Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Reddit launches image uploads, ditching alliance with Imgur

techcrunch.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

181–190 of 414 posts

Re: Reddit launches image uploads, ditching alliance with Imgur

#181

Post by Xiol »

HomebrewCC wrote: post #171
vertex-four wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

> Apple’s operating system offers numerous advantages over other platforms when it comes to image processing, and it is also favored by many designers for the same reasons. imgix has written tools which allow us to leverage these strengths with our service, using OS X for image operations where it provides superior quality and performance.

What advantages? If you're running these as headless servers, then what advantages does OSX possibly provide over cheaper, more powerful Linux boxes using e.g. ImageMagick (ok, ok, not having massive remote code execution vulnerabilities is one of them).

Re: Reddit launches image uploads, ditching alliance with Imgur

#182

Post by derefr »

kbrosnan wrote: post #175
derefr wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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/

That is indeed what I meant by "efficiently recompressed." 10 seconds of H.264 video are still a lot larger than a JPEG.

Re: Reddit launches image uploads, ditching alliance with Imgur

#183

Post by CJefferson »

Melk wrote: post #125
wingerlang wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

Actually the funny thing is, they mostly aren't gifs, imgur is converting them to mp4s for as many users as possible.

They are still often 1-2MB however, which I'm sure adds up, compared to the jpegs they started off distributing.

Re: Reddit launches image uploads, ditching alliance with Imgur

#184

Post by oe »

tdiggity wrote: post #45

Here's a thread that led to people's hate of imgur: https://www.reddit.com/r/iphone/comments/46cjo5/i_just_want_... It was really annoying on mobile.

The hate seems to go both ways. Imgur community dislikes lame images from Reddit appearing on Imgur front page and would like them to go away.

Re: Reddit launches image uploads, ditching alliance with Imgur

#186

Post by MasterScrat »

sotojuan wrote: post #20
tlrobinson wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This seems like a common pattern 1. Realize you need to make a lot more money (to meet investor expectations, pay for the fat the company has accumulated, etc) 2. Panic 3. Apply dark patterns ( http://darkpatterns.org/ ) 4. Something better comes along and eats your lunch 5. Repeat. It's sad because imgur was originally created as the "something better".

I'm sure they made mistakes but when you see massive growth like imgur did someone's gotta pay the sever bills somehow. Plenty of image uploading sites have come and gone because of server costs.

These are all good points but I have a strong feeling of déjà-vu with another thread in these comments...

Re: Reddit launches image uploads, ditching alliance with Imgur

#187

Post by MasterScrat »

sgk284 wrote: post #150
creshal wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is that really cheaper than S3, though?

Even at Amazon's cheapest posted bandwidth tier you're paying $50+ per terabyte for bandwidth. Any dedicated hosting company (OVH, Hetzner, etc...) will cost less than 3% of that (and that's on the high end). Bandwidth is cheap, but AWS marks it up roughly 30x-50x what you'd pay in a dedicated environment.

Then why isn't anyone running an AWS-like service focused for bandwidth-intensive applications hosted on "OVH, Hetzner, etc..."?

Re: Reddit launches image uploads, ditching alliance with Imgur

#188

Post by imaginenore »

esolyt wrote: post #155

> At this time, the Reddit community can still choose to use Imgur or other sites for image hosting. The fact that they used the phrase "At this time" makes it sound like they are planning to disable external image links in the future.

Or just convert all image links automatically. Some websites do it.

Re: Reddit launches image uploads, ditching alliance with Imgur

#189

Post by mschuster91 »

finnn wrote: post #31
Others wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What dark patterns are they implementing?

"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

> "direct" links to an image uploaded sometimes/usually redirect to imgur page

Actually I like this. It's so stupid that people directly link to the image - I'm always interested in reading the imgur comments, and especially the text comment by the uploader.

Re: Reddit launches image uploads, ditching alliance with Imgur

#190

Post by pjc50 »

redthrowaway wrote: post #163
kristofferR wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah. https://sli.mg seems to be the new imgur. I wonder how long until they start going downhill. I like their moderation log though, that's a good step.

sli.mg is the new imgur for /r/the_donald, and other subs whose content imgur regularly censors. I haven't really seen it used "in the wild" on more mainstream subs. It does have a nice, clean and minimalistic interface, similar to what imgur used to have.

How bad are they that they're getting censored off imgur? What for, racial hatred?
Post reply on HN