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Reddit launches image uploads, ditching alliance with Imgur

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Re: Reddit launches image uploads, ditching alliance with Imgur

#171

Looks like it's backed by S3 x-amz-storage-class: REDUCED_REDUNDANCY Content-Type: image/jpeg Server: AmazonS3 Can't imagine that AWS bill...

According to Reddit's source code they're using a provider called Imgix - https://www.imgix.com/ - who I assume use S3.

Came across an incredible photo series of their dataserver. http://photos.imgix.com/building-a-graphics-card-for-the-int...

Re: Reddit launches image uploads, ditching alliance with Imgur

#172
post #159
post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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

None of that is a dark pattern. A dark pattern is an UI design that motivates users to use the program/site in a way profitable to the site, but contrary to users' interest. To trick people, see http://darkpatterns.org/ . Redirecting to the whole page instead of the link is just a hotlink protection (as debatable as that is for an image hoster). Animated overlays in mobile is just shitty advertising and UX. But no da…

> A dark pattern is an UI design that motivates users to use the program/site in a way profitable to the site, but contrary to users' interest.

Doesn't this definition cover all advertising ?

Re: Reddit launches image uploads, ditching alliance with Imgur

#173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is that really cheaper than S3, though?

Massively cheaper at scale. Do the basic math.

can you explain the math? I honestly don't have a working knoweldge of the inputs, but let's say i wanted the equivalent of ec2? How would I go about setting it up and the costs? If I wanted to serve a few million english speaking people my web application, how coud I calculate the price? Do I literally buy my own hardware, or I rent hardware at a dedicated rate? These are real questions btw, not rhetoric, it's hard to find a solid blog post or comparison of setting this up and the long term cost v convenience benefits of scaling this because almost everyone uses cloud providers, and by cloud providers I mean digital ocean, AWS, azure, rackspace or now google. Heroku (last I checked) sits on AWS as well and maybe even ngineyard does. actually pretty curious now if a few million people would be worth running your own gear, and if running that gear was lease v buy

Re: Reddit launches image uploads, ditching alliance with Imgur

#174

I'm surprised one of the big companies (Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Amazon), or one of the world's governments doesn't start up a simple image hosting site with direct linking, and foot the bill in exchange for tracking everyone, and having more of the world under their umbrella, visiting daily. I'm assuming those companies also have the infrastructure to reduce bandwidth expenses, and they could accept the loss in…

Hosting an image site means you're responsible for its content. That means you need to have some policy for dealing with all the copyright infringement, child porn, racial hatred, leaked celebrity nudes, shock images, etc. It's a potential lightning rod for brand damage.

Note that all of Facebook, Google, Microsoft, & Amazon already allow you to host your own photos but aren't used in this way.

(Everyone has more or less given up on copyright enforcement for images, possibly because there's no central enforcement mafia, but that doesn't mean it's not still the law)

Re: Reddit launches image uploads, ditching alliance with Imgur

#175
post #162
post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My guess is that imgur started out profitable but that ended when gifs became popular. /r/all is about 50% gifs nowadays. The low bandwidth of an image host makes it possible to allow hotlinking but that doesn't work with videos.

Good point! I distinctly recall Imgur being started because it was one of those "this used to be something hard, but now Moore's law has made it easy" services. Imgur could afford to allow hotlinking because actually serving images had become a trivial cost. Because no other image-host had capitalized on this, Imgur cleaned up—for a while. Once people started shifting to sharing content mostly as really-inefficiently…

Any modern browser visiting imgur gets H.264/WebM instead of the uncompressed gif. They introduced this 2.5 years ago. After a couple smaller gif only sites made the practice popular.

https://blog.imgur.com/2014/10/09/introducing-gifv/

Re: Reddit launches image uploads, ditching alliance with Imgur

#176
post #64
post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On iOS, they override the swipe-from-left-to-go-back gesture and instead use it to cycle you through new images.

That's an OS gesture. It can't be overridden. If it cycles you to another image, you did't begin your swipe far enough to the left.

Please do find a source that backs this.

Re: Reddit launches image uploads, ditching alliance with Imgur

#177
post #159
post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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

None of that is a dark pattern. A dark pattern is an UI design that motivates users to use the program/site in a way profitable to the site, but contrary to users' interest. To trick people, see http://darkpatterns.org/ . Redirecting to the whole page instead of the link is just a hotlink protection (as debatable as that is for an image hoster). Animated overlays in mobile is just shitty advertising and UX. But no da…

> Redirecting to the whole page instead of the link is just a hotlink protection

Sounds like something that's profitable to the site but against the users' interest to me

Re: Reddit launches image uploads, ditching alliance with Imgur

#178
post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

None of that is a dark pattern. A dark pattern is an UI design that motivates users to use the program/site in a way profitable to the site, but contrary to users' interest. To trick people, see http://darkpatterns.org/ . Redirecting to the whole page instead of the link is just a hotlink protection (as debatable as that is for an image hoster). Animated overlays in mobile is just shitty advertising and UX. But no da…

> Redirecting to the whole page instead of the link is just a hotlink protection Sounds like something that's profitable to the site but against the users' interest to me

But not a deception triggering an action on the user side.

Re: Reddit launches image uploads, ditching alliance with Imgur

#179
post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

None of that is a dark pattern. A dark pattern is an UI design that motivates users to use the program/site in a way profitable to the site, but contrary to users' interest. To trick people, see http://darkpatterns.org/ . Redirecting to the whole page instead of the link is just a hotlink protection (as debatable as that is for an image hoster). Animated overlays in mobile is just shitty advertising and UX. But no da…

> A dark pattern is an UI design that motivates users to use the program/site in a way profitable to the site, but contrary to users' interest. Doesn't this definition cover all advertising ?

No. Advertising can also just provide information. It is also not an UI.

Re: Reddit launches image uploads, ditching alliance with Imgur

#180

The imgur hate in here is odd. It seems like people are just assuming the worst based on one critical comment thread that got turned into a techcrunch article. Which is understandable, I don't understand how they can offer a free unlimited image hosting site (and they've offered it for so long that, well, you can see the backlash they got when direct linking is taken away). Still, their management seems savvy enough…

They started as an image host for those freeloaders. That made them big. Now they stopped providing that service. Yes, imgur can do what it wants. But so can we. Also we may complain as much as we want for being deceived for so long. Thanks for the free bandwidth and farewell imgur.

Farewell Imgur? I browse Imgur a lot more than I browse reddit. It's the 16th biggest site in the US. It will do fine on its own.
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