From their website: 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.
This has been a strange year.
This certainly has been a strange year. The reckoning for these big unprofitable sites was inevitable in retrospect, but it’s wild how much is happening all at once.
I think it has a lot to do with Silicon Valley Bank failing. These companies were running on loans with the promise of “the profits will come, some day.” Whether they meant to or not, many of our most relied upon services were being run as venture capital scams. Whether these companies turned profits or not didn’t matter so much as long as the executives were getting paid salaries, and could show the investors graphs that showed something was happening to grow the company, it didn’t matter if the service was bleeding investor money into the cloud giants like Amazon, Microsoft, and Google.
And if we want to trace the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank back further, look no farther than Sam Bankman-Fried, Cara Ellison, and FTX. That one was very expressly a venture capital scam and a ponzi scheme rolled into one. I’m not going to say all cryptocoins are scamcoins, but I will happily say that enough of then are that the collapse of FTX has done permanent harm to the kinds of confidence people will be willing to put into digital fiat currencies. But what I more want to point out is that Sam Bankman-Fried was an intensified version of the kinds of people who have been showing growth charts and promising “profits, someday” while drawing massive salaries and bleeding investor money. He was playing video games on meetings and it was building his reputation, not harming it
The investors who knew SBF was playing games in meetings were the investors who backed Reddit and Gfycat. Now that their SVB money and their FTX money is never coming back, they need to withdraw money from other investments, while at the same time Reddit and Gfycat are no longer receiving their stream of money to pay their cloud bills. The result? Corporate web 2.0 is dead as of July 1st, 2023. Sure. There are still corporate web 2.0 services shambling across this earth, including Twitter and Reddit whose actions yesterday marked the end of corporate web 2.0, but they’re zombies. Their hearts have stopped beating. They’re dead ans they don’t even know it.
Whether you call it small web, web0, or my personal choice, Web 2.0.1, we are currently experiencing a rise of user owned web services that are picking up the slack left by corporate web 2.0 while in many ways rejecting web 3.0 as not being ready, or outright being a scam. We have a critical opportunity right now. We have the chance to realize that Mark Zuckerberg, Jack Dorsey, Alexis Ohanian, Stephen Huffman, or Elon Musk don’t have exclusive rights to enable us or empower us to interact online. They were holding a magic feather. We can use the tools of the fediverse to replace them. Its a little more work, yes, but so is everything when you take your own ownership of things. Making your own meals is more work than going to McDonalds, but its cheaper and healthier. Growing your own tomatoes is more work than going to the store, but you get the enjoyment of doing it and lesson your environmental impact. Owning your own home is more work than renting, but you get to keep the equity you build.
This federated internet experiment is worth the work. While we’re still experiencing some reliance in the cloud providers, they’re at least providing us with a service we might not have been able to figure out on our own. Twitter, Facebook, and reddit, though? Their value was a shared hallucination. They were useful to us because we collectively convinced ourselves they were useful. Now we just need to convince ourselves that the bug fix to web 2.0, web 2.0.1, removing the corporations, is worthwhile.
If you’re reading this, it means you’ve taken a big first step. Now take the second: tell a friend
This was great to read, and reminds me of the joke that the stock market is just astrology for dudes.
Great read, and right on the nose. Louis Rossman has a good video discussing this issue, especially Reddit’s role in all of it. Forgot the title, but its pretty recent.
The “golden days” of internet social media platforms are gone. It was fun while it lasted, but these companies were BLEEDING venture capitalist money, and at some point they have to show a profit. That time is now, and it’s ugly.
Great reply. Thanks for the thoughtful write up. I think you are onto something here and I love your abilities for why we should adopt and further the fediverse.
Web 2.0 was a house of cards all this time I suppose
As a Web 1.0 survivor, I can tell you it’s always been a house of cards. They keep trying to shoehorn a circular, communal, socialist invention (the Internet itself) into a square, capitalist hole. And it doesn’t work.
Aron Swartz knew that, and maybe even Tom from MySpace. He knew when to get out and leave someone else holding the bag.
They’re all jumping to get their bad news out while there’s a lot of other drama going on, in the hopes it’ll go less noticed.