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Google kills Tenor GIF API, forcing changes at X, Discord, and more
(arstechnica.com)
RIP Google Play Music. Have yet to find another streaming service who's algorithm knew me so well to discover new music
That one doesn’t make a lick of sense.
😂 I haven’t heard that phrase in a southern minute.
there were two things i loved. one i think was called turntable, which let you and friends take turns DJing. you'd queue up a song and then after your 2 or 3 or idk i usually used it with the same group friends got their plays in, you got yours. i don't know what happened to it as we stopped using it.
then was thesixtyone, which had great artist discovery. but they were not the best about getting licenses and lost their eventual IP lawsuit. after that they kind of turned into spotify. i've just been using my private collection since then.
Still mourning Google Reader, luckily we can find consolation i in that all those apps and services weren't strategically killed by an evil corporation.
Yeah i liked it too.
I self host freshrss which is better nowadays.
We all love to rag on Google, but this is such a nonsense website. Most of the things "killed" there are superseded by another product, like AI studio replacing Firebase Studio and Google TV replacing Chromecast. Then there's stuff nobody's ever heard of just to pad the list.
Tenor was quick, great, and optimal solution. I liked it.
Google (Tenor) notified API Users around five months before June 30, 2026, the access restriction date:
- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46628926
Klipy is being offered as a direct alternative:
- https://klipy.com/migrate
Discord also migrated to Klipy about a month ago. Yesterday, I saw positive feedback in communities about Klipy's more accurate search.
Tenor was always slow for me and had shit search.
I didn't know it was owned by Google, but now that I do it makes complete sense.
May I ask what sense the "bad search" does in the scope of one of the most common and known advertisement business backed by their fundamentally crucial systems for search, statistics, and analytics?
I read your questions three times but I still can't tell what you're asking.
Worth noting that while Klipy is headed up by ex Tenor employees, Google has also heavily invested in Klipy.
At my community (The Gamers' Tavern) we ditched Discord (when all the age verification crap started) in favour of Discourse and Fluxer (Discord clone, but open source and self hostable) and currently Klipy integration is offering a sketchy and vague pricing model that is looking like it is going to include ads.
So, that's the vein that runs through all of this. Google killed Tenor, funded a new startup that'll eventually likely be somewhere they can of course shove ads into.
Thank you very much for more insightful information! Google has always been a changer, not a talker, and appreciate them!
Yet, may I ask why did you choose Fluxer over Stoat, and if the source of Google investing in it available?
Source: Klipy themselves.
Why Fluxer over Stoat, there is a lot to unpack here, but self hosting was much more mature and well thought out with Fluxer. Docker support was way beyond Stoat, and development is proceeding at a much better rate with mobile apps, integrations etc. We probably answer a lot of the questions here: https://blog.gamerstavern.online/innkeeper/about-community-and-communities
Roger that. Thank you very much for the response and references!
I wish you safety, stability, and peace!
Thanks for the (more insider than i've got) information! I don't know anyone at tenor or klipy. shit, i didn't even know klipy existed.
Heads up that there is a self-hosted gif platform I've been tinkering on, original repo is here but it was more or less abandonded. I've been adding to it slowly here: Gifable.
The base repo was good, a selfhosted Gif hosting, but I needed more integrations so I've been managing my own fork for about a year. The largest one is a way that Matrix servers can integrate, so it now actually stands up a matrix server and can federate your gifs with other matrix users. The second item is adding Giphy support (I had Tenor as well... but guess I'll remove that), so you can alternatively search Giphy.
I won't say it's polished, but if Tenor is leaving a sour note in your mouth, having someone else hosting would probably be neat.
Screenshot:
Pfft, "not polished". Looks way more polished than manually dumping shit into a folder on my http server. Thanks!
Github sucks though, unreliable and headed to bad places. Considered mirroring or rehosting it somewhere with forgejo? Self-hostable, or there are some public options
Thanks! Design was mostly the original creators though.
It is mirrored on my private Forgejo instance, github was the original choice if the first eng, I will think about migrating
This looks interesting. I want to host my own discord alternative but gifs were what I missed most.
Happy cake day! Yes San boat. Element was the closest thing I found to discord, but gifs were annoying. Getting this added to apps is the hardest thing, but it's mostly that how to I say "add this integration please" when it's only my one server
You should try Sable! It's way closer to discord than element is.
Also Commet has been pretty good - has an app on android and Linux. Sable is better, but is only webapp.
It looks great, I will!
