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The Decline of Imgur on Reddit and the Rise of Reddit's Native Image Hosting

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Re: The Decline of Imgur on Reddit and the Rise of Reddit's Native Image Hosting

#21

Post by nazka »

TazeTSchnitzel wrote: post #7

Imgur is essentially a parasite upon reddit which exploited and relied upon reddit's lack of native image posts. Imgur's dependency on reddit led to it trying to compete directly with it to ensure its survival without its host (Imgur is now also a place to find and comment on images), but also ensured reddit would eventually drop it, thus paradoxically also hurting its survival. Ultimately I think Imgur is destined t…

That's some strong words. Imgur wasn't a parasite, it was offering a service that Reddit didn't offer but we needed. Yes Imgur was quite dependent on Reddit at the beginning but now Imgur has its own community and the two are quite different.

If you look at the numbers, after the beta Imgur was starting to grow again. It was a hit yes, but not an exodus.

Re: The Decline of Imgur on Reddit and the Rise of Reddit's Native Image Hosting

#22

Post by vermontdevil »

jswny wrote: post #11

Imgur pushing it's own website over direct image links is the exact reason I've stopped using it. I understand they have to make money by but I just want to put a damn picture on the internet and send the link to others. I don't want to have to deal with Imgur's album/site link crap and dumb expansion into being a social network. It's hard now to even find the direct link, nevermind avoid Imgur's annoying messages ab…

They used to offer a paid account which I gladly signed up for.

Apparently they saw that the ad model was the way to go and discontinued the paid accounts.

Which is too bad because that's where we stand right now. I wish they would still offer an ad-free paid account.

I guess in the long run we'll see how Imgur current business model will last.

Re: The Decline of Imgur on Reddit and the Rise of Reddit's Native Image Hosting

#23

Post by rm999 »

owenversteeg wrote: post #8

Why on earth would Reddit want to add a massive expense (image hosting) at a time that they're already hemorrhaging money? Especially since imgur was still a fairly adequate host for the site. Reddit's image hosting seems like burning money for nothing. Not to mention the Reddit image URLs are horrifying. I upload stuff to imgur just for the nice, short URLs.

Reddit did the right thing - they realized a majority of their users are on Reddit for the images, which makes it a core competency. Reddit was using Imgur as a free image host, which Imgur was obviously not ok with. I realized this last summer when imgur started redirecting direct image links into its ad-ridden bloated mess of a social image page. It was an obvious attack on reddit. I don't know if imgur ended up undoing this or not, but it made it painfully obvious that reddit and imgur cannot peacefully coexist in the way it used to.

edit: just found this, it looks like they're continuing to move away from being a simple image host for reddit. https://www.reddit.com/r/assholedesign/comments/6eip2q/imgur...

Re: The Decline of Imgur on Reddit and the Rise of Reddit's Native Image Hosting

#24

Post by maxerickson »

stanmancan wrote: post #17
jswny wrote: post #11

Imgur pushing it's own website over direct image links is the exact reason I've stopped using it. I understand they have to make money by but I just want to put a damn picture on the internet and send the link to others. I don't want to have to deal with Imgur's album/site link crap and dumb expansion into being a social network. It's hard now to even find the direct link, nevermind avoid Imgur's annoying messages ab…

Why not use Dropbox public links or something similar?

I've used imgur in the past because it is upload->url, no further messing around required.

Re: The Decline of Imgur on Reddit and the Rise of Reddit's Native Image Hosting

#25

Post by chrisper »

stanmancan wrote: post #17
jswny wrote: post #11

Imgur pushing it's own website over direct image links is the exact reason I've stopped using it. I understand they have to make money by but I just want to put a damn picture on the internet and send the link to others. I don't want to have to deal with Imgur's album/site link crap and dumb expansion into being a social network. It's hard now to even find the direct link, nevermind avoid Imgur's annoying messages ab…

Why not use Dropbox public links or something similar?

Because they have traffic limits.

