Gfycat was the only good gif hoster. The rest, tenor, giphy, etc, are all corporate buzzfeed slop, that were primarily used by dimwits to decorate their shitty blog posts with (remember the various reddit admin feature announcements that had like 300 stupid gifs in them?)
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 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.
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.
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.
They’re only good if they pass the savings of not having to pay a person to ring up your groceries onto you
I’m with the other person on this one. Self checkouts have really reduced the queues where I live. They’re much more compact than the cash registers and the shop near me basically doubled its cash register capacity because of them. I rarely have to wait in a queue these days.
Tesco even has a scan as you shop service which is really convenient. You get a barcode scanner before you start shopping, then scan all products you want to buy and place them directly in your bags. At the checkout, you scan a barcode attached to the checkout machine, it prompts you to pay, you pay and leave. All your things are already bagged.
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 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.
Maybe we need a bittorrent style protocol but for images, and people could host them on their own NAS or something. IPFS maybe?
Or maybe the Fediverse already solves this in a way - certainly on kbin I can add images to replies, but that storage must be coming out of Ernest's pockets? Perhaps having a modest file size limit for free users, and a larger allocation for premium users is a way that a fediverse host could cover the costs.
There were a few crypto solutions for distributed file storage (Siacoin and another whose name I can't remember) but I haven't paid any attention to crypto since it became a joke a few years back so I doubt they're still relavent.
The problem with a Blockchain style solution is there's no good way to remove content that needs to be removed. You can't modify the chain without a fork which requires at least half the people on it to agree every time it's forked. So what do you do if someone uploads something illegal, and then how do you remove it from all the people that opt to stay on the old side of the chain?
There's no central owner so it becomes an unmitigated disaster with nobody accountable.
I'm not sure how the file storage portion works but I don't think the files are stored on the blockchain. You're definitely right that there would be some hurdles to overcome and it might not even be feasible at all.
That storage and bandwidth is absolutely coming out of the instance operator's pocket. The bandwidth for just the actual html/javascript payload, too, but less since it's more easily cached and has smaller payloads. That's not even including the server costs.
A bittorrent like protocol is an option, but now you're talking about users running actual software to engage with the platform. That's a much higher lift and is a virtually guaranteed barrier to entry for casual users.
You have exactly three options here: 1) show ads, 2) charge money, 3) hope for donations.
Your only other option is to go under, eventually, or get purchased by someone with deeper pockets who will eventually use option 1 or 2.
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