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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

#241

Post by f4rker »

komali2 wrote: post #129
munificent wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It was a problem. All the old image host sucked a lot.

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

#242

Post by bane »

_qxjp wrote: post #9
lloydjatkinson wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

...Imgur was MADE by reddit!

According to Wikipedia, it was a “gift to Reddit”. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imgur#History https://www.reddit.com/r/reddit.com/comments/7zlyd/my_gift_t...

It was always kind of a weird thing. For reasons mysterious at the time, reddit suspended lots of the self-promotion rules around imgur which in turn allowed it to grow quite rapidly. I had a friend who actually tried to start another symbiotic for reddit startup at a similar time and reddit admins decided to enforce the no self-promotion rules on him even while letting imgur run free. It was very frustrating for him, fortunately he didn't go in for lots of money on it and was able to shut it down pretty quickly when it was clear reddit wasn't playing fair.

A lingering question at that time was how imgur was paying their obviously enormous bandwidth bills, but /u/mrgrimm was always very vague about the source of his funding.

Long story short, it turns out that reddit had made an investment in imgur at one point while earlier funding was never made public. So reddit was banking on imgur being successful but never made that relationship explicitly public.

There were other weird relationship oddities too, e.g. imgur used to not allow pornography to be uploaded and linked to, except when the referrer came from reddit.com. (if you look up info on imgur and referrer tag weirdness, it's a common pattern)

After imgur started jumping the shark and reddit's entire executive team turned over, they decided to do their own image hosting service. But now they had a well funded plan-b to fall back on if their own hosting service didn't work out.

Imgur has always been very vague and shady about funding, revenue, growth plans. It's assumed that they just wanted to be a non-suck

https://techcrunch.com/2014/04/03/after-five-years-of-bootst...

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

#243

Post by nxc18 »

Retric wrote: post #237
ksk wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Its no more dumb than arguing about editors, or tabs vs spaces, or metal versus opengl. You can introduce dressing to make them seem deep, or re-cast the conversations as being super critical, but all those conversations are about typing shit that goes into a file.

When was the last time you heard someone actually debate about text editors?

At least once a week if not more. Of course I'm biased coming out of a CS degree program...

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

#244

Post by dylz »

ue_ wrote: post #224
dylz wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No. Dropbox used to have a folder that let you share direct links. https://www.dropbox.com/help/files-folders/public-folder It's been retroactively removed from accounts.

What do you mean by direct links? My friend can link me to things, but they display in the "dropbox viewer", and I can download them by clicking "download" in that webpage.

Direct links, as in usable, etc.

Not viewer, not ad/conversion/signup/referral filled bloated javascript page.

It was pretty much the only reason I even kept a dropbox account. No point after that.

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

#245

Post by Zren »

samstave wrote: post #215
anoonmoose wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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."

it was created by /u/mrgrim as a programming side project because all the other img hosts were shitty, and as it was born of reddit, essentially for reddit, it blew up. I cant stand the new i.reddit img service, but that could be me just being an off-my-lawn-er... but I am wary of reddits motivations, as I dont trust the admins all that much given the fact that they are a huge social manipulation tool - and if you do…

> Reddit's motivations

It's effectively a tracking "pixel" for what you click, even if you block their javascript/redirect.

It also keeps that data in house which they can sell (if they need to) rather than give all that data away to imgur for free. Though I wonder if the bandwidth costs will break even.

They can also use it in order to craft personalised suggestions.

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

#246

Post by ksk »

Retric wrote: post #237
ksk wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Its no more dumb than arguing about editors, or tabs vs spaces, or metal versus opengl. You can introduce dressing to make them seem deep, or re-cast the conversations as being super critical, but all those conversations are about typing shit that goes into a file.

When was the last time you heard someone actually debate about text editors?

I poked fun at someone's choice of an editor about a week back. :P

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

#247

Post by wutbrodo »

Splines wrote: post #217
kakarot wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel like you just described reddit.

FWIW /r/no_sob_story/ is dedicated to highlighting content that is only interesting due to post context

Yeesh, the users on that subreddit all seem really unhappy.

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

#248

Post by xj9 »

BoiledCabbage wrote: post #118
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…

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.

gift economy seems to be working okay for gnu/social/mastodon

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

#250

Post by roel_v »

Sohcahtoa82 wrote: post #193
ryandrake wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Simpler times. Public facing IP address, web server running on my machine and serving from /var/httpd/public_html or some similar directory. People go with 3rd parties nowadays for the slick web interface and that they do the "hard" work of setting up bandwidth caps and security for you.

> People go with 3rd parties nowadays for the slick web interface No, they go with 3rd parties nowadays because most home users don't have bandwidth to host their own images. One of the current top posts on reddit/r/funny has had over 1 million views after being posted to imgur 8 hours ago. The image file is 1.7 megabytes. That means imgur has transferred 1.7 TERAbytes in 8 hours of just that one image. That's an ave…

In the times the gp was talking about, you'd set up a cron job to download a 1.7mb file overnight, and be happy if it finished by morning. So yeah, apples and oranges (of the gp).
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