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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

#51

Post by DerfNet »

owenversteeg wrote: post #42
kemitche wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reddit's URLs got much shorter within a few iterations of the product. As to why compete with imgur? User experience. It's much easier to share a picture on Reddit now, with it being a native feature, rather than having to go to imgur or elsewhere, upload something, find the best/right URL to share with, and the submit that to Reddit.

Right, but why not just pay imgur some $$$ for the privilege of a simple little upload form? That seems like a far smarter idea. Now Reddit is responsible for running not only its current business but also an entirely separate image hosting business. Keep in mind how ridiculously expensive it is to run an image host. Even imgur, which is by far the most acceptable of the popular hosts, has a ton of obtrusive ads. I h…

>so where is that money going to come from?

presumably ownership of the image.

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

#52

Post by [deleted] »

castis wrote: post #26
nazka wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

[deleted]

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

#53

Post by charred_toast »

novia wrote: post #27

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 fol…

Yes I noticed that too; it's most likely an image recognition algorithm paired with a AI tag parsing program generating a related image.

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

#54

Post by ortusdux »

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…

An interesting side effect of imgur integrating a social feature is that imgur-only users now push back against reddit users using 'their' site.

https://www.reddit.com/r/IgnorantImgur/comments/6cowy8/imgur...

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

#55

Post by adventured »

jasonkostempski wrote: post #36
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…

Where else can an image be posted without having to create an account? That's not parasitic, that's a perfect service if I've ever seen one.

Everyone here is taking offense to the word parasite, when it's nearly the perfect definition of the relationship from the first day. Imgur couldn't survive without Reddit, it grew and fed off of Reddit, and it was almost exclusively dependent on Reddit for its early users.

I think a lot of people in this thread don't know that one of the primary definitions of parasite can include not harming the host and generically mean: "an organism living in, with, or on another organism."

And if you question the dependency part of Imgur being a parasite, just wait until you see how things go for Imgur the next few years post Reddit handling its own images. One can thrive without the other, it's obvious which that is.

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

#56

Post by [deleted] »

jaymzcampbell wrote: post #46
vermontdevil wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I too was a (happily) paying customer of Imgur and was surprised when they refunded my prepayment for the year and went free. I had a feeling it was going to go downhill quickly thereafter.

[deleted]

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

#57

Post by TekMol »

Spivak wrote: post #20
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…

As it turns out, it's really hard to monetize an S3 bucket at scale.

Would it be easier to monetize a small S3 bucket?

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

#58

Post by nazka »

TazeTSchnitzel wrote: post #48
nazka wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think we have the same definition of a parasite or we see things differently. For me a parasite is a startup being a copy-cat, eating your market share, stealing your content, and stealing your customers. But Reddit and Imgur are two different websites. If Reddit was that mad about it, they could have done it in a month on S3... If you want a parasite I will say 9gag. It's true that Imgur has to grow its prod…

The characterisation of Imgur as a parasite isn't a value judgement. Imgur isn't doing anything wrong (nor reddit for that matter).

Ok I see what you mean. It just doesn't feel pleasant to my hears.

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

#59

Post by SN76477 »

novia wrote: post #27

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 fol…

I use imgur for work sometimes, and this throws my team off every time.

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

#60

Post by zkms »

novia wrote: post #27

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 fol…

also if you accidentally hit the left or right arrow (which i have an unfortunate habit of doing when on a website, it's sorta part of my idle animation).
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