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Imgur's community was in revolt

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Re: Imgur's community was in revolt

#31

Post by hellojesus »

pak9rabid wrote: post #14
AngryData wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, when imgur came about reddit was 99% text on the site. Hosting images would have been a huge step up in cost considering the user count. Then of course people realized that if imgur can make money on ads thanks to reddit's traffic, reddit could potentially make even more and it has been all down hill from there.

Not to mention the liability of hosting users' media, which would have needed costly moderation to ensure nothing too illegal made its way in.

How much protection do platforms have against user media submissions? If you implement a dcma/illegal report button tbat instantly takes the media down, maybe even logically, is that sufficient?

Re: Imgur's community was in revolt

#32

Post by evilduck »

ajsnigrutin wrote: post #21

Webdevs, why, why o why, do you have to ask me to subscribe to the newsletter before you even let me read the first 5% of the article? Do you really thing people read the first sentence and then go "yes, i definitely want to receive spam from this website! here's my email address!" or what?

Webdevs aren't the ones making that decision unless they happen to own the whole company, product managers and marketing demand those popups. Also, unfortunately, they do tend to work better than other options like passively showing signup forms below content or on a dedicated page linked off of something.

Re: Imgur's community was in revolt

#33

Post by Scaevolus »

koakuma-chan wrote: post #18
jtokoph wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My guess would be cost. I don’t think Reddit had much, if any, revenue at the time and images would likely require orders of magnitude more storage.

Isn't storage cheap? Telegram advertises as free unlimited storage.

Storage and bandwidth were way more expensive in 2009.

Re: Imgur's community was in revolt

#34

Post by [deleted] »

whywhywhywhy wrote: post #12
Workaccount2 wrote: post #5

What's interesting about imgur, and telling of how times changed, was that it was created mostly to fill the gap in unreliable uploading of images to reddit. Which begs the question: What the hell was reddit doing that they didn't immediately implement an image hosting feature to keep users on the platform? Imgur rose to fame because it was the darling image host of reddit users, and it wasn't long before imgur neede…

> What the hell was reddit doing that they didn't immediately implement an image hosting feature Maybe partly because it wasn't Imgur that added image hosting to reddit it was more reddit always had images they were just on ImageShack, PhotoBucket and there was another reddit darling one who's name escapes me before imgur which I think added ads or started deleting images that caused Imgur to be created. So Imgur was…

[deleted]

Re: Imgur's community was in revolt

#35

Post by angst_ridden »

freefaler wrote: post #7

Nothing is free, servers must be paid. On top of that owners want to make money. We can enjoy free services while the investors money last, but in the end every long-term service must find a way to pay the bill. (And some owners are more greedy than others) It's the same with AI chatbots/API costs, heavily subsidized now and much more expensive in the future.

It's not like Imgur didn't finance with ads. They did that for a long time. Dunno if it paid the bills. The latest kerfuffle is because they were bought and the new owners fired all the moderators in favor of "AI moderation."

Re: Imgur's community was in revolt

#36

Post by BuyMyBitcoins »

ajsnigrutin wrote: post #21

Webdevs, why, why o why, do you have to ask me to subscribe to the newsletter before you even let me read the first 5% of the article? Do you really thing people read the first sentence and then go "yes, i definitely want to receive spam from this website! here's my email address!" or what?

Modal windows are just popups reborn.

Re: Imgur's community was in revolt

#37

Post by diggan »

internet2000 wrote: post #20

Imgur having a "community" is still the strangest part of this story.

Every for-profit business needs to earn money somehow, and if you're just "that service that reddit users use for uploading and viewing images", it's really hard to justify your existence in the first place.

And then of course, you add in VC-investments, and suddenly you have external parties forcing you to start extracting as much value from users as you possibly can.

Basically, the same story as with every other enshittificated company that happened so far.

Re: Imgur's community was in revolt

#38

Post by duped »

Workaccount2 wrote: post #5

What's interesting about imgur, and telling of how times changed, was that it was created mostly to fill the gap in unreliable uploading of images to reddit. Which begs the question: What the hell was reddit doing that they didn't immediately implement an image hosting feature to keep users on the platform? Imgur rose to fame because it was the darling image host of reddit users, and it wasn't long before imgur neede…

> What the hell was reddit doing that they didn't immediately implement an image hosting feature to keep users on the platform

Reddit was a hub for illegal porn so presumably, they didn't want to face a crackdown for hosting that kind of content. It still is, but nsfw posts are banned from /r/all now.

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