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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

#111

Post by betenoire »

ljk wrote: post #79
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.

> I upload stuff to imgur just for the nice, short URLs. genuinely curious, why is that important? is it common to memorize the URLs instead of copying and pasting?

Short URLs are nice. Less to go wrong for starting. Slashes, and any non \w character, is potential mistake in sharing, due to copy paste errors, bad decoders, etc. Plus they look nice and can literally be typed out from a screen shot or something.

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

#112

Post by tyingq »

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…

Reddit killed the model that allows them to be financially viable and "not annoying". I suspect the alternative is to shut down.

The bit of community that exists solely within imgur can't be enough to subsidize the bandwidth costs of everyone else, can it?

Thus far every image hosting site has gone the cycle of initially good, annoying attempts at monetizing, then shutting down. Which, of course, leaves a trail of forum posts, comments, etc, with broken images and links.

I wish some entity with deep pockets would just offer it as a public service / loss leader so we could stop the cycle. Google, Amazon, etc.

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

#113

Post by Sir_Substance »

chii wrote: post #93
Sir_Substance wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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,…

funny how nobody wants to pay for bread and butter functionality, and yet the internet survives on such bread and butter.

I'm really not sure what point you're making. It's not surprising that Reddit rolled their own image hosting. In general, most major websites have done that, because it's easy to do. If your business relies upon image hosting, why would you trust others to do it?

Anyway, Reddit gets paid via ads and gold, so people are paying for it. They just won't pay for it on it's own, because image hosting on it's own is not really worth much. You could make your own perfectly adequate image host on a raspberry pi. Reddit's value is not in it's image hosting. Nor is Wikipedias or 4chans.

Imgur picked a shit business model, the internet will survive their inevitable passing.

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

#114

Post by artursapek »

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 really have some dark stuff going on. When I upload an image, right clicking to copy the URL copies a useless blob URL the first time. When I try again, it copies the proper URL.

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

#115

Post by lisper »

tyingq wrote: post #112
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…

Reddit killed the model that allows them to be financially viable and "not annoying". I suspect the alternative is to shut down. The bit of community that exists solely within imgur can't be enough to subsidize the bandwidth costs of everyone else, can it? Thus far every image hosting site has gone the cycle of initially good, annoying attempts at monetizing, then shutting down. Which, of course, leaves a trail of fo…

Or you could, you know, pay for it.

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

#116

Post by moomin »

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…

Grief, their mobile site is horrible. I tried using it today after reading this article. I won't be tomorrow.

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

#117

Post by JTon »

j2bax wrote: post #102
CM30 wrote: post #97

This is why you have be careful when it comes to starting a business or service that's dependent on another to keep going. Because it's very easy for the 'host' company to take your idea, undercut it and 'force' you out of business. Or to make changes that completely kill your product or service/screw up your marketing strategy. It's a risk you have to take with a business so dependent on another particular company o…

Seems like a fairly valid business strategy though. Step 1: Provide a solution to a problem that isn't being addressed by an existing service with a large audience. Step 2: Try to convert users of the host service to your own users by offering other valuable features to them that aren't reliant on the host service. Getting any access and visibility to users is the biggest problem. If you can't retain the users after…

I don't think the parent was implying it is an invalid business strategy; just that it has a set of risks.

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

#118

Post by BoiledCabbage »

tyingq wrote: post #112
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…

Reddit killed the model that allows them to be financially viable and "not annoying". I suspect the alternative is to shut down. The bit of community that exists solely within imgur can't be enough to subsidize the bandwidth costs of everyone else, can it? Thus far every image hosting site has gone the cycle of initially good, annoying attempts at monetizing, then shutting down. Which, of course, leaves a trail of fo…

Similar to the issues with the advertising model (and content creation), it again boils down to people want value on the internet but unlike everywhere else in the world, here they don't want to pay for it.

If we want to keep nice things, we need to make an ecosystem where we can pay small amounts for useful things.

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

#119

Post by komali2 »

tyingq wrote: post #112
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…

Reddit killed the model that allows them to be financially viable and "not annoying". I suspect the alternative is to shut down. The bit of community that exists solely within imgur can't be enough to subsidize the bandwidth costs of everyone else, can it? Thus far every image hosting site has gone the cycle of initially good, annoying attempts at monetizing, then shutting down. Which, of course, leaves a trail of fo…

I want to talk about that community, because it genuinely boggles my mind. Their culture is as if they were crafted by /r/circlejerk as some sort of cosmic joke. They repeat the same memes ad nauseam, in every post, seemingly completely unaware. They lack any measure of what I consider healthy internet cynicism - if you post a picture of your face and say "I beat cancer!", you're getting upvotes, and there won't be a single comment in the thread along the lines of "this is a picture of a face." I mean, it's easy to bot upvotes on reddit, but it's trivial on imgur, because of the total lack of self-awareness of the community.

I get that I come off as a total asshole - "why don't they hate the world, as I do?!" But honestly, they seem like the most gullible bunch of back-patters on the internet.

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

#120

Post by joosters »

lisper wrote: post #115
tyingq wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reddit killed the model that allows them to be financially viable and "not annoying". I suspect the alternative is to shut down. The bit of community that exists solely within imgur can't be enough to subsidize the bandwidth costs of everyone else, can it? Thus far every image hosting site has gone the cycle of initially good, annoying attempts at monetizing, then shutting down. Which, of course, leaves a trail of fo…

Or you could, you know, pay for it.

The problem is that it requires everyone to pay for it. Any one individual will get no noticeable benefit by paying for an image hosting site, since all the rest of the content they view will be from free sites. As a result, no-one pays for these sites. It's a vicious circle.
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