Gfycat

» see gfycat.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

the thing gfycat is remembered for is a file format it did not actually serve. you dropped a gif on it, and what came back was a short silent video wearing the gif's clothes. it looped like a gif and sat in a page like a gif, at a tenth of the weight. the word survived, the format underneath it did not.

three people started it in edmonton in 2013. richard rabbat had come out of google, and the company was incorporated in the united states in 2015 and raised ten million dollars a year later. by 2016 it was inside the top sixty us websites by traffic. in 2017 it was carrying more than 130 million people a month, most of whom had never typed the address into anything.

snap bought it in may 2020, banned adult uploads within days, and then did very little with it in public. the earlier warning had been a 2018 breach that exposed something like eight million accounts. the later one was smaller and more telling: in may 2023 the certificate for gfycat.com simply expired, and browsers started throwing warnings at a site nobody at snap appeared to be watching. it was renewed four days later, and uploads stayed broken anyway.

i never made an account on gfycat and i suspect most people who used it every week never did either. it lived in other people's links. that is the whole reason its ending cost more than it should have.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ what it actually served ~

the gif is a format from 1987 with 256 colors and no real answer for motion, which is why a two-second clip could weigh several megabytes. gfycat transcoded uploads into h.264 and webm, kept the autoplay loop, and handed back a url. the file got smaller by an order of magnitude while the experience stayed identical, which is the kind of substitution users are supposed to never notice.

the other thing it did was name them. every upload got a url built from two adjectives and an animal, so links read like ObeseGrimyIguana or SoggyDeafeningCrane. it made addresses that people could read out loud and remember, and it is the detail everyone mentions first when the site comes up now.

~ the day the embeds broke ~

the notice went up on 30 june 2023 and gave two months. on 1 september the site went dark and the content went with it, deliberately deleted rather than parked. anything embedded on another site turned into an error box the same day.

that is a lot of pages. a decade of reddit threads and forum tutorials where the moving part was the whole explanation. none of those authors got a warning, because none of them were gfycat's customers. they had just used the address that a friend or a stranger handed them years earlier.

~ what got buried with it ~

media hosts are the weak joint in everything written on the web. tinypic went dark and photobucket priced itself out, and each time the loss landed on people who never chose the host in the first place. gfycat was the largest of these to be shut off with the archive explicitly discarded.

the loops themselves were mostly disposable. the annotations around them were not. somewhere in that deleted store was every clip somebody used to explain a thing once, in a thread that still exists, with a rectangle in the middle of it that no longer says anything.

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