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Image Hosting on Reddit

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Re: Image Hosting on Reddit

#111

Post by cname »

rms_returns wrote: post #104
galistoca wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because it's a monopoly. Come back when Imgur becomes the only (or one of very few) place on the web to share funny images and Gifs. Farewell.

Are you trying to imply that Youtube is a monopoly? Aren't there others like vimeo, etc.? Besides, there is nothing from technology perspective to make it a monopoly. All you need is a server rack and a bunch of web developers who can build such a site, right?

Well, there's also massive scaling, which the average web developer isn't experienced with. Then there's creating a consistent experience across various devices and browsers.

So, sure, anyway halfway competent developer could bang out a YouTube (or Facebook, etc) prototype in a few weeks, but going from there to a reliable, usable service at scale is something else altogether.

You're going to need some project managers, SREs, sysadmins, front and back end web developers, programmers who know about video encoding, content experts, lawyers, etc...

Re: Image Hosting on Reddit

#112

Post by danneu »

School-Cotton wrote: post #102
danneu wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It would be irresponsible for a machine learning black box like Google's indexer to give much importance to rel="nofollow". Think about it. Imagine you're building the perfect internet indexer. In an effort to generalize your model, you anticipate a scenario where a nofollow link shows up consistently on various Wikipedia pages where it persists for a long time. What are you going to do? Ignore the link because, sorr…

Interesting. I and everyone else I've talked to in the industry have always assumed Google just takes it on faith. Granted, I never worked in SEO directly. I'm still not sure what the truth is. You raise a good point.

The only reason you'd take someone's word for something is when you can't derive it yourself, like if the tech isn't there yet.

Google introduced nofollow in 2005 to either let people help fill a gaping hole in Google's tech at the time or for the smart marketing move of making people fixate on their magic attribute. Both under the guise that spammers would care.[1]

It's been twelve years.

The SEO advice industry and Matt Cutts' blog these days are probably like when I try to ponder why my cat scoots its waterdish around the room before it drinks: attempting to find backsplanations for the idiosyncrasies of a neural network that nobody quite understands.

[1]: https://googleblog.blogspot.mx/2005/01/preventing-comment-sp...

Re: Image Hosting on Reddit

#113

Post by ben_jones »

dmerrick wrote: post #10

It's really unfortunate that Imgur took such a turn for the worse. Originally it seemed like Imgur was a benevolent gift to Reddit users... a clean, simple, easy to use image hosting service that everyone could use for free. I guess it was too good to be true, because now it's tricky to link to a direct image (though not impossible), and the standard landing page is filled with unnecessary clutter. As an aside: if yo…

Well they took a bunch of VC money so they could have a nice office in the middle of San Francisco and presumably so the founder could cash in a little bit. You can't blame him for his choice to take VC money, but this was inevitable.

EDIT: It's actually worse if you read their wiki [1]. They were profitable enough early on to have 10 employees AND move to San Francisco, going as far to win a "best bootstrapped start-up award". THEN they took 40 million in funding.

[1]:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imgur

Re: Image Hosting on Reddit

#114

Post by robbbbbbbbb »

chadscira wrote: post #66
dmerrick wrote: post #10

It's really unfortunate that Imgur took such a turn for the worse. Originally it seemed like Imgur was a benevolent gift to Reddit users... a clean, simple, easy to use image hosting service that everyone could use for free. I guess it was too good to be true, because now it's tricky to link to a direct image (though not impossible), and the standard landing page is filled with unnecessary clutter. As an aside: if yo…

This was the reason why I created http://img42.com . They bombard you with ads, and other "features". I wanted something where I could just click, drag and drop, or pate and it would be uploaded.

What an awesome UI, I love it. Thanks for making something so cool.

Re: Image Hosting on Reddit

#115

Post by robbbbbbbbb »

cookiecaper wrote: post #51
x5n1 wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Completely expected as soon as they took money. They are exactly what organic "success" stories online look like. Now they want some of reddit's traffic and so reddit is fighting back at first by embedding images directly on the page and now hosting the image themselves. Reddit is also looking to maximize profit.

