Comment by thenewbtg | Hacker News Reader

Comment by thenewbtg | Hacker News Reader

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@Sir as a long time reddit user, your total blameshifting of your services inability to compete with gfycat, coming right after listening to you blameshift on why you couldn't compete with imgur, stinks to high heaven from here.

At what point do you accept responsibility for the success and failure of your ability to create a service and make it popular?

At what point do you stop externalizing the blame and get down to the hard task (or simply lucky outcome) of succeeding?

For what it's worth, I just made a gfycat of a youtube video to share with my mom. So I decided to do the exact same process for your service that you tout as superior to gfycat.

With gfycat, it was super simple to paste the youtube link, select the time frame and output the html5 video/gif. Done in under a minute. Your service has not actually completed an "upload" of the youtube video from a link no matter how long I've waited. Whenever I click on the random floating microphone near the top left of your services homepage, I simply see "an error occurred". I don't know how long I'm supposed to wait for this to work, but I just made 3 more youtube->gfycats while waiting.

I'm not lying, here are the 3 youtube -> gfycats that finished while your service says "uploading" without a progress bar at all (gfycat has a working progress bar so I can helpfully tell that it downloads the youtube video in about 10-15 seconds). http://gfycat.com/UnitedGoodnaturedArcherfish http://www.gfycat.com/RemoteWelltodoLadybird http://www.gfycat.com/FeminineCapitalCob

No offense but gfycat obviously blows your service out of the water, so perhaps you should play catch-up instead of blaming reddit admins? Which is silly anyway, because gfycat succeeds through comments and people sharing it and talking about it, not through owner spam or something else.

For the record it's been over 10 minutes since I began a youtube -> html5 conversion on your site and it still says "uploading" and I think it's broken.

Here's the thing. I thought for a long, long time (MediaCrush has been around for 9 months, you know), about why gfycat might be more popular. I cannot arrive at an answer. MediaCrush is an objectively better service in almost every way imaginable. We tried to be better by making a better service, and it didn't work. So, I start looking for other reasons. The biggest reason I can think of is that our launch was botched on Reddit because the admins came down on us, and they did not come down on gfycat. More people know about gfycat. As for imgur, I haven't thought nearly as much about how to compete with them, they're just too ingrained in Reddit culture.

YouTube uploads are not supported, intentionally. That's legal hot water we don't want to be in, and frankly, neither should gfycat. The fact that it's not giving a user-friendly error is a problem - I will investigate it.

Saying gfycat blows our service out of the water is nonsense. Stop spewing nonsense. That's a single simple feature that is intentionally not supported. Do some actual research.

I think it's simply a branding issue. "gfycat" is a catchier name which also hints at the GIF-related features. I have a pretty good idea of what it does from the name alone. "MediaCrush" on the other hand could be just about anything.

Quality and success are not directly related. Growing a product is a grind. A good launch can help build momentum, but is not critical for success. It sounds like you are blaming others for your failures when you could be looking for other opportunities. There are undoubtably reddit competitiors that you could target.

"MediaCrush is an objectively better service in almost every way imaginable. "

I disagree. You're very protective of your work and obviously deluded to the quality. It's a shame.

As a reddit user I will continue to use gfycat as in my 25 minutes of testing over 5 different sources, gfycat worked in under 15 seconds and for 100% of the time, and provides an objectively superior feature set at every stage of the process.

At this point I don't even know what you support. You don't list it on your webpage (gfycat does), and you don't fail when bad input is brought in (gfycat does). You don't give a progress report for uploads (gfycat does) and you don't support speed changing on html5 videos (gfycat does). Your service brands all pages with your logo and naviagation links, gfycat hides the entire UI except for at certain times, for a much much cleaner look that almost appears like a native gif.

Just did multiple gifs as a test and gfycat is just objectively much faster at uploading and encoding. Gfycat finishes the whole process while your service says "pending" before it begins! I'm sorry, I don't see a single way your service is better. Maybe outline them instead of just claiming it is?

Sorry you don't agree. Keep blaming admins, I'm sure that'll help you build a truly competitive service.

I wrote three responses to this comment, and three times you edited it. I'm not going to try for a fourth.

Update: Actually, there are some points you've edited in that I need to refute here to prevent the spread of misinformation.

>Your service brands all images with your logo, gfycat hides it except for at certain times, for a much cleaner look.

What? No, we don't do anything like that. What on Earth are you talking about?

>You don't give a progress report for uploads

Yes we do.

>"What? No, we don't do anything like that. What on Earth are you talking about?"

I mean that if you view a gfycat it's a totally white page, if you view a mediacrush your logo and navigation are all over the page. Gfycat appears unbranded most of the time, your service does not.

As for progress bar, gfycat shows you a real-time indication of the status of the upload. Yours is a dummy progress bar that gives no indication of progress and will run even if the service is doing nothing (as the "we don't support youtubes we just 'upload' endlessly until you quit" test proved to me).

Your fake progress bar and lack of error handling caused me to wait 20 minutes to upload a video for converting with zero indication that there was anything amiss. As I performed during my test, gfycat handled multiple youtubes and large gifs (1-10MB) in under 5 minutes total, while I waited 20+ minutes on Mediacrush before giving up on many of my inputs.

I had to contact a creator of the service to find out it didn't support one of the most popular and most used features of the competitor he claims to be superior to!

I understand I'm downvoted, I understand this community is rewarding you.

But sorry buddy: outside of HN, Gfycat beat you with a superior service. Not because of the admins, but because users like me who willingly make the choice. Who submit links from gfycat not mediacrush. Who convert everything we see into gfycat. Because we compare services with videos, large gifs, small gifs and everything in between and pick what we like best. You didn't convince me: quite the opposite, you attacked me for judging your service and took zero criticism fairly, even when gfycat is easily and objectively better in the eyes of the users who you have to win over to see any viral success in subreddits. To see someone say "we're superior in every way" is such a heartbreak to me. How can you compete if you're unwilling to have fair perspective?

I will promote gfycat on reddit comments wildly, as I have in the past, as so many hundreds of users have loudly and strongly done so-- and thats why gfycat will succeed. Because of users like me who go into comments and convert every gif and video to gfycat and become the most upvoted comments. Gfycat succeeds because of viral attraction to it.

All the best luck, but you might consider adding basic error handling, upgrading your UI to meet parity with gfycat, and might want to add features like youtube if you want to compete. You can find legal reasons why you can't, but that just means I pick gfycat over mediacrush every single time. Your legal concerns are not mine-- I want the best service, not the "most proper" service or whatever. I'd move quick though, gfycat is already moving to become a mainstay in many video/image subreddits and your window to displace it is closing faster than you might believe.

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