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

Post by jasonkostempski » Tue, Jun 20, 2017, 3:58 PM UTC

stanmancan wrote: post #17

jswny wrote: post #11

Imgur pushing it's own website over direct image links is the exact reason I've stopped using it. I understand they have to make money by but I just want to put a damn picture on the internet and send the link to others. I don't want to have to deal with Imgur's album/site link crap and dumb expansion into being a social network. It's hard now to even find the direct link, nevermind avoid Imgur's annoying messages ab…

Why not use Dropbox public links or something similar?

Post by bhandziuk » Tue, Jun 20, 2017, 4:00 PM UTC

novia wrote: post #27

Imgur recently started doing something really annoying on their mobile site. If you keep scrolling past the picture you were linked to, it shows a bunch of other pictures that were not posted by the person who posted the first picture. These extra pictures seem to be generally in the same category as the picture that was meant to be linked to, so if the original picture is a slightly risque photo, the photos that fol…

Post by gwern » Tue, Jun 20, 2017, 4:03 PM UTC

TazeTSchnitzel wrote: post #7

Imgur is essentially a parasite upon reddit which exploited and relied upon reddit's lack of native image posts. Imgur's dependency on reddit led to it trying to compete directly with it to ensure its survival without its host (Imgur is now also a place to find and comment on images), but also ensured reddit would eventually drop it, thus paradoxically also hurting its survival. Ultimately I think Imgur is destined t…

Post by nazka » Tue, Jun 20, 2017, 4:04 PM UTC

castis wrote: post #26

nazka wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's some strong words. Imgur wasn't a parasite, it was offering a service that Reddit didn't offer but we needed. Yes Imgur was quite dependent on Reddit at the beginning but now Imgur has its own community and the two are quite different. If you look at the numbers, after the beta Imgur was starting to grow again. It was a hit yes, but not an exodus.

Edit: Whoops! I was definitely wrong here. It was absolutely a parasite. It would not have survived to grow to the size it did without Reddit. Parasites can offer a beneficial service to the host but cannot live without it. It has since evolved into something possibly capable of existing on its own but only time will tell. My guess is it lives for a few more years at best.

Post by TazeTSchnitzel » Tue, Jun 20, 2017, 4:04 PM UTC

rm999 wrote: post #23

owenversteeg wrote: post #8

Why on earth would Reddit want to add a massive expense (image hosting) at a time that they're already hemorrhaging money? Especially since imgur was still a fairly adequate host for the site. Reddit's image hosting seems like burning money for nothing. Not to mention the Reddit image URLs are horrifying. I upload stuff to imgur just for the nice, short URLs.

Reddit did the right thing - they realized a majority of their users are on Reddit for the images, which makes it a core competency. Reddit was using Imgur as a free image host, which Imgur was obviously not ok with. I realized this last summer when imgur started redirecting direct image links into its ad-ridden bloated mess of a social image page. It was an obvious attack on reddit. I don't know if imgur ended up un…