Ask HN: Now that Giphy sold, what can RightGIF do for you?

34 points by toast76 6 years ago | 19 comments

Hi folks, I'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 "social & fun" apps in the Slack marketplace (behind only Giphy itself which was the defacto first-party GIF app at the time).

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'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.

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.

What I'd love to know from the HN community is: a) do you have privacy concerns about Giphy/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?

Thanks heaps!

tdrp 6 years ago |

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.

Ayesh 6 years ago |

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 6 years ago | |

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.

gitgud 6 years ago |

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 6 years ago | |

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...

1cvmask 6 years ago |

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 6 years ago | |

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 6 years ago | | |

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

snickell 6 years ago |

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.

stephenr 6 years ago |

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?

smarri 6 years ago |

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?

foepys 6 years ago |

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 6 years ago | |

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 :)

egfx 6 years ago | |

Microsoft and Facebook have partnered up and exchanged equity so I don't know why they wouldn't keep using giphy.

tqzk 6 years ago |

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?

1cvmask 6 years ago |

What happened to gitr.io by the way?

toast76 6 years ago | |

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!

011-video 6 years ago |

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 6 years ago | |

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?