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Comment by tyre | Hacker News Reader

  But Giphy faces challenges in building a business.
  It hasn’t figured out a way to bring in revenue, and it
  doesn’t own many of the GIFs or have exclusive distribution
  partnerships.

They have raised $150 million for a GIF search engine.

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..Which also works crappily. I am exposed to giphy through the slackbot interface and it never finds anything relevant.

I really hate it when there's that one coworker that insists on /giphy-ing everything in slack. Usually its a clueless manager who thinks cute little pictures will inspire team morale, but all the results are always random and oftentimes tone-deaf or, in some cases, straight up NSFW. It's very annoying, thank god I can turn off gif display automatically.

I flat out refuse to have a giphy trigger in any chat-thing that I administer, and I argue strongly and vehemently against it in any that I'm a member of. My arguments are often backed up by the fact that 90% of the /giphy results are unrelated garbage.

So far, four out of five slacks no longer have giphy integration, and my work Hipchat rooms (on- and off-topic) don't have it either. The other slack rarely uses it, because of the 90%-garbage rule, so I'm content to not harp on it too much.

Stand up against giphy garbage.

Why can't it just be "someone who finds it cute / fun". Why does it always have to be some cynical "MBA who thinks it will inspire team morale"

Because in my anecdotal experience it's always been the overeager manager. I also qualified that statement with "usually", ergo it's not the absolute "always" condition you specify in your unnecessary reply. Either way I find it mad annoying. Emoji reactions are perfectly fine and non-intrusive ways of non-verbally communicating in a slack or IRC environment. GIFs suck. They are possibly one of the worst image formats out there.

> GIFs suck. They are possibly one of the worst image formats out there.

Halo effect?

I think they mostly serve so called "fake" gifs i.e. video in a loop

Work communications are not a place for fun. They are a place for productivity and focus. If your company's work is not fun by itself (interesting problems, no bs, etc.), that's a problem! Fix that, don't gloss over it with distractions (that thrash people's CPUs).

That sounds miserable. Have you never worked with people whose company you enjoy? It's really a motivating experience.

It's hardly miserable. I mean, I get along with my coworkers just fine in a professional way, but I'm not exactly buddy buddy crushing code sharing gifs like it seems like most startups want you to be. I don't go to work to make friends.

Just do it in the break room/kitchen, not in the workspace, which should be treated with the same respect as a library (if you provide private offices with doors that close, feel free to disregard). Group chat rooms that aren't #random (which I have /part-ed) are an extension of that workplace, and deserve the same respect.

My current workplace offers neither. People shout what I'll describe as "verbal memes" to no one in particular. There is music blaring (dubstep currently), over which I have no control without risking social ostracization. Group chat is used poorly (what do you an all-day all-hands meeting with no agenda?).

When I read your first post I thought you were just being uptight, but that does sound completely terrible.

I find background music can help or hinder depending on what I'm trying to do but it needs to be under my control. Out of consideration for others that means headphones.

And I hate open plan offices - don't even get me started. Place I'm working at the moment is awful for noise and overcrowding.

Funny thing is I find it hard to work in a completely silent environment unless I'm on my own - if the atmosphere is crypt-like with other people around I find it quite oppressive.

I hate open-plan offices with a passion. Especially when I get stuck on a high-traffic corridor.

Strangely, though, I do like spending time in coffee shops.

Maybe companies should just do away with offices altogether (walled, cubicles, and open), and turn the company building into a giant coffee shop with free drinks and pastries, nice decor, etc. Provide some meeting rooms so teams can meet in person, but otherwise just let everyone find a little alcove in the coffee shop to work in.

When I have to work unpaid overtime on the weekends, I get to work at home. I'm so much more productive then.

That sounds awful.

We have work-related chats, which are 95% serious with the occasional joke - same as we'd make at our desks - and we have offtopic and specific-topic rooms (literally, #offtopic and #videogames and #music, etc.)

It sounds like you are at one end of the spectrum but the solution is not necessarily to go all the way to the other extreme.

> Have you never worked with people whose company you enjoy?

Are GIFs a necessary component of this?

I have real friends outside of work thank you very much, if you're my coworker please help me by doing a good job so I can go hang out with them.

Whats that have to do with anything? You're going to run out of social pleasantries if you use them all on your coworkers instead of your friends?

If you don't want to enjoy the time your coworkers -- fine. But getting annoyed by people who do is silly.

Distractions mean that I need to work longer. I could get the amount of work that I do per day done in six hours. Instead, because of the distractions (including @here gif messages), I work ten hours, and have little time for my friends.

I have a very strict "only in private chats with coworkers I know well" rule for /giphy. The gifs are often wildly inappropriate.

