121–130 of 414 posts
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Colocation hosting your own servers around the world... you know, the original way.
Is that really cheaper than S3, though?
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Because they probably aren't charities, and can't afford to donat e Free resources for your perpetual enjoyment?
> Because they probably aren't charities, and can't afford to donat e Free resources for your perpetual enjoyment? Then why did they start a free service to begin with, if they knew from the start it couldn't last? Right, to trick people into becoming dependent on the free service so they'll be reluctant to leave once the shady, UX-degrading monetization starts. You'll forgive me if I'm not sympathetic to that busine…
For example, they may have hoped or believed they could find a better business model over time, an alternative to the traditional ad models. Based on watching their various experiments since the day they got started, I can say for a fact they did try other things (two examples: Imgur as a service via paid API and Imgur Pro accounts).
Is it more likely the Imgur founder was naive or malevolent? The answer is extremely obvious.
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I want to know whether Imgur's dark patterns are because the site isn't profitable, or because it isn't profitable enough . Because they've sort of cut their own throat here, and it would be interesting to know whether it was from necessity or greed.
Lots of image upload sites does this, start out good and eventually add a lot of crap to monetise. Does it mean they cut their throat or does it mean the creator just set himself up for a life of money? Genuine question, maybe this is just a way to become rich, maybe these shitty upload sites make enough money that they simply pick this way instead of keeping it pure.
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To be fair, bandwidth isn't free. Imgur can't serve hotlinked content for free, forever.
To be fair, they could have operated a simple and effectively profitable business, and grown at an economically normal rate. But hey, I guess I wouldn't say no to $40M of a16z's money and a $200M valuation either.
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Colocation hosting your own servers around the world... you know, the original way.
Even cheaper and easier is just to rent dedicated servers or VPSes.
The founder, Vlad, used to rent out cheap dedicated boxes with about 500gb of bandwidth per box for $60 to $80 per month. He'd cycle upload machines - eg 123.imagevenue.com - and fill up the drives on them until no more space was available; when bandwidth was exhausted, that was that for the month. Typically image file downloads would decline on any given upload over time, so machine resources would free back up in terms of bandwidth and deleting images that weren't viewed after N amount of time.
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"direct" links to an image uploaded sometimes/usually redirect to imgur page, with lots of ads and shitty content, obnoxious, animated overlays that block out part of the image on mobile, etc
To be fair, bandwidth isn't free. Imgur can't serve hotlinked content for free, forever.
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[ deleted ] -- I removed it because I got tired of trying to explain the nuance.
That is absolutely false. Plenty of large companies are able to negotiate their rates on AWS. You just have to be huge.
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> Because they probably aren't charities, and can't afford to donat e Free resources for your perpetual enjoyment? Then why did they start a free service to begin with, if they knew from the start it couldn't last? Right, to trick people into becoming dependent on the free service so they'll be reluctant to leave once the shady, UX-degrading monetization starts. You'll forgive me if I'm not sympathetic to that busine…
+1 to this. People should stop being soften with unrealistic business that uses the ad hororem tactic. Imgur can explore dozens of models.