Imgur Acquired by Medialab • Hacker News Board

Re: Imgur Acquired by Medialab

#221

Post by maccolgan » Tue, Sep 28, 2021, 12:59 AM UTC

ChrisArchitect wrote: post #29

Medialab's other things include like, Genius (ok, fair enough, sustains itself / useful/ well-used I'm assuming)....and Kik? The teen messaging app from like 2010 that no one uses anymore? hm Had to look a bit harder to even find their website ( https://www.medialab.la/ ) - 'a holding company of consumer internet brands' heh, sheesh, yeah that's not sketchy.

>Kik? The teen messaging app from like 2010 that no one uses anymore?

It's not "none uses anymore" anymore, it's widely used for nefarious and degenerate sexual solicitation and shit like that.

Re: Imgur Acquired by Medialab

#222

Post by jart » Tue, Sep 28, 2021, 1:15 AM UTC

kyle-rb wrote: post #133

ChrisArchitect wrote: post #29

Medialab's other things include like, Genius (ok, fair enough, sustains itself / useful/ well-used I'm assuming)....and Kik? The teen messaging app from like 2010 that no one uses anymore? hm Had to look a bit harder to even find their website ( https://www.medialab.la/ ) - 'a holding company of consumer internet brands' heh, sheesh, yeah that's not sketchy.

MediaLab probably got Kik at a pretty big discount. There were child grooming issues, and at one point they did an ICO and subsequently got fined by the SEC. They were also indirectly responsible for the whole leftpad disaster lol.

Are you talking about NPM leftpad that broke Node? Is there any place where I can read more about this claim?

Re: Imgur Acquired by Medialab

#223

Post by chptung » Tue, Sep 28, 2021, 1:21 AM UTC

missedthecue wrote: post #136

Is this the same Medialab that bought the lyrics website Genius for $80 million last week?

Yes

Re: Imgur Acquired by Medialab

#224

Post by MengerSponge » Tue, Sep 28, 2021, 1:34 AM UTC

robertoandred wrote: post #106

BiteCode_dev wrote: post #62

Earlier 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?

My retired father?

Re: Imgur Acquired by Medialab

#225

Post by ceocoder » Tue, Sep 28, 2021, 1:44 AM UTC

jart wrote: post #222

kyle-rb wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

MediaLab probably got Kik at a pretty big discount. There were child grooming issues, and at one point they did an ICO and subsequently got fined by the SEC. They were also indirectly responsible for the whole leftpad disaster lol.

Are you talking about NPM leftpad that broke Node? Is there any place where I can read more about this claim?

This thread should help - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11349870

Re: Imgur Acquired by Medialab

#226

Post by clavicat » Tue, Sep 28, 2021, 1:47 AM UTC

Swizec wrote: post #111

robertoandred wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah but who goes to the front page of imgur?

Who doesn't? It's the best source of almost everything. Perfect mix of culturally important twitter and news screenshots and entertaining gifs.

I scrolled through it for five minutes just now. Advice animals, rage-bait about politicians, political cartoons, cute animals—this is complete garbage.

Re: Imgur Acquired by Medialab

#227

Post by jccalhoun » Tue, Sep 28, 2021, 1:54 AM UTC

darkwizard42 wrote: post #5

Medialab has now acquired Kik (2019), Imgur (2021), Genius (2021)... Big spree of acquisitions! Anyone have any idea the goal?

Based on this episode of Darknet Diaries: https://darknetdiaries.com/episode/93/ It sounds like they buy up dead/dying online properties, fire basically everyone, put the service on life support to keep it barely functioning, milk all the money they can from the remaining users as the service goes to shit, buy something else.

Re: Imgur Acquired by Medialab

#228

Post by oceanplexian » Tue, Sep 28, 2021, 2:02 AM UTC

mcny wrote: post #60

ChrisArchitect wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right, it's the scale and seemingly limitless ceiling.... seems crazy. Obviously there's a lot of low res tiny images on there etc but there's also not -- and for years and years?

I remember back around 2009(?) ish I had a chance to talk to some folks at Justin.tv (now twitch) and they said one ad on the stream every few hours more than covers all the costs. What changed? I guess the videos are much more high resolution now than the webcam size 320x240 videos back then but has cost gone up that much?

I think a lot of tech companies meet the fate where they get diminishing returns on growth and have to keep hiring and spending a lot of cash to chase smaller and smaller gains. Bandwidth is expensive but having thousands of highly compensated employees is also very expensive, probably more so.

Re: Imgur Acquired by Medialab

#229

Post by oceanplexian » Tue, Sep 28, 2021, 2:14 AM UTC

sha90 wrote: post #84

icelancer wrote: post #65

Earlier 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.

Bandwidth is a heck of a lot cheaper these days (I remember a previous employer paying $10k/mo for a 100MB circuit in San Francisco 10ish years ago). That said while the prices are much lower, people are realizing that not all bandwidth is created equal, e.g to get good connectivity to some regions can still be ludicrously expensive, for example if you want to deliver to Singapore, Australia, etc, or say you wait to get content from the USA to South America with reasonable reliability and low latency.

Re: Imgur Acquired by Medialab

#230

Post by jkelleyrtp » Tue, Sep 28, 2021, 2:21 AM UTC

seph-reed wrote: post #166

missedthecue wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> Minecraft Take it back! Seriously though, I remember MC before it was a kids game. It was already becoming one by the time Microsoft bought it, but since then almost every update has been gimmicks for kids. The world generation is still ridiculous (jungles next to arctics), the weather patterns are binary (hard rain, or nothing), and proximity chat is practically impossible. They've made a lot of money off making i…

If it's any consolation, there are really good mods for proximity voice chat and jungles next to arctics is being fixed in the next major update.

I don’t quite agree that every update has been gimmicks for kids - I can’t really point to a “childish” new mechanic added. Maybe your perception of the game has changed?