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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

#341

Post by TeMPOraL »

pyrophane wrote: post #253
baldfat wrote: post #240

> I saw that multiple times here on HN now that people misuse the term. It's a pity, the original idea is something to be aware of, and diluting what dark pattern means hinders that awareness. Sorry long post TL/DR Fighting people on word definitions is frustrating and words change meaning when one aspect gets popular. I have fought this war over and over again over the following words: Troll - Everything is a troll…

Hacker still gets me. The dilution of the term to simply mean "programmer" or perhaps more specifically "startup programmer in his 20s who crushes it" causes a little pain in my side every time.

I have two[0] separate buckets in my head under the same key "hacker" - one for actual hackers, per old meaning, and the other for "just a programmer" & "a random startup person".

Sometimes this confusion actually gets beneficial for the old-word-meaning crowd - you can get +10 to marketing of your hackerspace on startup events based solely on the tern "hacker" meaning something else than the crowd there think it means :).

[0] - actually three, if you count "hacker as a criminal" thing

Re: Reddit launches image uploads, ditching alliance with Imgur

#342

Post by PirateDave »

billmalarky wrote: post #278
GrinningFool wrote: post #268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Heavy emphasis on the pseudo part of that I assume? A quick glance at third party sites accessed when loading imgur.com: - facebook - twitter - amazon ads - google ads - quantserve - google analytics - scorecardresearch Because this is pretty much the standard list for any major site, each of those providers has a highly detailed profile built for the average web user. While the top three will often have login data a…

And how many of those services share their user profiles with imgur so that imgur can monetize that data by selling expensive premium ads to advertisers? No one is arguing that facebook/google/tw... (well maybe twitter heheh) aren't profitably mining lots of user data. But imgur probably isn't able to mine much value out of it's own data.

scorecardresearch is the endpoint for comScore which is used to do exactly what you mentioned. Imgur buys the data from comScore as a sort of "online Nielsen rating" in order to sell the value of the site to ad vendors.

Re: Reddit launches image uploads, ditching alliance with Imgur

#343

Post by TeMPOraL »

kelukelugames wrote: post #277
baldfat wrote: post #240

> I saw that multiple times here on HN now that people misuse the term. It's a pity, the original idea is something to be aware of, and diluting what dark pattern means hinders that awareness. Sorry long post TL/DR Fighting people on word definitions is frustrating and words change meaning when one aspect gets popular. I have fought this war over and over again over the following words: Troll - Everything is a troll…

I want to make a blog series about these words. Mansplaining? Used to mean condescending entitled douchebag. Now it's anytime a man says something I don't like. Feminism? Putting an end to sexism. Or anytime a woman say something I don't like.

Some material on the subject:

http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/07/social-justice-and-word...

Re: Reddit launches image uploads, ditching alliance with Imgur

#344

Post by [deleted] »

transpy wrote: post #339
joshdickson wrote: post #283

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Daring Fireball does it" has to be the worst possible comparison imaginable. Gruber has super differentiated, high editorial value content that folks will pay a premium to put their message next to. Imgur is about as far away from that as possible. They have to try to make money, it's crazy to sit here and think you know better than they do on this. Don't you think if they could make enough money doing what you thin…

I wish an image service existed that did some image recognition on the picture and provided you with relevant, but subtle 'Learn more about this thing' links.

[deleted]

Re: Reddit launches image uploads, ditching alliance with Imgur

#345

Post by larrik »

transpy wrote: post #339
joshdickson wrote: post #283

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Daring Fireball does it" has to be the worst possible comparison imaginable. Gruber has super differentiated, high editorial value content that folks will pay a premium to put their message next to. Imgur is about as far away from that as possible. They have to try to make money, it's crazy to sit here and think you know better than they do on this. Don't you think if they could make enough money doing what you thin…

I wish an image service existed that did some image recognition on the picture and provided you with relevant, but subtle 'Learn more about this thing' links.