We call that the "Giphy Russian Roulette"

And it's surprising how many people pay.

Me? I just insert the URL of the image I actually want.

We use /gif instead of /giphy, which uses RightGif: https://rightgif.com/. Ironically RightGif does have a business model while serving up better gifs 90% of the time.

Pay to get SFW only gifs. :frown: Sure, if you're paying for slack already... but if its "just" a bunch of friends, the idea of shelling out money to make sure that NSFW images don't show up in the wrong window... Yes, I know its a business model, but it disappoints me that that is one of the price differentiators between the plans.

I've switched my team's integration to gif keyboard which has a search and approve workflow so that someone has to say "I want that one" to have something NSFW show up.

That's actually what makes it exciting. Giphy's results are so bad that you never know what you're gonna get. I'm surprised Giphy doesn't utilize something like this:

http://tarzain.com/2016-09-22/building-a-deep-learning-power...

I'm surprised they don't just pipe the query to google image search and pick any random result from the top 100 google finds. That would be better in 99% of cases I've seen

Oh geez, yes. My team usually reacts with surprise whenever giphy gets one right. That's not the kind of brand association you want.

it's really amazing how bad giphy is.

rightgif works a lot better, but isn't as nicely integrated (not their fault -- 3rd party integrations don't get the same abilities as built-in giphy; come on slack...).

The search results are based on user-submitted tags, right? So the quality should be expected to be shaky.

I wish Giphy well, but one random thing about them that's always perplexed me: literally 1/3 of their staff have Director titles [1]

I get that vanity titles are a way to help startups hire good talent, but once you reach a nontrivial team size, this seems rather odd -- who are all these people directing exactly? It would make me very hesitant if interviewing a candidate who worked at Giphy, since their titles appear meaningless.

[1] http://giphy.com/team

Case in point, they have seven in the role "Director of Engineering"

Titles are free, so there's not a huge downside. I worked at a mutual fund company which had dozens and dozens of vice presidents. The reason was vendors and institutional customers take you more seriously if your title is "vice president".

The downsides are:

1. Director generally implies a manager of managers. If your title is "Director" and you're actually a team lead, it makes your company look like it doesn't know what it's doing. Specifically, the leadership.

2. If your resume goes from "Director" to "Developer" people are going to wonder what you did. It will cause people to take a second look at your resume in a negative way.

3. So at the end of that job, you've got someone who isn't qualified for a job with that title anywhere else and who will need to actively harm their career to take the jobs they are qualified for.

I'm sure I've forgotten several, but they've built a $600M GIF search engine so what do I know.

If they actually are like trying to be a managerial role and 33% are acting like managers (mostly meetings and more meetings for example) that I think would be worry some indeed.

For some organizations, though, Director isn't really a "Director" but more of a rank like "Senior." By this I mean there would be Assistant Director of Blah blah Development that didn't actually direct a group of people, but were was a more senior-ish developer earning the Director part of their name. It is odd, but it wouldn't be the first place I've seen that.

Sure, I mean in finance everyone is a Vice President :) But in a consumer-facing startup like Giphy, I've honestly never seen a company at that size and stage do that. "Director of Engineering" typically has a particular meaning that differs from "Senior Engineer".

AFAIK they host the GIFs themselves, meaning that they are more of a GIF hosting site than a search engine.

This creates two problems: 1. Copyright infringements 2. Hosting costs.

EDIT: I opened their main page and scrolled down a little bit. It downloaded 70MB.

Not to mention, google image search is already better from indexing giphy + the rest of the internet. Just select "animated" from the type dropdown.

Even Evernote is not profitable yet. Or Snapchat.

Huge company valuations with little to no profitability. Sounds familiar?

Luckily for us, valuation does not and should not have much concern with profitability.

If this was not the case, the only businesses would be the size of lemonade stands. Cardboard ones at that, that can be profitable on their first day.

Sounds like Twitter a few years back. These companies are on the same track.

Except that with Twitter, you self-identify as so many different things on the basis of the content you contribute. Giphy is nowhere close that.

Selling inventory is only valuable if you can sell the targeting to go with it. It's arguable if Giphy has the former, but it sure as fuck doesn't have the latter.

Does bing have an API because their gif search capabilities are amazing.

Forgive my ignorance - is a GIF search engine any different from a text search engine? They assign text tags to GIFs (maybe in a clever, machine learning type way?) and then search those, right?

I believe they scrape metadata about the gif, a lot of them come from tumblr which has a lot of tagging associated with the posts.

I bet their next thing is a chat app. It has to be.

cough Minus -> Meow

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