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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

#261

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.

Was it ever a news sharing site? I think you might be mis-remembering history.

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

#262
post #166
post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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-d…

Sounds exactly like https://ipfs.io.

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

#263
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…

> if you post a picture of your face and say "I beat cancer!", you're getting upvotes, and there won't be a single comment in the thread along the lines of "this is a picture of a face.

objectively, and putting aside the kneejerk reaction against being fooled, i cannot see a single thing wrong with this. no one is asking for money or trying to con the audience out of anything tangible; either they're telling the truth about the cancer (in which case they'll be happy for the upvotes) or they're trying to game the imgur community for upvotes (in which case they'll be happy for the upvotes). you might argue that that's cheapening the upvote, but the sole value of an upvote is what you, personally assign to it. you want upvotes that are worth something to you, post in a community where they are rare enough for you to feel they are worth something.

as for the rest of it, if the backpatting keeps them happy, what's wrong with it? it seems infinitely better than e.g. the cringe-oriented communities who get their social bonding and dopamine hits from making fun of the more earnest sections of the internet.

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

#264
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…

[deleted]

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

#265
post #237
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?

almost never, but i've seen a lot of debates about the relative merits of vim (a text editor, for the uninitiated) and whatever it is people use to painstakingly insert glyphs into a file.

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

#266
post #223

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…

Reddit hasn't been part of Conde Nast for a while.

Can you link me to an article about the divestment please? I genuinely want to keep up and think I might have missed that.

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

#267

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…

A big part of what makes the comments so poor on imgur is that they have an arbitrary character limit of 140. When you limit people to a single sentence, memes and jokes are all they can post. This comment, for example, can't be posted there.

Eh, people regularly get around this by splitting their comments in much the same way as on Twitter, dividing them into multiple 1/2

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

#268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A big part of what makes the comments so poor on imgur is that they have an arbitrary character limit of 140. When you limit people to a single sentence, memes and jokes are all they can post. This comment, for example, can't be posted there.

Eh, people regularly get around this by splitting their comments in much the same way as on Twitter, dividing them into multiple 1/2

comments as a nested chain of replies, which is also often abused for humorous effect. 2/2
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