Or even links sending you to the original source of the image (comics especially)

Re: Reddit launches image uploads, ditching alliance with Imgur

#346

Post by TeMPOraL »

onli wrote: post #310
sbarre wrote: post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So you're saying if it's not on that website it's not valid? Come on.. If I see a URL that ends in JPG, my understanding is that I am about to load an image. If the site then shows me a page full of ads with my image somewhere on there, that's exactly what you described . The site is tricking me into doing something that is to their benefit and to my detriment. Showing me a URL that looks like a link to an image is a…

One last try. I'll stop then. If you are really arguing that you are inherently more likely to click on the direct link, and it is this click impulse that is used to manipulate you, and that going to a page containing that image plus ads instead is the big negative outcome, then I understand why it is a dark pattern for you. I did not see that direct link have a higher affordance (that might stretch the term a bit to…

Direct link is a significant "positive signal" for the following reasons:

- you implicitly expect it won't load code to your browser

- you implicitly expect it will serve the one and only one resource that you need

- you implicitly expect that after receiving the resource no further data will be exchanged between the client and the server

- you implicitly expect it will work well with the standard UI of your viewing platform - for instance, it will be pinch-zoomable on mobile, or zoomable with mouse in desktop browsers

- you expect to work well with applicable context; for instance, a direct image link should work in "href" attribute of "a" tag (resulting in an image being embedded on a website), it should work with curl or wget (resulting in a single image file being created on your hard drive), or just browser's "save" feature (again, resulting in a single image file being created)

I'd call breaking these things a dark pattern. A particularly nasty one at that, since it's poisoning the well. Breaking users' trust in that URLs do is one of the many subtle ways of fucking the Internet for everyone for personal profit.

Re: Reddit launches image uploads, ditching alliance with Imgur

#347

Post by TeMPOraL »

onli wrote: post #178
shawabawa3 wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

The deception is really in the URL. If I see an address ending with .jpg, I expect it to load a raw JPEG, and I have some implicit expectations following that that are being broken if the site serves HTML instead.

Also, it's actually much simpler than the discussion makes it to be. Just look at the big picture. The user wants a picture, free of irrelevant or harmful bullshit. The site promises that raw image, by means of providing what looks like a direct URL. Then, it does not deliver on the promise, serving the irrelevant and/or harmful bullshit along with the picture. It's pretty clear that one side is trying to exploit the other one.

Re: Reddit launches image uploads, ditching alliance with Imgur

#348

Post by bryang »

joshdickson wrote: post #283
makecheck wrote: post #274

Imgur forgot its roots as a dumb image host, rapidly crufting-up its service with things that were not only annoying but interfering with its basic function . If you can’t easily see an image as soon as you click on it — on mobile or otherwise — then the image service has completely failed. The sad thing is, they could have added non-intrusive ads. DaringFireball does it; write a single line of text such as “This ima…

"Daring Fireball does it" has to be the worst possible comparison imaginable. Gruber has super differentiated, high editorial value content that folks will pay a premium to put their message next to. Imgur is about as far away from that as possible. They have to try to make money, it's crazy to sit here and think you know better than they do on this. Don't you think if they could make enough money doing what you thin…

I've never seen Grubers blog until today... Does he only mention the sponsor at the beginning and end of each week?

I don't see any other occurrence of the sponsors name.

Re: Reddit launches image uploads, ditching alliance with Imgur

#349

Post by enjo »

mbesto wrote: post #267
enjo wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I assume your familiar with their operating costs somehow? I have direct experience at a different (older) host. It was simply not possible to serve the tremendous bandwidth needs without increasingly aggressive monetization. I have no idea what they're costs look like and bandwidth is much cheaper than it was 10 years ago, but I'd wager that there was no profitable business for them at any point without intrusive ad…

> but I'd wager that there was no profitable business for them at any point without intrusive ads. 5 years ago: "but it's profitable enough to hopefully hire another guy or two this summer."[0] The founder has completely bootstrapped the site since day 1, and has done an AMA on Reddit talking about the whole situation[1]. Ads are absolutely necessary to make it profitable, but clearly taking investment now means they…

That was five years ago, they've experienced explosive growth since then which changes the equation. Because they were profitable then doesn't mean that you can simply linearly grow that as the amount of content being served grows. Particularly when you rely on ad revenue which has been on a downward trend over the last few years.

Point being: unless you have been directly involved in the decisions accusing them of either malevolence or greed is a pretty tough accusation to make. Sometimes (usually) it's cold hard business realities that drive people to adopting these sorts of monetization strategies.

So now the cycle will repeat. Someone will start a host that simply serves images. People will use it. They'll add some ads, people won't care much. They'll start serving more aggressive ads and someone will start another host... over and over again.

Re: Reddit launches image uploads, ditching alliance with Imgur

#350

Post by wlesieutre »

derefr wrote: post #162
Melk wrote: 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…

As others have mentioned, most of the videos are served as "gifv" videos, which are much more bandwidth conscious than actual gifs.

It's worth highlighting that Gfycat is managing to operate as a short gif/video hosting service without turning awful, though I obviously don't know what their financials look like.

Gfycat does have a homepage of popular gifs, but they've never shown them to me unless I wanted to see them. The viewer page is just the viewer.

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