
Ask HN: Now that Giphy sold, what can RightGIF do for you? - toast76
Hi folks, I&#x27;m Alan, one of the founders of RightGIF. We originally built RightGIF as an alternative to Giphy in our own Slack teams. It quickly took off and became one of the top &quot;social &amp; fun&quot; apps in the Slack marketplace (behind only Giphy itself which was the defacto first-party GIF app at the time).<p>It got very expensive for us to run, and we very nearly sold the app early on, but decided to keep hold of it and just add some little premium features to keep it afloat. Since then it&#x27;s been running pretty close to break even. We kept it because we always had the intention of one day picking it up and getting serious about it.<p>Now that both Tenor (GIF Keyboard) and Giphy have sold to Google and Facebook respectively, we feel like it might be time to get serious.<p>What I&#x27;d love to know from the HN community is:
a) do you have privacy concerns about Giphy&#x2F;Facebook tracking?
b) what platforms would we need to support to get you onboard with RightGIF
c) are there app developers out there that would make use of our API if we made it public?<p>Thanks heaps!
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tdrp
I've always been curious as to how Giphy/other GIF providers are allowed to
monetize on what is basically often snippets of copyrighted material.

Our app uses the Giphy API. Not having animated GIFs meant a few of our users
would eventually leave or move to platforms that do have them.

After about a year of usage, we've been relatively happy with it. Our app is
PG so we need to make sure all the GIFs sent are completely PG (otherwise
users blame us rather than Giphy). Not sure if your API already has the tech
to do this. Giphy was pretty good at it, and we only once got a report of a
porn-like GIF.

That said:

a. Yes. FB SDK was already relatively sneakier than we had expected and we
would have done away with it a while ago if we didn't have so many users
"signed in with facebook"

b. I assume it's just a regular HTTP request but you probably want to have
Kotlin/Swift/etc

c. We might move to it IF it turned out that the privacy issue was actually
real and not just our own assumption.

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Ayesh
The reason why Facebook bought Giphy is not the Gifs themselves, it's the
data. So I would say the privacy of search data and context would be the
number one concern for anyone. It's pretty hard to find the balance between
privacy, trending content, and relatable content, but it's for you to tune the
knobs.

Also, if you release the API, I'd say making it a drop-in replacement for
Giphy would increase the adoption. S3-compatible storage options, or Fixer-
compatible APIs, etc are examples and they can help reduce the friction.

~~~
toast76
Yeah, privacy for us has always been #1. It means we will need to monetise,
but all indications are that teams are willing to pay a small amount for that
privacy. We have the benefit of not wanting to get rich.

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gitgud
Well Gifs in the context of Twitter and messaging apps are almost always a
_reaction_ to something said.

Even now I find some of the labelling of Tenor (GIF Keyboard) and Giphy to be
lacking. Which makes it hard to find an appropriate reaction GIF.

Better search, categories and recommendations would probably be a good
addition.

Maybe a merge tool too, to combine too gifs for the perfect reaction GIF....

~~~
gitgud
Just thought of another feature.

GIFs are highly emotional (in most cases) I think a good UX feature would be
to quickly describe a complex emotion by clicking through emotion
recommendations, and adding them to a tag list which could find you matching
GIFs

(Happy), (Nervous), (Scared)

(Happy), (Hungry), (Sleepy)

(Angry), (Hungry), (Tired)

This could help find the _perfect reaction GIF_... The possibilities are
endless

[http://www.davidhodder.com/wp-
content/uploads/2018/10/Emotio...](http://www.davidhodder.com/wp-
content/uploads/2018/10/Emotion-Feeling-Wheel-1.jpg)

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1cvmask
I definitely think there would developers ready to use your API.

Hope you will expand beyond Slack. We use RocketChat. But I assume the other
platforms will be a priority first for you.

Good luck growing the company by the way and offering a non-FAANG alternative.

~~~
toast76
Thank you! My hope is to be able to support as many platforms as we can, or
even open up the API in way that allows users to roll their own.

~~~
1cvmask
What is your email by the way or best way to reach out to?

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snickell
Is there an easy way to filter in RightGIF for "images that will auto-expand
in slack and not be too big", I hate guessing in Giphy if my chosen image is
gonna be too big to auto-expand.

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stephenr
It’s not obvious from the demo on your site, will/can you return more than one
image for a given phrase?

I bought a really simple (or possibly stupid?) domain that takes advantage of
a particular TLD to make a common reactionary phrase, and it returns gifs that
match that phrase.

I’d used the Giphy and Tenor APIs and I’d be interested in yours, but without
Multiple results it’d defeat the purpose. Also I kind of assume your web site
demo is limited to “safe” results, would you make “unsafe” results available
via api?

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smarri
I'm curious, I'd love to know more about the business model in this space?
What's the revenue model in the GIF business?

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foepys
Considering that there are two other large tech cooperations named Microsoft
and Amazon out there, would you sell RightGIF to them? Microsoft will probably
be interested because of MS Teams that is currently using Giphy.

Even if you don't want to ultimately sell, you should try to get Microsoft to
use your service.

~~~
toast76
I know GIFs are not exactly an "important social good", but I do like the idea
of keeping RightGIF independent. We definitely want to integrate with Teams of
course, so there will no doubt be conversations to be had there :)

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tqzk
a) yes b) Android, MS Teams c) I bet that - obviously!

Also: I'm not a frequent user of GIF apps/keyboards, because gifs load for so
long. Did you think about it to preview only every X frame of the GIF (even
like 3 frames per gif) cause people usually know what gifs they are looking
for (don't have to explore the dataset to look for "the one that seems
right"). Maybe it will load them quickly. And if a user does not choose a gif
for X sec, it loads all of the frames or next gifs?

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1cvmask
What happened to gitr.io by the way?

~~~
toast76
LOL... I forgot it even existed. It was a hackathon project that never made it
past being a hackathon project :) I'm glad someone remembers it though!

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011-video
GIFs sucks. Most popular GIFs are video chunks played in loop. So reverse the
process and convert GIF to video. With web app as 011.video for instance you
can reduce the file size by a factor of 10 easily, just upload GIF, resize and
download WebM video. Even better, for your own website use the original video
chunk, play it in loops and make it clickable with HTML 5.

~~~
hackerman123469
Don't get tricked by the "GIF" names. Ex. Giphy will only use GIF if videos do
not work. They mostly use video formats.

I assume it's the same for RightGIF?

