Earlier quoted context omitted.
Thanks! Check out the blog, we're innovating.
Your architecture page is an inspiration to me.
Would you like a job maintaining our Hadoop cluster? We pay per node.
Imgur Acquired by Medialab
171–180 of 302 posts
Re: Imgur Acquired by Medialab
#172Earlier quoted context omitted.
Ads are worth a magnitude less today than they were in 2009.
But you need to consider that so have hosting costs-- proportionately too. Hosting data was incredibly expensive 10 years ago. If the math was working then, it should at least be pretty close to working now.
For some segments that's true. Image hosting wasn't incredibly expensive 10 years ago. It was very much on the lighter side in cost compared to MegaUpload or YouTube type services.
Image file sizes increasing dramatically as smartphones started producing photo sizes that would have been considered massive 15 years ago, saturated much of the gains in cost to hardware.
It's easier to run a one-click image host (like the early Imgur) as a solo operator today versus back then. It's not much cheaper when you account for the larger image files (unless you severely limit the file size, which won't be a popular choice with users, most of which just blast four billion smartphone photos, don't think much about image sizes, and want to upload them as is without thinking about any of that).
Re: Imgur Acquired by Medialab
#173Earlier quoted context omitted.
Can you think of a notable example when they weren’t?
Anything bought by Microsoft in the past 10 years. Minecraft, Github, LinkedIn, all are better products today than they were at the time of sale.
Not sure if this goes for LinkedIn, but I agree with the others.
Re: Imgur Acquired by Medialab
#174Wasn't this the company that ostensibly began on reddit? Their founder used to post many promises about "not selling out" and the rest.
everyone sells out eventually. nothing wrong with it. either that or they run it into the ground or die. people move on that's just life. congrats to the imgur team and good luck for their next adventures.
Hmm, as far as I can see you either sell out, or get sold out to. The last one seems like a viable option?
Re: Imgur Acquired by Medialab
#175Earlier quoted context omitted.
But who are these companies that successfully provide this service?
It's just an educated guess, so I don't know. Besides, such company would do its best to stay discrete, by design.
I'm aware of one such company that uses Imgur like that and that deals with celebs. Imgur isn't their primary target, it's just a handy layer of abstraction away from the real target so the content can't TRULY be taken down on the target site. Plus, it shows you how many impressions you get for free. That way they can gather up their campaign image urls and views at the end of the contract and show hard results without the need for a fancy, paid analytics dashboard or campaign tracking system.
Re: Imgur Acquired by Medialab
#176Earlier quoted context omitted.
My guess is PR. Regularly, on imgur, you see a pic in interest for a celebrity, a rich person, a movie. It looks organic, but if you look closely, there are plenty of weird things about it. Then it disappears as suddenly as it arrived. I believe that they sell the front page to PR firms that need to promote something in a way the people think themself came up with the hype. It's probably the same for a lot of communi…
Yeah but who goes to the front page of imgur?
you're forced there if you want to upload something
Re: Imgur Acquired by Medialab
#177Hm. My bet would be that you can now count the number of years until imgur links go dead on one hand. This prompted me to check whether there were any backup efforts already, and how much data that would involve. Indeed, archiveteam has some good info: https://wiki.archiveteam.org/index.php/Imgur > Imgur serves a massive amount of traffic. In 2012 alone, 42 petabytes of data were transferred. Fortunately, the amount…
Huh, all of Imgur costs only +/- $2000/month to store on Backblaze.
That’s not that bad.
Re: Imgur Acquired by Medialab
#178Interesting company. It was created in 2018 [1], and the CEO is Michael Heyward, who was a co-founder of Whisper. Some interesting shuffling happened with Whisper [2] and it's now owned by MediaLab. Since then they have acquired a number of other properties, the general idea seems to buy declining brands for cheap and extract as much value as possible on mobile. [3] There is no public information on their funding.
1. https://businesssearch.sos.ca.gov/CBS/SearchResults?SearchTy...
2. https://www.latimes.com/business/technology/la-fi-tn-whisper...
3. https://www.assemblyexchange.com/about-us - their job ads feature this ad network prominently.
Re: Imgur Acquired by Medialab
#179Imgur jumped the shark long ago.
Re: Imgur Acquired by Medialab
#180Earlier quoted context omitted.
> They began on Reddit because Reddit was incapable of handling image uploads. I'd argue they largely still are incapable of handling image uploads. Their gallery system sucks and the redesign just makes it harder to even see what was posted.
It's not just a poor design. old.reddit.com currently has what ought to be considered a show-stopping functional bug: every gallery post (that is, every post with multiple images) has its URL replaced with the empty string, causing it to render as a purple link that goes nowhere. If you instead click the little "comments" link, the post loads as normal. This has been reported to the admins dozens of times since it fi…
That 'empty string/purple link' issue still happens to me even on NewReddit. I can find old Galleries that work just fine on both, it's so weird.