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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

#121

Post by jasonkostempski »

adventured wrote: post #55
jasonkostempski wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 genericall…

People don't generally use the parasite metaphor unless they're intention is to paint an ugly picture. Anyway, people still use Imgur very heavily in Reddit comments. I don't know if that's because reddit doesn't have a better alternative at the moment or if people just don't know how to use it.

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

#123

Post by TranquilMarmot »

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'm surprised none of the big companies have done this, and used the fact that images are tagged and commented on to improve their search results in some way. They could really harvest a lot of data from it.

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

#124

Post by komali2 »

ortusdux wrote: post #54
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...

It's hilarious, I see it all the time on /r/fitness. Someone will post progress pics and get huge upvotes because the reddit post goes into detail on their lift schedule, diet, etc. Post will be hovering at 2-5k upvotes on reddit, but meanwhile will have been downvoted to oblivion on imgur, where I doubt the OP even meant for it to be a "post."

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

#125

Post by jasonkostempski »

stanmancan wrote: post #65
jasonkostempski wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Or, for now, use imgur.

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

#126

Post by 6stringmerc »

You know how I can tell Reddit doesn't have any content creators in upper management who consider these decisions? Because at least one of them would've spoken up:

"Oh, we built many of our communities on sharing Copyright protected content by way of our weasel-cousin IMGUR, so let's go ahead and bring all that DMCA/Safe Harbors liability under our umbrella - you're joking, right?"

At least the Conde Nast lawyers will come out okay in this.

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

#127

Post by sametmax »

TranquilMarmot wrote: post #123
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…

I'm surprised none of the big companies have done this, and used the fact that images are tagged and commented on to improve their search results in some way. They could really harvest a lot of data from it.

They don't need to. They can just cheaply crawl the image sites for those informations. Easier. Less resource needed. No community to manage.

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

#128

Post by mschuster91 »

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 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.

Doesn't work because the usual deep-pocket entities are trying to stay as far away from "nasty" stuff as possible... with "nasty" ranging from harmless stuff like nipples over porn to straight out gore (like Liveleak).

There are always some puritan but loud "activist parents" trying to f..k up stuff for everyone else.

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

#129

Post by komali2 »

munificent wrote: post #78
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…

It started as a symbiotic relationship. Reddit had no good image hosting solution and it was a real problem. Before Imgur came along, you'd often find image posts where the link was dead, dog slow, or took you to a page filled with ads and malware. Imgur made Reddit better. If anything, Reddit was the parasite because its users used a ton of Imgur bandwidth and by direct linking, didn't give anything in return. Once…

But that was back in a time when reddit really was a news-sharing site. Huff huff get off my lawn and all, but back in the day it was more akin to hackernews, and so the "problem" of hosting images wasn't a problem at all - you'd be linking to articles that had their own image hosting solution. Nowadays it's a heavy picture, meme, whatever browser. Makes sense that imgur is trying to take over that niche.
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