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.
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.
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.