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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

#241

Post by pbhjpbhj »

gnarbarian wrote: post #121
creshal wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is that really cheaper than S3, though?

Way cheaper. Amazon is a middleman for hardware. Even at smallest scales the cost of buying a server pays off within a year. In exchange you get convenience and the ability to scale up on demand without buying more hardware.

I'm sure buying the server pays off, but what about running and administering it?

What's the minimum commercially you'd spend to get cross-continent redundancy on hardware you manage in-house. Just the accounting cost of paying wages for technicians in two countries probably means you need to be a quite large company.

There are middle grounds, managed co-location say, but then you're not likely to save much over using AWS are you?

Re: Reddit launches image uploads, ditching alliance with Imgur

#242

Post by bluedino »

zitterbewegung wrote: post #18

Having a third party host Reddit's images gave away a bunch of control to the point that imgur has its own community based upon the site . At the time Reddit didn't have the resources to make a competitor but this seems to be a good move now that imgur is doing dark patterns.

>> At the time Reddit didn't have the resources to make a competitor

But a self-funded (and then donations) college student working in his spare time did.

Re: Reddit launches image uploads, ditching alliance with Imgur

#243

Post by mdellabitta »

conceit wrote: post #201
raverbashing wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"You either die a hero or you live long enough to see yourself become the villain" (or until you get an investment from less ethical companies) But to be honest monetizing things like imgurl is hard. Most of the users cost more than they earn I think with adblockers becomming more common we'll have to think of better ways of coming out with feasible arrangements. Sharing bandwidth between users? JS bitcoin mining (or…

> Most of the users cost more than they earn I call bullshit. Can you spell datamining? also: native advertising.

> I call bullshit. Can you spell datamining?

Pretty sure you just suggested they make money by datamining cat gif and dank meme traffic...

Re: Reddit launches image uploads, ditching alliance with Imgur

#244

Post by pionar »

bluedino wrote: post #242
zitterbewegung wrote: post #18

Having a third party host Reddit's images gave away a bunch of control to the point that imgur has its own community based upon the site . At the time Reddit didn't have the resources to make a competitor but this seems to be a good move now that imgur is doing dark patterns.

>> At the time Reddit didn't have the resources to make a competitor But a self-funded (and then donations) college student working in his spare time did.

It's called priorities. Reddit didn't need an image uploading service, it had other shit to worry about.

Re: Reddit launches image uploads, ditching alliance with Imgur

#245

Post by arenaninja »

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/

I stopped clicking imgur gifv links a looong time ago. They worked for me maybe one out of eight times. By now I have an allergic reaction just to seeing them, even if the issues may have been fixed by now.

Re: Reddit launches image uploads, ditching alliance with Imgur

#246

Post by girvo »

Dobbs wrote: post #90
jedberg wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[ 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.

Hardly huge. When I was at a web agency with about 70 people on staff here in Australia, we were an AWS partner with negotiated rates, and honestly we weren't doing massive clients really (aside from some government stuff now and then).

Re: Reddit launches image uploads, ditching alliance with Imgur

#247

Post by ascagnel_ »

unlinker wrote: post #202
tehbeard wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My money is on the JavaScript for the stupid ass swipe left/right functionality and cat paw. The same functionality that loves to go off when I'm scrolling down on an album and lose my position.

The cat paw is absolutely obnoxious. It's funny that a service that started to get rid of all the crappy image hosts would do that. I can understand the redirect to a page with ads, and even showing unrelated images. But the cat paw... what in hell.

Especially since it only shows up when you're directly linked to a single image or album. Even worse, it seems to link only to unrelated content.

Re: Reddit launches image uploads, ditching alliance with Imgur

#248

Post by garrettgrimsley »

JamesMcMinn wrote: post #215
Others wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What dark patterns are they implementing?

I often get "authentic" looking "Your Android device is 63% infected! Install this software to fix it" scams on mobile when opening gifv files on imgur. To top it off, they make my phone vibrate and hitting back just reloads the page and causes another long vibration, which is infuriating. If that isn't a dark pattern, I don't know what is. It only happens when coming from reddit if I open an incognito tab in chrome…

>If that isn't a dark pattern, I don't know what is.

It isn't. What you are describing is better describe as malicious advertising, or malvertising.

Re: Reddit launches image uploads, ditching alliance with Imgur

#249

Post by bluedino »

visarga wrote: post #30

Can reddit clone the pics previously uploaded on imgur or does it have its eggs in someone else's carriage?

It could - SomethingAwful basically did that when ImageShack got annoying. They mirrored all the linked images to their own servers, and the community came up with a new host - WaffleImages

http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=188...

Re: Reddit launches image uploads, ditching alliance with Imgur

#250

Post by bubuga »

lmm wrote: post #196
bubuga wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Shame on imgur for providing a service that was sought-after by everyone, and provide it for free by serving ads. While we're at it, let's demand the end of free TV, free email providers, free forums, and even youtube.

> While we're at it, let's demand the end of free TV, free email providers, free forums, and even youtube. If you have a sustainable business model for such a thing, knock yourself out. If you're just making it free for a couple of years to suck people in before you ratchet up the (not necessarily monetary) cost then yeah, we can do without that.

> to suck people in before you ratchet up

It's an image hosting service.

You upload cat pictures, you pass the link around. That's it.

Once the hosting service stops being a hosting service, you move on and upload the picture somewhere else.

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