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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

#151

Post by kakarot »

komali2 wrote: post #119
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 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…

I feel like you just described reddit.

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

#152

Post by Endy »

fictioncircle wrote: post #144
devoply wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You don't even need to do that. Just have people opt in for NSFW content on their accounts. Leave them opted out by default (or public). There is no reason it shouldn't be a human controlled flag.

There is a Mature filter on imgur already that's human-determined. The problem is that people posting pictures will mark things mature unnecessarily, and there have been trolls who put up hardcore pornography without marking the image as mature. The problem is, as always, trusting humans to do the right thing without massive consequence for doing the wrong thing.

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

#153

Post by rhaps0dy »

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…

Would it be possible and good to use desktop users' browsers as WebTorrent hosts for images? This would make the users pay for their browsing, allowing for the experience to be without ads.

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

#154

Post by tyingq »

mschuster91 wrote: post #128
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 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" t…

I see what you mean, but Google seems to manage this problem in YouTube via end user flagging and machine learning. Similar for Facebook, etc. I see why it might take Amazon out of the running to provide it.

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

#155

Post by bluedino »

redm wrote: post #43

This is not really a surprise, this cycle happens from time to time, i.e. Photobucket, ImgShack, etc. As soon as Imgur took funding the die was cast. They have to show more ads, get more traffic to their pages, and drive engagement. Imgur was at its best when it was simple to upload and link. Those days are gone.

Just waiting for it's successor to come along...

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

#156

Post by amyjess »

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…

Imgur's big act of hubris was accepting VC money so they could expand.

They were fine before that. They were making enough money to stay afloat, but the founder wanted to expand. So he took VC money... and then the VCs began making demands of him. And then Imgur started sucking.

I remember one of the first changes that the VCs forced on them: Imgur debuted a new API, and if you want to access albums through the API, you have to pay a huge amount of money. There were some allowances for small, limited usage for free, but any app published on a major app store would blow past that limit easily. The cost might be fine for a big company, but it screws over one-man operations like...well, like most Reddit apps. The developer of Sync got hit pretty hard by it.

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

#158

Post by anoonmoose »

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…

As far as I know, Imgur actually started off as a bit of a public service. From Wikipedia:

"Imgur was created as a response to the usability problems encountered in similar services. Designed to be a gift to the online community of Reddit, it took off almost instantly, jumping from a thousand hits per day to a million total page views in the first five months."

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

#160

Post by stanmancan »

jasonkostempski wrote: post #125
stanmancan wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That falls under the free service with ads
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