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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

#251

Post by nyolfen »

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 think it's just what happens when the unifying identity of the people in your 'community' is "i need to upload pictures somewhere." well, that and "i have no prior attachments to more specific internet communities," or "reddit is too niche for me."

i hate to use the term 'normies', but...

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

#252

Post by hkajshdf67 »

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?

Neckbeard here raged hard yesterday about adding netcat to systems for troubleshooting. Keep it lean. Hates Docker and this container "fad" though. Guess that's "too lean"?

Usually rants once a week about not needing more than vi

Not even vim, but vi

Perl is the only language the world needs

He is very serious about these things. Shuts PR's that challenge his world view in anyway

He's barely 40

Little sympathy for him and his back problems lately. It means he's working at home and not around the rest of us.

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

#253

Post by tyingq »

Zren wrote: post #245
samstave wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I imagine they will also start checking referers and presenting pages, instead of images, to certain visitors. If that isn't happening already.

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

#254

Post by hkajshdf67 »

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?)?

Sure, why not?

They're already using metadata from users devices to supply traffic map data. Thought that was way cool, then discovered how it worked; Google Maps app actively reports your location behind the scenes.

Was creeped out, but I still use it all the time, despite never remembering giving explicit consent.

Be trivial for them to scrape EXIF data but not actually "peak" into the image data

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

#255

Post by tqkxzugoaupvwqr »

buro9 wrote: post #232

Bandwidth isn't really imgur's problem now. So long as you have users, you have bandwidth, you have revenue. The problem is now storage. As users and revenue may decline the bandwidth bill declines too... but the storage bill always increases and never declines. This is the real problem with image hosting, keeping alive old images and storage costs always growing regardless of current usage and revenue.

Imgur has (had?) a policy of deleting images that were not requested within the last six months.

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

#256

Post by matthewowen »

tyingq wrote: post #154
mschuster91 wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

I think the parent's point is that they ultimately remove this content. Imgur basically removes things that are illegal in the USA, and pretty much nothing else.

That's a feature, but it's not a feature most conglomerates want to provide.

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

#257

Post by evincarofautumn »

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 guess I’m an Imgurian, since I’ve been on Imgur for a few years, and hell, I even met my partner at Camp Imgur in 2015—basically a 3-day summer camp for (mainly) young adults.

The culture is…hard to understand if you’re not a part of it, which I think is probably true of any sizable social site. And different users probably have different attitudes about it.

Yeah, there’s a lot of memetic trash, because the culture definitely rewards repetition, and I guess the only unifying factor of everyone on Imgur is that we like to look at pictures. But that’s also an advantage in that the community seems to be more diverse than on any given subreddit, or even HN. (Although it definitely skews young, male, white, and progressive.)

It’s kind of nice to be part of a community that’s unabashedly earnest, even if it means getting taken for a ride sometimes. I don’t think there’s no self-awareness, it just doesn’t seem like it from the outside.

For example, take Lassannn. He’s a user who makes up stories for points, and is completely honest about that fact. Some people hate him for that, believing that if you’re posting a story in the first person, it ought to be true. So they started saying “Fuck you, Lassannn” on all of his posts. But now there’s also a sizable cohort of people who love him because he’s a good guy and produces good content, so they post “Fuck you, Lassannn” ironically to make fun of the people who actually hate him. And crucially, you can’t tell the difference if you aren’t aware of the whole story, which has taken place over years. And there are countless stories like this.

For me, Imgur has all those aspects that I loved while growing up on forums in the early 2000s. It also rewards clever puns, remixing, ironic shitposting, even intelligent discussion if you look for it. I’ve learned countless things from people with completely different backgrounds, been exposed to world news I would never have seen otherwise, and been able to reach loads of people with my bad jokes, shitposts, and encyclopedic knowledge of linguistics and trivia. It’s fun, and that’s all that matters.

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

#258

Post by kemitche »

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…

The money argument is an odd one to make. Why would paying imgur money per image be substantially different cost wise to self hosting? At reddit's scale, it would be a similar hosting cost whether done in house or passed along to a 3rd party. The difference is that with in house, Reddit maintains more control over the underlying image data. If it costs $x million to host all reddit's submitted images for a year, imgur isn't going to magically let Reddit pay them less than that. (Assuming direct linking, i.e. no imgur ads, which is what you want to be able to best deal with embedding the images inline on Reddit)

And those URL lengths are both fine. No one is typing those in manually very often. (Reddit's URLs used to have a bunch of long query params - those were a bit ridiculous)

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

#259

Post by acover »

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…

Would anyone be interested in creating an igmur clone and then fund it via Patreon? It seems like such a basic public good, like Wikipedia.

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

#260

Post by mwfunk »

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'm assuming you mean the last time today.
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