Gfycat is shutting down September 1st

blaise@champserver.net to Technology@lemmy.world – 296 points –
Gfycat | Watch and Create GIFs, Videos, Memes
gfycat.com

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

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imgur is also in a downward spiral of entshittification though. No uploading without an account, and all old images uploaded by people with no accounts are going to get deleted.

They want to be a social media site now, not an image hosting site.

I mean, how can you monetize free image hosting?

Not in a greedy capitalist way, but simply paying for servers, developers and coffee. There's hardly any revenue stream in image hosting. So a pivot to a more social media like site makes sense.

Not sure if folks have realized we're at the end game of free internet money.

Not sure if folks have realized we're at the end game of free internet money.

I definitely agree with that, and I really don't have a good answer on how to create a financially secure image hosting service. But I do think that criticism of how they are approaching it on imgur at the moment is legitimate. In particular their intention of deleting pictures uploaded before the deadline by non-account users. This will only add to the unfathomable amount of link rot going on atm all over the internet.