Yes. I also think that part of reddit's unspoken strategy with this is to get more people using their mobile apps instead of the high-quality third-party alternatives (which allows them to control the reddit experience more tightly, which they want to try to rehabilitate their image away from 4chanLite, and also allows them to get the ad views instead of giving them to third-party devs). reddit is trying to squeeze b…

If this is their plan they aren't doing a very good job at executing it. Their mobile app is honestly outclassed by others. And their mobile web browsing experience is unpleasant to say the least. Each page takes a very long load time to load, despite it being a single page web app, and the load times cannot really be explained by what it is downloading, as other apps, and the desktop site, can load the same amount of data very quickly.

If the plan of trying to monetize mobile fails, I wonder who, or if, someone will just try to buy them out and try to do it better themselves. I am convenience that the reddit brand is very popular. The other day I started compiling something, and reflectively I alt tabbed and went to reddit, after realizing I was in the middle of doing something I closed it and got back to work, but I went their out of mussel memory - and I think that just goes to show how valuable their brand is.

Re: Image Hosting on Reddit

#116

Post by x0x0 »

toxican wrote: post #54
galistoca wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And why would Google purchase a forum site for sharing funny images and GIFs?

Why would they purchase a forum site for sharing funny cat videos?

A guess: (and note they kept youtube a wholly owned subsidiary I think) they desperately had to make sure the Viacom lawsuit defense was well funded and aggressively defended or it would severely damage Google's business.

Also, google has now had success building photo sites / photo products, but at the time of the youtube purchase, hadn't had much success building a video product.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viacom_International_Inc._v._Y....

Re: Image Hosting on Reddit

#117

Post by robotresearcher »

BigJono wrote: post #100
gottam wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Videos They did make their own version of youtube at one point, apparently it wasn't enough and they wanted the userbase too.

Does anyone know if it was specifically the community/userbase that enticed Google, or was there some technical aspects to YouTube that Google couldn't or didn't want to build themselves?

Google did build similar functionality. Google Video was a thing for a while. They closed it down a while after acquiring YouTube.

Re: Image Hosting on Reddit

#118

Post by nopzor »

pyvpx wrote: post #25
revelation wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's what the lore tells us, but maybe it's just plain wrong and the old incumbents were just greedy and terrible. I think imgur was bootstrapped for a long time and didn't have much in the way of monetization, certainly hotlinking still worked then. The changes came when imgur took VC money.

imgur worked because a CDN named voxel could readily use the bandwidth bump provided by hosting images to decrease their overall network costs.

Voxel founder here.

That doesn't really make sense, as others have pointed out.

Imgur was indeed a valued customer, and we grew together and had a great relationship with them.

Customers like them helped us achieve the necessary scale to build out our network.

But pushing more bits costs more, not less ;)

Re: Image Hosting on Reddit

#119

Post by ManlyBread »

Houshalter wrote: post #89
bluedino wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The other big thing is censorship - when reddit wants to delete a post it will take your image with it. Not to be taken lightly in light of all the mod craziness during the Orlando shootings and related posts.

FWIW, mod removals don't remove content. They just filter it from the listings. If you have a url, the content and everything will still be there (for self posts, comments can only be seen by the author but the data is still on the server.)

You know the site sucks if you have to rely on external services like archive.is or go1dfish to actually read the contents of it.

Re: Image Hosting on Reddit

#120

Post by beefsack »

dmerrick wrote: post #10

It's really unfortunate that Imgur took such a turn for the worse. Originally it seemed like Imgur was a benevolent gift to Reddit users... a clean, simple, easy to use image hosting service that everyone could use for free. I guess it was too good to be true, because now it's tricky to link to a direct image (though not impossible), and the standard landing page is filled with unnecessary clutter. As an aside: if yo…

Imgur was the epitome of setting user expectations way too high. The service they offered was fantastic but costly, but users came to expect they should get it for free without clutter and monetisation wrapped around it.

It's a reinforcement of how important setting expectations with customers early is very important to avoid stepping on their toes later on.

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