[VeilEm]

It's analogous to building a 30+ person company around MS Office clip art circa 1995 or Print Shop banner designs circa 1985, only now the company is valued at $300m with $50m funding. For gif search. Because I need those memes and I need them fast?

[xienze]

The difference is, that clip art company was directly selling a product. Make a collection of clipart, customers pay money.

[Tenhundfeld]

I guess your critique is that Giphy doesn't have a clear, announced monetization strategy?

That sounds fair. I haven't done any research on the company, but that seemed vague in their recent funding announcement/valuation.

However, I think it's fair to say that Giphy has created something people want to use. Anecdotally, their Slack integration is very popular in the channels I frequent. Maybe the lack of public monetization plan means bubble to you, but it seems the business at least has some value. I don't know if they'll be able to turn that value into revenue, but it seems plausible to me.

I'm not really arguing against your opinion. I'm just trying to get clarity on exactly why you think Giphy is indicative of a bubble. Searching for funny gifs may seem frivolous, but it's something people value. If Giphy can capitalize on that value without losing users / destroying the brand, it seems like a reasonable foundation for a business.

[Keats]

If only the gif search worked. 75% of the time when I do a giphy search on slack i get completely unrelated gifs.

[theTaggedTags]

It's all about the tags. You have to work in the other direction. Find something well-tagged, then giphy the fully qualified tag that produces the same gif every time.

Granted, this is not a "search engine" type of use case, but the actual existence of some gifs, and the tags applied, force a degree of compromise.

[derFunk]

You nailed it. See my comment from yesterday, it's the same for me: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11113644

[Gmo]

Same here, useless 90% of the time.