META: Crowd-sourced GYFCAT solution?
Disclaimer: this is a seed of a thought without a solution
As I Bleed Maize n Blue reported on July 3rd, GFYCAT is closing up shop Sept 1 (post). While clicking through "Of The Decade" posts over the weekend, saddened that such content might be significantly lessened, I wondered if there might be a crowd-sourced solution to the problem?
There are many rabid MGoBlog fans with (clearly, from these posts) significant free time. Is there some tech-savvy leader who might direct their energy? I bet many would consider it a good trade to give an hour to keep the content from one or two articles alive.
Unleash the ideas! Don't let "perfect" be the enemy of "something that sucks less than what is coming."
Feel free to buy some servers and configure them to host other people's gifs
And then rename it X.
and then profit...
What kind of slacker needs a whole hour to create a GIF hosting site?
If you scour the Internet with the following formula in mind - (situation / feeling being conveyed).gif - you would be impressed with the GIF files that appear, probably a fair number that never would have been compiled elsewhere. That's what I've done to build a collection of obscure GIF files that only I seem to enjoy, but then I don't really invest time in what the rest of you think about it. That's why they made me a moderator all those years ago.
(joking, partially)
I think they did an amazing job of demonstrating that there is no viable business model behind free GIF creation/hosting. Why would someone want to take another bite at that apple?
Because if I understand correctly, this wouldn’t need to scale. MGoBlog needs replacement technology, not a generalized and monetized platform.
This isn't a problem that requires a technological solution; nothing is stopping MGoBlog from hosting its own GIFs. The reason they don't is, I presume, purely monetary.
Exactly. Instead of spending 6 figures of SWE time to build a cheap knock off of GFYCAT, we could just donate the $10 a month or whatever it would cost to get a Canva license. This is a very solvable problem with existing technology
The last time I allowed the BLOG to lead me I became very frustrated playing RISK.
Just so I'm 100% sure I understand your request, you want to download all the GIF's that were used on this site from GYFCAT and then update all of the posts to point to the new location of those GIF's?
That's impossible without access to the database. Now if the MGoBlog site owners want to preserve this data, they could use a SQL script that gets all of the image links for that site. With a list of all the links there's a few different routes to download them but a python script would probably be the easiest. Once downloaded, upload to the server and run another SQL script to update the database and use REPLACE to update the links.
My professional opinion is the amount of time it would take is pretty insignificant but is it really worth it?
META: Why can we not upload .webp files?
If they didn't threaten to delete all your files 90 days after canceling I'd subscribe to Streamable. But it's not going to work if we're trapped in a situation where they can hold all the videos hostage.
Gfycat was fine; the problem is it was bought by one company that was bought by another company that was overextended and only wanted a different piece of the company they bought.
Do any rich donors like UFRs? If not, get them to like UFRs and then to buy Gfycat and create a living trust to keep it going. Or get their grandkids to like UFRs and cry about losing the clips hosted on Gfycat etc., etc., etc.
This is a perfect opportunity for MGoBlog to offer a subscription tier. Gifs are essentially short form video. Self-hosted video is at least one order of magnitude more expensive than static web hosting, and that's a wild ass guess. It could very well be 50x more expensive to serve up 50MB of video vs a 500KB-1MB page load per visit to UFR.
If you want to read the data/charts for UFRs - that's free. If you want to see the video, you gotta pay $5/10/etc, month.
For just 30 cents a day.... you can make sure Devon Bush always has soil to cultivate, allowing him to grow his own healthy food and never go to be hungry.....