Well, it was nice while it lasted.
Imgur Acquired by Medialab
211–220 of 302 posts
Re: Imgur Acquired by Medialab
#212Wasn't this the company that ostensibly began on reddit? Their founder used to post many promises about "not selling out" and the rest.
It literally began on reddit. I remember reading the thread. The founder (of imgur) was sick of all the bullshit that other hosting sites did. Like not just serving the image. But instead forcing logins, and landing pages etc.
I remember the writing was on the wall when someone said, making fun of "imgurians" as people who thought of imgur as "a site to go to" and not just an image host for reddit. It keeps getting more and more user hostile with dark patterns etc. The other day I tried to just go to my page of image uploads on mobile and flat out could not. The site would not let me even though I know the exact url.
It was sad, if inevitable to watch imgur become the exact same garbage site it was trying to replace.
Time to download my stuff I guess.
Re: Imgur Acquired by Medialab
#213Damn. Imgur just became amazing in the last month. They rolled out a feature where you can filter out political posts, and it's become the only place I can go to just enjoy some mindless scrolling. There's still a ton of political posters who never tag, but you can mute them. And then there's the "look how dumb those people are" circle jerks, that aren't actually political. But all in all, I have a pretty decent qual…
> There's still a ton of political posters who never tag, but you can mute them.
not really scalable
Re: Imgur Acquired by Medialab
#214As a side note I find it amusing how the HN community simultaneously obsesses over startups, equity, funding rounds, etc but gets grumpy when a company actually does sell. The cognitive dissonance is sublime.
doublethink*
CD would be us being uncomfortable with the conflict and possibly resolving it.
Re: Imgur Acquired by Medialab
#215Earlier quoted context omitted.
I, and apparently Swizec ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28676558 ), do both, and I doubt we're the only ones.
Yes, there might be dozens of you.
For the uninitiated, this is a meme reference to a clip from the TV show Arrested Development, popular on Imgur as a reaction to show support for someone else who expresses a sense of loneliness in their appreciation or affection.
A version of this: https://i.imgur.com/pgXjbNy.gifv
Re: Imgur Acquired by Medialab
#216TL;DR - we've been doing this for 12 years and we're tired and want to do something else. These guys gave us enough money to do that.
Interesting that there are at least three 'Medialab' brands, one is the management platform for healthcare, one is a department at MIT, and then there is Medialab the holding company (https://www.medialab.la/) which bought Genius (YC S11) too.
I may be too cynical because I'm guessing they are going to give it the 'Sourceforge' treatment.
Re: Imgur Acquired by Medialab
#217Earlier quoted context omitted.
Ads are worth a magnitude less today than they were in 2009.
What? They're crazy competitive these days. Every popular ad space online has been bought by the highest bidder. AdWords, Facebook, Imgur, Reddit, companies are dumping cash like mad. The market grew by billions over the past decade.
Sorry, was confusing.
Ads cost a lot more. People who rent space get a lot less.
Re: Imgur Acquired by Medialab
#218Earlier quoted context omitted.
DataPacket has a lot of locations globally (compared to Hetzner), though you're going to need to spend more than a few dollars to get started.
Not only to get started. What costs me €20 on hetzner costs me $800 on DataPacket. That’s quite a difference.
Right, it's not a 'side project' type of vendor, more of an Imgur scale vendor. I love Hetzner, I just wish they had more locations than Germany and Finland, which are practically the same in terms of latency if you/your users are from Asia or the Americas.
Re: Imgur Acquired by Medialab
#219Nothing good ever lasts. Well, then... time to archive the links for future find-and-replace, and to offload everything I have there (luckily, not much, I learned my lesson on imageshack.us once upon a yesteryear).
Re: Imgur Acquired by Medialab
#220Interesting 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.…
The whisper founders threatened to default on the debt they raised from SVB, then used inside money to buy it at cents on the dollar. because debt is senior to equity, they then wiped out the equity raised and kicked sequoia, shasta, and lightspeed off the board. then raised PE to fund a series of purchases of apps such as kik, and a lot of android apps with churned users with always-on location permissions turned on. They then used that data to build a small ad network.