The Decline of Imgur on Reddit and the Rise of Reddit's Native Image Hosting • Hacker News Board

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

#161

Post by komali2 » Tue, Jun 20, 2017, 6:20 PM UTC

jxramos wrote: post #149

komali2 wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Is your quote ("why don't they hate the world, as I do?!") just off the cuff or a mockery of something or a repeating of something already out there to be sourced? If there's a source please share.

Off the cuff comment to indicate that my observation isn't a serious proposition, but just me sharing my general feelings, and acknowledging that my feelings should be considered fairly cynical.

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

#162

Post by penpapersw » Tue, Jun 20, 2017, 6:20 PM UTC

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 has developed a very active community and they have a MINIMUM of $20,000 per "promoted post" (ad). Considering how often I see new ads on there (at least once a month), I'd say they've finally figured out how to actually monetize an img hosting site. Whether they can avoid throwing away all that money on inefficiency and poor management is another story though. If anyone here knows how to scale an imgur clone properly, and can do it as a one or two person team, you'd probably have an amazing startup right there.

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

#163

Post by satsuma » Tue, Jun 20, 2017, 6:20 PM UTC

yummybear wrote: post #157

The graph seems to indicate that the number of images almost doubles during 2016, but the number of submissions do not?

Might count large albums as submissions? Upload a single image and it's one image, one submission. Upload 10 images into one album and it's 10 images, one submission.

Could be wrong but that's my guess.

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

#164

Post by takeda » Tue, Jun 20, 2017, 6:22 PM UTC

rhaps0dy wrote: post #153

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.

Isn't what projects like https://freenetproject.org/ or https://www.torproject.org/ essentially do?

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

#165

Post by satsuma » Tue, Jun 20, 2017, 6:22 PM UTC

legohead wrote: post #95

ljk wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

When I want to share an image over chat with a friend, the long, odd looking reddit image urls disrupt the natural flow. It's like virtually slapping someone on the face. A nice, short and sweet URL is much nicer in text conversations. Also, being a developer and security conscious, I inspect URLs before I click on them. The longer they are, the more frustrated I get examining them.

The flow comment is interesting, especially because it's one I resonate with. Every time I want to hotlink an image from Facebook I cringe at the multi-line horror in the clipboard.

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

#166

Post by takeda » Tue, Jun 20, 2017, 6:27 PM UTC

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.

Things like that makes me wish NDN[1] would succeed.

Essentially in this network instead using addressing to address hosts, they address the data. This brings interesting properties, since routers are aware what data is being transferred they can start caching it.

In the end no CDNs are needed (network takes care of it) so people can host data themselves without worrying of it getting too popular.

[1] https://named-data.net/

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

#167

Post by raldi » Tue, Jun 20, 2017, 6:27 PM UTC

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…

http://redd.it/6idi12

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

#168

Post by monochromatic » Tue, Jun 20, 2017, 6:28 PM UTC

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…

They also got rid of the link to the upload page. They really want you to download the app.

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

#169

Post by raldi » Tue, Jun 20, 2017, 6:29 PM UTC

legohead wrote: post #95

ljk wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

When I want to share an image over chat with a friend, the long, odd looking reddit image urls disrupt the natural flow. It's like virtually slapping someone on the face. A nice, short and sweet URL is much nicer in text conversations. Also, being a developer and security conscious, I inspect URLs before I click on them. The longer they are, the more frustrated I get examining them.

Reddit has short URLs; they're in the sidebar of every submission, e.g., http://redd.it/6idi12

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

#170

Post by cookiecaper » Tue, Jun 20, 2017, 6:31 PM UTC

sametmax wrote: post #127

TranquilMarmot wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Not only that, but they already have cloud environments that allow them to get all of that data anyway. Android phones come pre-configured to automatically upload every photo you've ever taken to the cloud, Amazon offers unlimited personal photo storage, and Google and Amazon offer the two largest enterprise cloud computing environments available, so they can likely just analyze imgur's logs.