Whatever replaces Tenor needs to allow for more specificity in searching. If I search "lemur" and I see 3 orangutans, a chimp and a 12 gibbons, and maybe 1 actual lemur, I'm still happy to have simians, but I really needed a lemur, man. I was quite fucking specific in my search term. Had I written "monkey" but it showed me a series of apes, I wouldn't mind that so much.
Also, "cat on skateboard" has fuck all to do with a poorly staged video of a dog playing Tony Hawk's Pro Skater with a set of gaming bongos. Again, glad to see it, but where's my skateboarding cat??
That is a good point, they've crammed ai slop into everything yet they can't even fix something basic as image search.
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At this point, anyone that relies on a Google service is just asking for trouble.
Yes they will kill off the thing you have grown reliant on, and so you're better off to avoid anything with google
I bet they will introduce a sloppy AI gif generator
powered by grok, so you're running a risk every time you use it
running a risk
Your comment made me think of something I had not considered.
Somewhere in this AI image generation infrastructure, there must be some poor asshole who has to look at whatever is made to say its OK or not. Which has to be at least as traumatic as doing the same thing for facebook or any site that has censorship. Or do they use the AI to vet the AI which causes issues like you describe?
“AI” CSAM detection is over a decade old, and apparently very accurate.
It’s oldschool machine learning. Image hosts had no choice but to develop them.
And legal authorities gave them access to datasets to make the detection models.
I think Lemmy uses it. And it’s indeed implemented on “modern” AI sites like CivitAI, and very effective. If it’s ineffective somewhere (like Grok?) that means the owners are total idiots and should be sued.
I'm a somewhat old timer on the internet, I know free speech absolutists like Musk way too well. Free speech absolutism often includes "legalizing all recordings of crimes", and not understanding why non-consensual porn is bad, thus a lot of them support real CSAM. They are also the reason why free speech nowadays has a bad name, as it mainly was for privileged people and their supporters, and often included "negative freedoms", because criticism might force someone to self-censor, but of course not for them.
honestly the best use of AI image recognition is to recognize illegal content. that spares humans the trauma. but you have to have a database of illegal content to train it on, so it's a catch-22. also AI (LLMs in particular, so it'd need to be some other kind of ML program) is notorious for being wrong a lot. which means it still needs more human supervision than an AI that does its function properly.
Yeah that last line is what I was picturing. Ive messed around a little with AI chatbots and the amount of things that I know from my professional life that it got wrong was pretty astounding.
Which is why people mostly think "AI" will take over other jobs, but not theirs, cause it can't even answer basic questions right on their field 🤔
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which is why they just want you asking general shit. they know if you ask specifics that you already know the answer to, it will answer wrong a hell of a lot of the time. if you're an expert in the field, you know that it's wrong. if you're not, you just shrug and accept it.
which is why i get such a good chuckle out of vibe coders. that's their field. they should be able to recognize that the work the LLM puts out is shit.
i really don't want anyone to be an expert in recognizing CSAM though. ideal worlds and shit.
But thats just silly. AI is being touted as an intelligence machine.
I guess it's a stupid person's idea of "smart", it only knows general things, sometimes.
The real problem was probably that Tenor was free, and Google didn’t see a way it could make money from a GIF API.
The author can’t figure out how a company can monetise an API? Monetisation clearly isn’t the problem here. It’s possible that they’re going to launch a new product incorporating this, or more likely incorporate it into Gemini.
On March 27, 2018, Tenor was acquired by Google. The company has continued to operate as a standalone brand.
Huh, well if you couldn't see a way to make money with it, maybe you shouldn't have bought it...
i'm sure that the site's acquisition was always about user tracking data and never about it being 'profitable' itself.
You just aren’t privy to the reason why they bought it.
I covered this in this comment here: https://lemmy.world/comment/24536634
Google basically shuttered Tenor and heavily funded the replacement, which is showing sketchy early signs of ads.
Discord needs to offer a setting that you can pick which gif hosting website you want to search. GIPHY results are fucking ass cheeks.
I’m literally just keeping a browser open with tenor and manually copying the gifs over to discord.
I wish it would at least let me switch from GIPHY search to anything else.
Love seeing how it seems like these tech giants are starting to try to fuck each other up. This will be fun.
I'm gonna get the popcorn. You want some? :)
I'll have mine with extra butter if that's OK 😁
i remember tenor search results were freaky/crazy
And giphy results are ultra boring...
RIP a large chunk of memes.
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this post was submitted on 30 Jun 2026
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