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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

#61

Post by ortusdux »

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…

That is still better than the giant animated cat paw they had a year ago. It was active just before reddit went live with their image service and I imagine it was a desperate grab for some last minute conversions.

https://www.reddit.com/r/IgnorantImgur/comments/4aqf2r/fuck_...

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

#62

Post by fredsted »

There's just no way to do a free image hosting site without it turning to crap sooner or later. When Imgur started making it hard to copy the direct .jpg links, it was game over.

What's interesting is that Imgur managed to pivot into a full-blown community site, with threads, communities and voting. I don't think they're very dependent on Reddit anymore. From a few cursory glances, they have a relatively large amount of participation, and it's not unusual that an image shared on Reddit has a huge comment section on Imgur, with Imgur users not getting the context (that of course is over on Reddit).

Reddit is doing a smart thing here by hosting the images themselves. They're now at a scale where hosting images is feasible. Being dependent of Imgur (and Imgur not being dependent of Reddit) is a bad thing for Reddit, since most of the popular content on Reddit is images, and so Reddit gives away a huge amount of traffic to Imgur (which is basically a Reddit competitor now), trading that for the expenses of running an image hosting site. I guess Reddit realized it wasn't worth it.

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

#63

Post by jpfed »

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.

>Parasites can offer a beneficial service to the host but cannot live without it.

Incidentally, this is not what biologists consider parasitism. To a biologist, a parasitic relationship is one that benefits one while harming the other. Do you think that reddit was harmed by imgur? If imgur benefited but reddit was not harmed, their relationship was commensal. If they both benefited, their relationship was mutual.

To capture the idea that imgur was totally dependent on its relationship with reddit (but not vice versa), you would say that their mutualism was obligate for imgur but facultative for reddit.

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

#64

Post by digi_owl »

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…

Is there an equivalent to "every program expands to read email" for web services? Because just about every image hosting service seems to go down this feature creep route.

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

#65

Post by stanmancan »

jasonkostempski wrote: post #31
stanmancan wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why not use Dropbox public links or something similar?

Unless I'm mistaken, that requires an account, accounts suck.

It does, but it was just an option.

Really you have three options, free services have ads, paid services which require an account, or host your own.

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

#66

Post by devoply »

bhandziuk wrote: post #33
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…

That was really surprising to me. Recently saw some picture with a woman in it (very SFW picture, nothing risky about it at all) then scrolled down and BAM immediately very NSFW. I thought I did something wrong but I think it was imgur who screwed up now.

Fortunately this is an easy thing for Imgur to solve in 2017 if they really want to with machine learning. Enough is available online that almost anyone could do it at this point.

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

#67

Post by stanmancan »

maxerickson wrote: post #24
stanmancan wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If you're sharing with a limited option all you have to do is right click the file in your Dropbox folder and click "get public link" -- others are suggesting there's bandwidth caps so this isn't ideal for a Reddit post or something that might receive large amounts of traffic.

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

#69

Post by Sir_Substance »

digi_owl wrote: post #64
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…

Is there an equivalent to "every program expands to read email" for web services? Because just about every image hosting service seems to go down this feature creep route.

It's because image hosting is a nothing business. It's basically one step up from serving text in the list of bread-and-butter internet functions.

Sure, there's some complexity in doing it at scale, but it doesn't actually need to be done at scale to be done easily. 50 different small image hosts is as good as one big one from the perspective of end users.

As a result, it's /really/ hard to get people to pay for it, and you cause exoduses by trying to embed advertising. The only thing you can do is grasp for features to validate your business.

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

#70

Post by stanmancan »

astrodust wrote: post #49
stanmancan wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why not use Dropbox public links or something similar?

There's limits on what you can share. imgur's big benefit is no cap on hosting, so if your meme goes nuclear you're not going to get a "bandwidth exceeded" page.

Fair enough, wasn't aware of the bandwidth limits. Thanks!
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