> considered table stakes for modern chat clients

I'm not so sure about that. I rarely see anyone using them anymore and have read reports that usage is declining. Even if it is table stakes, nothing stops you from rendering gifs without gify integration.

Nothing stops you from starting a new service for any sort of content library. The moat is in the content creation/curation, and in this case that content is centered around gifs.

If you want to get really reductive we could point towards any sort of content based business on the internet as merely moving files over http/https but I don’t think anyone would find it reasonable to compare Netflix and Kindle’s book library as competing in the same market

> Nothing stops you from starting a new service for any sort of content library.

Content licensing does. Try creating an alternative streaming platform that has the entire Netflix library and see how quickly you get shut down.

Facebook can't sue you if you create a rival gif service. None of the value is in their "content". All the value is in the search and ui

> All the value is in the search and ui

I'm pretty sure that value is approximately $0.

Why would you even want to for gifs? The value seems super low compared to the effort. What value did gify even provide facebook? The data is probably next to worthless. Gifs in text chat seem like a fading fad, and are probably a bad user experience. The whole thing seems like a huge boondoggle, and the idea that it gives facebook any leverage anywhere is laughable.

I’m going to point towards Facebook spending 600 million to buy giphy and the regulators deciding this gave too much monopoly power to the point of requiring Meta to sell the business, as self evident proof that it’s valuable.

I get that you, personally, don’t value it but large organizations apparently do

I don’t think that proves that either Facebook or UK regulators are rational actors. I’m also not aware of any earnings reports from Facebook point to any return on that investment. It also doesn’t seem like there have been many gify copycats.

[*edit] I'd also add that Facebook's share price dropped 15% the month the original deal was announced, and took two months to recover. It seems like the market agreed that it was a bad deal.

This is kind getting tautological here when you’re saying that just because someone/some group values it doesn’t make it valuable, especially when we have two fairly large organizations involved.

I’d need your definition of what “valuable” is before we could have a useful conversation

It seems obvious to me that the value of any business deal could be measured in attributed revenue or movement in stock price. On both points, this deal looked like shit.

It could also be valued in its ability to prevent competition from forming and causing margins to fall in the protected area of business. Which happens to be what the regulators are looking to prevent.

This wouldn’t cause a bump in revenue or stock price unless this broke the equilibrium and let the controlling firm take more of the market. If it’s a defensive measure it’s just increased cost to maintain revenue, but that still can be worth it if actual competition is expected to drop margins enough to exceed the cost of the defensive measure

Facebook doesn't own any of the gifs in giphy. So "cutting off the supply" doesn't really make sense. Lots of them could probably be considered copyright infringement if a company wanted to be litigious enough. I'm pretty sure they don't have a license for all the thousands of subtitled Star Wars clips you can find on there, for example.

Cutting off the easy to use single place for content can have the same affect on usage rates as actually legally limiting access. Most people on this forum work in an industry where it’s common knowledge that even an extra second of initial load time will drastically increase your bounce rate. The frictionless experience you get with giphy is part of the content curation that is the moat for them