re: Once again

Let's be fair here, personal servers never last either.

[Arthur the cat]

Oh dear

"GIF of man shaking fist here."

[mark l 2]

I am surprised Snap are closing it down as how much does it cost to host a GIF hosting service, all the content is generated by your users so its really just hosting and maintenance costs?

AFAIAK Snapchat is still popular in the youth, the unique notification sound when a new snapchat message comes through to someones phone ive heard several times going around the shops and on public transport in the last few days. So how they can't make money from it suggests its more of a bad management than anything else.

[daflibble]

Even freely provided content you have the storage capacity to host cheaply gets expensive to provide connectivity to. Traffic over network links costs real money.

[IGotOut]

I'm surprised...

....as GIFs, fonts and other external content are a fantastic way of tracking people without them having a clue it's happening.

Clearly they weren't very good at selling the data

[Plest]

So basically there'll just be a few more "image not found" blocks on some web pages? I think I can sleep easy at night.