Comment by anonfunction | Hacker News Reader

Comment by anonfunction | Hacker News Reader

Hey HN, I'm one of the back-end engineers at Gifs.com and we just launched a brand new editor that anyone can use to create and augment videos online.

We started with the premise of democratizing video editing by making an iMovie-lite in the cloud. Our goal is to empower people around the world to express themselves. We still have a lot of ideas in the works to make finding, creating and augmenting short-form media frictionless but launching our new editor is the back-bone of that dream.

You may remember us from gifyoutube.com where anyone could add gif in front of youtube and we would let you trim the video and add captions. Now you can simply replace youtube.com with gifs.com or put gifs.com/edit/ in front of any video or GIF to open it up in the new editor with even more editing capabilities.

Everyone knows a picture is worth a thousand words, so does that mean a GIF must be worth n pictures where n is frames in the GIF? After checking out /r/reactiongifs/ and /r/wastedgifs I now believe so.

The player looks super nice and was very easy to use. Hope y'all do well.

Thanks for the kind words Ian!

what do you mean by democratizing video editing? are users all giving little input on a larger collaboration? is this wishful buzz-speak or are these things (expression, empowerment) now synonymous with democracy? (-:

p.s. can't wait to try out what you've built when I get to my desktop.

Thanks for the question and I hope you enjoy it!

What I meant by democratizing was opening up a capability to many more people than previously available due to needing expensive software or the knowledge and skills to use OSS.

Here is wikipedia's definition:

> Democratization of technology refers to the process by which access to technology rapidly continues to become more accessible to more people.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democratization_of_technology

Sometimes people ask questions when they really mean to make a statement. It's tough to be direct without blaming.

Your buzzwords, and the rest of this industry's buzzwords, are basically meaningless mumbo jumbo to all those people you are trying to sign up around the world. Equally guilty, I've used the word "container" in a thousand sentences if I've used it in one. I've also used the crap out of your service, but bailed to one of the other ones because of video quality. That's the reality of GIFy playthings.

Users should dictate what software is created for them, including and up to how it benefits from their use. If an application requires hurting a long time user to be more "successful", then it should rethink how it presents itself to the users during the marketing growth phase. I'd rather pay cryptocurrency transactions to a GIF API aggregator that does auto-bids on quality and compression times for services like this. That way, I'd get to pick what TYPE of service I wanted and the services themselves would optimize on feature quality instead of founder and VC equity.

We spent a good time brainstorming and discussing what it is we're building before we built it. It's hard to describe complex ideas and grandiose visions of the future succinctly.

Our goal is not to be a high quality image transcoding business, if that's what you are after there are many great options. Our first task was to create a tool that anyone (like our parents) could use to edit short clips of video and easily share it with their friends. However I can sympathize with the feeling of wanting higher quality media and we have several performance increases and smart mechanisms to serve the right quality to different clients that will allow us to increase the quality of our media for everyone, no auctions necessary.

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