Curious why not a "recycling" approach where images that are about to expire on Imgur are simply reposted to Imgur gaining a fresh URL?
Show HN: Avoiding Imgur Link Rot
31–40 of 55 posts
Re: Show HN: Avoiding Imgur Link Rot
#32Interesting service, but an earnest question about your Terms and Conditions[0].
How closely did you read this? Since I see you used an TOC generator (which was nice for me learn about), I'm just curious how closely you read some of the conditions.
I just may be reading the Prohibited[1] section too closely as well as the User Generated Content [2] section, but it seems like your stated goal about protecting the NSFW content from Imgur, as I guess such content is potentially obscene, lewd, lascivious, filthy, violent, harassing, libellous, slanderous, or otherwise objectionable (as determined by [you and your team]).
I'm not here to trash your service or trying to "gotcha", just since you're responding in the thread, I'm only curious how closely you've read the TOC and if you stand by all the elements of it.
0 - https://haasie.com/terms_and_conditions
1 - https://haasie.com/terms_and_conditions#prohibited
2- https://haasie.com/terms_and_conditions#ugc
edit: fixed link formatting
Re: Show HN: Avoiding Imgur Link Rot
#33First off: great work! The age old question is how you afford to run this, and how if you get popular do you not become an imgur yourself and have their same pressures to delete, moderate and make money.
I say we need basic universal internet infrastructure in the same way we have roads, libraries, hospitals, mail service, etc. Fundamental services like email, image and video hosting, backup storage, small cloud nodes, and so on. All partially or fully publicly funded, with no bloat or wasted overhead trying to commercialize it into an advertising platform filled with spyware and dark patterns.
Why shouldn't image and video hosting be a paid service?
I don't think there ever was any free method of mass distributing information. Or storing it if someone didn't find it interesting. If you need to share something, you should burden the cost. Just because some idiots thought they had a model that didn't work doesn't mean there isn't real costs involved. And those should be paid. In free market they should approach margin.
Re: Show HN: Avoiding Imgur Link Rot
#34> Well done, you’ve defeated link rot!
Except you haven't, because anyone that wants to view these images where they are linked needs to know to change the URL to Haasie instead of Imgur. So all the links are still broken.
And on top of that, even if the users know about Haasie, it only works if someone went to this website before the original image was deleted, and enter the URL on a form. Non-popular images will be long gone before people do this manually. Perhaps accepting any URL and transparently fetching it from Imgur would improve this a little. From my manual testing, this doesn't seem to be the case, just gives an S3 error from bucket ID haasie01, and nothing shows up there even if I wait and refresh.
All of this is assuming this website won't go down or go bad. Probably the Archive Team, and Archive.org can handle this task better.
Re: Show HN: Avoiding Imgur Link Rot
#35First off: great work! The age old question is how you afford to run this, and how if you get popular do you not become an imgur yourself and have their same pressures to delete, moderate and make money.
Thank you! My thinking is to start with donations. There is no such thing as a free service. If people get value from using it to upload anonymously and they want to keep it going, makes sense to donate. In the future I could also add a subscription account for additional features, access to an API, bigger upload limits, transformations, greater ability to organise, etc.
Is there a backup plan? Not saying that relying on donations is impossible, but realistically there is a very small chance that enough donation will flow in continuously.
As a sidenote, reddit is (was?) the one of main user of imgur, however https://www.google.com/search?q=%22haasie.com%22+site%3Aredd... yields no results - maybe it is worth to promote it there also.
Re: Show HN: Avoiding Imgur Link Rot
#36> Well done, you’ve defeated link rot Until this site succumbs to the challenges of being a free image host? FWIW ArchiveTeam is grabbing as much as possible so it could eventually show up in the wayback machine. Though what they have now, 47TB, is a drop to the petabytes imgur probably has now. There was an estimated 376 TiB in 2015. - https://wiki.archiveteam.org/index.php/Imgur - https://tracker.archiveteam.org/im…
Free image hosts just aren't sustainable, the costs are high and it's fairly hard to make that money back. I made a paid image host a while back (https://imgz.org) exactly because of that reason.
Re: Show HN: Avoiding Imgur Link Rot
#37Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's sad to me that we went away from everyone just having their personal web space as part of their ISP package. Ditto email. It meant more smaller providers had to play nice and we didn't have a few major companies arbitrarily deciding what to host and what to drop. I don't believe it should be government funded, but I wish there was a protocol that would let my ISP allocate a few GB of resources on my behalf that…
You can't because some people hosted extremely popular files (often starting with p- and ending in -orn) on the few GB that your local ISP gave you. And your local ISP suddenly needed to serve hundreds of terabytes they didn't have in their peering budget. So now you need caps. And enforcement. And exceptions. And suddenly, you have a cloud service provider. And they've invested a ton into making the place nice, and…
Shouldn't a whole bunch of upload bandwidth even out the traffic flows and make such an ISP a better candidate for peering?
Re: Show HN: Avoiding Imgur Link Rot
#38Earlier quoted context omitted.
I say we need basic universal internet infrastructure in the same way we have roads, libraries, hospitals, mail service, etc. Fundamental services like email, image and video hosting, backup storage, small cloud nodes, and so on. All partially or fully publicly funded, with no bloat or wasted overhead trying to commercialize it into an advertising platform filled with spyware and dark patterns.
Why shouldn't image and video hosting be a paid service? I don't think there ever was any free method of mass distributing information. Or storing it if someone didn't find it interesting. If you need to share something, you should burden the cost. Just because some idiots thought they had a model that didn't work doesn't mean there isn't real costs involved. And those should be paid. In free market they should appro…
The world lacks a good system for microtransactions to make paying the actual costs feasible.
Also I'm already paying my ISP for a connection, and so is everyone that views the things I host, so personally I hope for advances in P2P to leverage that existing already-paid-for bandwidth for distribution instead of having to toss more money on top.
Re: Show HN: Avoiding Imgur Link Rot
#39> Well done, you’ve defeated link rot Until this site succumbs to the challenges of being a free image host? FWIW ArchiveTeam is grabbing as much as possible so it could eventually show up in the wayback machine. Though what they have now, 47TB, is a drop to the petabytes imgur probably has now. There was an estimated 376 TiB in 2015. - https://wiki.archiveteam.org/index.php/Imgur - https://tracker.archiveteam.org/im…
My intention is not to be a free host though - that's not sustainable. I hope to fund it through donations and potentially a subscription for enhanced features.
Donations are not sustainable either. You need a business plan.
Re: Show HN: Avoiding Imgur Link Rot
#40> Well done, you’ve defeated link rot Until this site succumbs to the challenges of being a free image host? FWIW ArchiveTeam is grabbing as much as possible so it could eventually show up in the wayback machine. Though what they have now, 47TB, is a drop to the petabytes imgur probably has now. There was an estimated 376 TiB in 2015. - https://wiki.archiveteam.org/index.php/Imgur - https://tracker.archiveteam.org/im…
My intention is not to be a free host though - that's not sustainable. I hope to fund it through donations and potentially a subscription for enhanced features.
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