131–140 of 414 posts
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Then we're back to my initial point: they never should have started as one.
I imagine you in a grocery store somewhere, railing against free samples. "You never should've given me a piece of sausage if you were going to start charging for them."
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> Because they probably aren't charities, and can't afford to donat e Free resources for your perpetual enjoyment? Then why did they start a free service to begin with, if they knew from the start it couldn't last? Right, to trick people into becoming dependent on the free service so they'll be reluctant to leave once the shady, UX-degrading monetization starts. You'll forgive me if I'm not sympathetic to that busine…
Back to reality: would imgur have become so popular if it wasn't free? Who would pay? Reddit users? I don't think so.
Nobody has to make a website. If the only way you can think of to make money is bait-and-switch, then you can choose to do that, or you can choose to go back to the drawing board and come up with a less unpleasant business plan. If you choose the former, don't expect me to cheer because you found a way to make money, and you think that's the only thing that matters.
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Colocation hosting your own servers around the world... you know, the original way.
Even cheaper and easier is just to rent dedicated servers or VPSes.
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To be fair, bandwidth isn't free. Imgur can't serve hotlinked content for free, forever.
Then they should never have started. Why does every 'free' service on the Internet inevitably devolve into an ad-laden, tracker-enabled shitfest?
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it's funny that imgur is turning into the sites it was replacing in the first place
I get the feeling that Imgur set unrealistic expectations when it launched, and they can become very difficult to back away from when they become untenable.
While I certainly can't speak to the intentions of the founder, I would assume that he didn't have many exceptions at all.
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To be fair, bandwidth isn't free. Imgur can't serve hotlinked content for free, forever.
To be fair, they could have operated a simple and effectively profitable business, and grown at an economically normal rate. But hey, I guess I wouldn't say no to $40M of a16z's money and a $200M valuation either.
How? I don't see a way from Imgur to monetize on sharing images directly.
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> Because they probably aren't charities, and can't afford to donat e Free resources for your perpetual enjoyment? Then why did they start a free service to begin with, if they knew from the start it couldn't last? Right, to trick people into becoming dependent on the free service so they'll be reluctant to leave once the shady, UX-degrading monetization starts. You'll forgive me if I'm not sympathetic to that busine…
+1 to this. People should stop being soften with unrealistic business that uses the ad hororem tactic. Imgur can explore dozens of models.
While we're at it, let's demand the end of free TV, free email providers, free forums, and even youtube.
Having a third party host Reddit's images gave away a bunch of control to the point that imgur has its own community based upon the site . At the time Reddit didn't have the resources to make a competitor but this seems to be a good move now that imgur is doing dark patterns.
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That is absolutely false. Plenty of large companies are able to negotiate their rates on AWS. You just have to be huge.
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Then we're back to my initial point: they never should have started as one.
I imagine you in a grocery store somewhere, railing against free samples. "You never should've given me a piece of sausage if you were going to start charging for them."
Supermarkets wouldn't allow, much less encourage, anyone to consume large numbers of free samples instead of buying the actual for-sale product.