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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

#201

Post by bhandziuk »

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.

I agree that should be the default but getting the data to do it automatically is hard if you're going to ask users to mark things NSFW on their own accord.

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

#202

Post by corobo »

bluedino wrote: post #155
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...

You can give imgsir.com a go if you like. Caught with my pants down on a train but I was thinking the patreon model. No donate, basic images. More donate, things like videos etc and various inbetweens

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

#203

Post by __jal »

freehunter wrote: post #185
amyjess wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Back in the day, the bulk of Internet users were on university networks, and they gave everyone access to Unix systems where anything you put in public_html goes up on the university's website under your username. For example, I went to UTD from 2003 to 2007. This was long after the days of "the bulk of Internet users were on university networks" were over, but the infrastructure was still there. All students had ssh…

Huh. TIL. I didn't think I was that modern having gotten Internet access in the mid 90s, but I wasn't at a university, and by the time I got to university everyone was on a NAT and was behind firewalls.

What the GP describes is still more that possible. I happen to have some physical hosts in a data center, but you can have the same effect with a Linode VM.

It is massively convenient to run your own server. But you need to know how to maintain it (or be willing to learn). It isn't that hard, depending on what you're doing, but there's some effort and learning if you don't do this for a living.

Well worth it, at least for me.

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

#204

Post by vit05 »

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…

It's funny because they've quintupled the team of engineers to make changes that most people are criticizing. The strategy of Youtube to offer similar content and hold the user for a longer time on the site works because they are very good at understanding the average user's taste. But Imgur is very weak, totally dependent on the information the uploader provides, not from the viewer. They could have grown in markets where Reddit is weak like South America, Asia and Africa as a totally independent and mobile-focused product. But they make little effort in that direction.

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

#205

Post by __jal »

Sir_Substance wrote: post #113
chii wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 rea…

I read the OP as pointing out that image hosting, like email, is an awful business to be in, but is something on which tons of other services depend.

Think of it as analogous to sanitation. Being in the garbage hauling business isn't something that really revs that many people up, but civilization literally depends on it.

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

#206

Post by Sohcahtoa82 »

gboudrias wrote: post #138
hinkley wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you think it's possible to create an ethical ad network? It's something I wonder about at least once a month, but I'm not sure if it could compete.

> Do you think it's possible to create an ethical ad network? It's something I wonder about at least once a month, but I'm not sure if it could compete. I'm highly skeptical, in that I believe the nature of ads makes this inherently unfeasible. The point of ads is to be seen by as many people as possible. In dramatic terms, you could say the purpose of ads is to invade your mental space against your will on behalf of…

> I think they don't trust advertisers

Considering malvertising is a thing, attempting to spread malware through ads, users shouldn't trust advertisers.

I don't just run an ad blocker to prevent annoyances, I do it to increase security.

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

#207

Post by Sohcahtoa82 »

tscs37 wrote: post #190
hinkley wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you think it's possible to create an ethical ad network? It's something I wonder about at least once a month, but I'm not sure if it could compete.

There is projectwonderful, which is serving ethical ads and has a uncomplicated bidding method (bid for a day on a website). They're explicitly on all my adblocker whitelists since their ads only amount to a PNG image with a link. The advertisers know where they are advertising, the site owners can control who advertises, the payment is transparent and everyone is happy.

Wow I haven't seen Project Wonderful in a long time. Good to know they're still around.

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

#208

Post by Sohcahtoa82 »

6stringmerc wrote: post #126

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 wil…

I think they did it because the writing was on the wall.

Imgur's current business model was not sustainable. Direct image linking is expensive and can't be monetized. Imgur has been making an effort to lessen direct image linking and may end up blocking it entirely eventually, which would screw over reddit.

And so reddit had to be proactive and create their own alternative.

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

#209

Post by TilJ »

amyjess wrote: post #177
freehunter wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sending out a link to what? I mean... maybe I'm too young to know what you're referring to, but if I have my local computer, sitting behind a NAT, sitting behind a firewall, sitting behind a personal router, on another NAT, and you're on the other side of the country, what am I sending you a link to? Did every machine have a domain name? Was your local DNS somehow broadcast publicly? Did you just send a link for "C:\…

Back in the day, the bulk of Internet users were on university networks, and they gave everyone access to Unix systems where anything you put in public_html goes up on the university's website under your username. For example, I went to UTD from 2003 to 2007. This was long after the days of "the bulk of Internet users were on university networks" were over, but the infrastructure was still there. All students had ssh…

For anyone interested in re-living the old days and not wanting to host the infrastructure themselves, check out https://sdf.org.

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

#210

Post by cookiecaper »

MichaelGG wrote: post #179
cookiecaper wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Are you claiming that Google analyzes all of people's images automatically, with no consent, taken on Android and uses that data internally? And that Amazon and GCP analyze customer info (off the disks? off unencrypted HTTP?)?

Yes, I 100% believe they analyze cloud photo backups and use the data for their own purposes, and I would be surprised if they don't explicitly allow this within their privacy policies and Terms of Use. That's the motivation for them to offer unlimited free storage. I would guess that they probably have a human look at a random image, identify the objects, and then use that to train their CV pipelines.

They do some types of automatic analysis/processing which you can see when the Google Photos app delivers an automatically composed album, panorama, or movie to you, and you can also go into Google Photos and sort your photos by the objects and/or people that Google recognizes within them.

They do this for all speech-to-text run through official Android/Google search applications. You can go to a Voice History page within your Google Account and download recordings of every "OK Google" you've performed, and I've heard that they have human transcribers who spend all day listening to random voice searches and transcribing them to provide the corpus to compare against the computerized transcription.

As for EC2/GCP, I am sure they analyze whatever data they can. I doubt they go into the disks, but they would necessarily see the endpoints of the conversations, the volume of the average transmission, and other such details. The datacenter has a lot of knowledge from metadata without having to actually introspect the bits that you're sending over the pipe or storing on disk.

Disclaimer: I am not involved with Amazon or Google in any direct way and this is mostly hearsay.

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EDIT: On re-reading, I realize that I flubbed in the original post (now past its edit expiration). I was in a hurry and didn't realize how flippantly my statement came off.

I don't mean to imply that Amazon/Google casually spy on the information of specific users for competitive intelligence, just that interesting metadata is available to the platform host without requiring them to look at anything that they wouldn't normally have access to, and that they already have a vast abundance of the types of images that people are uploading to public hosts like imgur.

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