Re: The Decline of Imgur on Reddit and the Rise of Reddit's Native Image Hosting

#26

Post by castis »

nazka wrote: post #21
TazeTSchnitzel wrote: post #7

Imgur is essentially a parasite upon reddit which exploited and relied upon reddit's lack of native image posts. Imgur's dependency on reddit led to it trying to compete directly with it to ensure its survival without its host (Imgur is now also a place to find and comment on images), but also ensured reddit would eventually drop it, thus paradoxically also hurting its survival. Ultimately I think Imgur is destined t…

That's some strong words. Imgur wasn't a parasite, it was offering a service that Reddit didn't offer but we needed. Yes Imgur was quite dependent on Reddit at the beginning but now Imgur has its own community and the two are quite different. If you look at the numbers, after the beta Imgur was starting to grow again. It was a hit yes, but not an exodus.

Edit: Whoops! I was definitely wrong here.

It was absolutely a parasite. It would not have survived to grow to the size it did without Reddit. Parasites can offer a beneficial service to the host but cannot live without it.

It has since evolved into something possibly capable of existing on its own but only time will tell.

My guess is it lives for a few more years at best.

Re: The Decline of Imgur on Reddit and the Rise of Reddit's Native Image Hosting

#27

Post by novia »

Imgur recently started doing something really annoying on their mobile site. If you keep scrolling past the picture you were linked to, it shows a bunch of other pictures that were not posted by the person who posted the first picture. These extra pictures seem to be generally in the same category as the picture that was meant to be linked to, so if the original picture is a slightly risque photo, the photos that follow might be straight up porn. It's very annoying to me.

Re: The Decline of Imgur on Reddit and the Rise of Reddit's Native Image Hosting

#28

Post by TremendousJudge »

jswny wrote: post #11

Imgur pushing it's own website over direct image links is the exact reason I've stopped using it. I understand they have to make money by but I just want to put a damn picture on the internet and send the link to others. I don't want to have to deal with Imgur's album/site link crap and dumb expansion into being a social network. It's hard now to even find the direct link, nevermind avoid Imgur's annoying messages ab…

ironically, image hosting sites being crap was the reason imgur was created in the first place. turns out you have to pay the bills somehow

Re: The Decline of Imgur on Reddit and the Rise of Reddit's Native Image Hosting

#29

Post by Alex3917 »

TazeTSchnitzel wrote: post #7

Imgur is essentially a parasite upon reddit which exploited and relied upon reddit's lack of native image posts. Imgur's dependency on reddit led to it trying to compete directly with it to ensure its survival without its host (Imgur is now also a place to find and comment on images), but also ensured reddit would eventually drop it, thus paradoxically also hurting its survival. Ultimately I think Imgur is destined t…

> Imgur is essentially a parasite upon reddit which exploited and relied upon reddit's lack of native image posts.

Given that many subreddits have in their rules that people submitting images and blog posts should copy and paste the content into Reddit rather than linking to the actual creator, it seems more accurate to say that Reddit was a parasite on Imgur.

Re: The Decline of Imgur on Reddit and the Rise of Reddit's Native Image Hosting

#30

Post by TazeTSchnitzel »

nazka wrote: post #21
TazeTSchnitzel wrote: post #7

Imgur is essentially a parasite upon reddit which exploited and relied upon reddit's lack of native image posts. Imgur's dependency on reddit led to it trying to compete directly with it to ensure its survival without its host (Imgur is now also a place to find and comment on images), but also ensured reddit would eventually drop it, thus paradoxically also hurting its survival. Ultimately I think Imgur is destined t…

That's some strong words. Imgur wasn't a parasite, it was offering a service that Reddit didn't offer but we needed. Yes Imgur was quite dependent on Reddit at the beginning but now Imgur has its own community and the two are quite different. If you look at the numbers, after the beta Imgur was starting to grow again. It was a hit yes, but not an exodus.

> Imgur wasn't a parasite, it was offering a service that Reddit didn't offer but we needed.

Well… sure, you could say at first it was more of a symbiotic relationship, though probably providing more benefit to reddit than to Imgur, the latter absorbing the former's bandwidth costs and not getting much in return.

The parasitical part comes with

> but now Imgur has its own community

because, in order to ensure its survival, Imgur has tried to grow itself into an independent community on the back of reddit, to eventually be self-sustaining.

Now that reddit's cutting it off, maybe it actually will be self-sustaining. All the more power to them if that works.

But I don't think “parasitical” is an unfair characterisation of how things have worked so far. It's not really intended as a value judgement on my part.

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