After being purchased by Snapchat, it appears that gfycat has been abandoned.
The Gfycat service is being discontinued. Please save or delete your Gfycat content by visiting https://www.gfycat.com and logging in to your account. After September 1, 2023, all Gfycat content and data will be deleted from gfycat.com
Damn we really are just doing a “kill everything web2.0” speedrun any%
Now all the things must be selfhot+fedi or die… welocm to web 3.1… 😆 (web 3 has been claimed by crypto scammer… sad… 😅)
All that venture capital money must be drying up and bills coming due.
Yep. Web/tech companies generally had an easier time than most dealing with the pandemic, and capitalism, in all its reactionary, short-sighted wisdom, smelled profit and massively over-invested, so companies grew faster than they knew how to handle.
Cut to ~6 months ago and most of them had nothing to show for all of that money (Reddit being a great example - in the time between their massive expansion and now, they only thing they actually added were wildly unpopular NFT avatars). But capitalism demands that profits increase at an increasing rate, so they have to squeeze money from somewhere, which is how we got the massive tech layoffs at the start of the year.
Now they need to find even more ways to increase profits, but many of them are at the point where finding ways to monetize is actually really difficult, so they’re tying to squeeze money out of everything they can find - Reddit’s API changes, Twitter trying to push people towards blue with arbitrary limits, wholesale shuttering of things like Gfycat. Now obviously that’s going to cause a bunch of problems with user trust and retention but who cares about that? That’s a tomorrow problem, and we need profit now!
Capitalism working as intended.
It is not only the pandemic. Even before, during the last decade or so, they got the VC investments. Now with rising interest rates and the shift to AI capital is drying up for the web2.0 bubble.
Yeah, painting this as a downstream effect of the pandemic is just wrong. This has been coming for a long time and would have happened no matter what caused interest rates to rise.