Having a third party host Reddit's images gave away a bunch of control to the point that imgur has its own community based upon the site . At the time Reddit didn't have the resources to make a competitor but this seems to be a good move now that imgur is doing dark patterns.
I want to know whether Imgur's dark patterns are because the site isn't profitable, or because it isn't profitable enough. Because they've sort of cut their own throat here, and it would be interesting to know whether it was from necessity or greed.
Imgur was successfully bootstrapped and profitable enough to afford employees in a San Francisco office for 5 years. The bloat issues didn't really start popping up until after they took in $40MM of VC capital in mid 2014.
Their transition has VC written all over it.
It should also be noted that reddit has an ownership stake in imgur, so they must have really been concerned about the degrade in imgur experience to have done something like this.
Lots of image upload sites does this, start out good and eventually add a lot of crap to monetise.
Does it mean they cut their throat or does it mean the creator just set himself up for a life of money? Genuine question, maybe this is just a way to become rich, maybe these shitty upload sites make enough money that they simply pick this way instead of keeping it pure.
My guess is that imgur started out profitable but that ended when gifs became popular. /r/all is about 50% gifs nowadays. The low bandwidth of an image host makes it possible to allow hotlinking but that doesn't work with videos.
Good point! I distinctly recall Imgur being started because it was one of those "this used to be something hard, but now Moore's law has made it easy" services. Imgur could afford to allow hotlinking because actually serving images had become a trivial cost. Because no other image-host had capitalized on this, Imgur cleaned up—for a while.
Once people started shifting to sharing content mostly as really-inefficiently-compressed ten-second videos (which are still pretty large when efficiently recompressed), Imgur's original business model was dead in the water. Maybe one day gifs will be as cheap to serve as images are now—but it won't be any time in the next few years.
Any modern browser visiting imgur gets H.264/WebM instead of the uncompressed gif. They introduced this 2.5 years ago. After a couple smaller gif only sites made the practice popular.
I stopped clicking imgur gifv links a looong time ago. They worked for me maybe one out of eight times. By now I have an allergic reaction just to seeing them, even if the issues may have been fixed by now.
As others have mentioned, most of the videos are served as "gifv" videos, which are much more bandwidth conscious than actual gifs.
It's worth highlighting that Gfycat is managing to operate as a short gif/video hosting service without turning awful, though I obviously don't know what their financials look like.
Gfycat does have a homepage of popular gifs, but they've never shown them to me unless I wanted to see them. The viewer page is just the viewer.
The drive to make imgur its own community with its own comments, logins, etc greatly predates its support of gifv. If anything gifv has saved it tremendous bandwidth. Its been hosting gifs since the beginning, even absurd 50-100mb ones. They never bothered to put in a reasonable file size limit. Also, this move also only happened when a lot of traffic was going to gfycat, which supported mp4/h264/webm/whatever files for ages. gifv support from imgur pretty much killed them.
I think the larger narrative is that imgur wasn't some geek's side project. It was a VC-run enterprise that will eventually find a way to be profitable. I think ultimately, this type of service is difficult to monetize. Reddit running its own makes a lot of sense.
From an experience perspective, my god, its terrible. I'm constantly being nagged to install the imgur app and sometimes Im not sure if the comments I'm seeing are reddit's or imgur's due to using a dark theme on my reddit app. Its all around a shitshow and I'm surprised reddit tolerated them for so long.
"You either die a hero or you live long enough to see yourself become the villain"
(or until you get an investment from less ethical companies)
But to be honest monetizing things like imgurl is hard. Most of the users cost more than they earn
I think with adblockers becomming more common we'll have to think of better ways of coming out with feasible arrangements. Sharing bandwidth between users? JS bitcoin mining (or some other kind of processing)? Mechanical Turk style work for users?
That's rather hard to do if your site mainly serves hotlinked or embedded images. You don't have the level of interaction required for meaningful data.
Hits and content analysis is all google needed to become successful. There are native comments in /all/, on reddit and maybe the referrer set in the header.
I would be very interested to hear what data you think imgur could sell.
Also, I know that on a website like imgur native pays about as little as display. The fact that imgur tried Taboola a while ago and eventually ditched it seems to corroborate this.
Imgur's users are pseudo-anonymous, just like reddit and HN. Advertisers aren't really willing to pay much for that when they can target accurate user profiles like Facebook or anything that connects with Facebook.
Heavy emphasis on the pseudo part of that I assume? A quick glance at third party sites accessed when loading imgur.com:
- facebook
- twitter
- amazon ads
- google ads
- quantserve
- google analytics
- scorecardresearch
Because this is pretty much the standard list for any major site, each of those providers has a highly detailed profile built for the average web user. While the top three will often have login data associated, there's plenty of capability for data mining without that. This excludes data other providers can glean from the actions taken and data rendered by those top three providers - I haven't kept up on the state of that and I don't know how possible it still is.
And how many of those services share their user profiles with imgur so that imgur can monetize that data by selling expensive premium ads to advertisers?
No one is arguing that facebook/google/tw... (well maybe twitter heheh) aren't profitably mining lots of user data. But imgur probably isn't able to mine much value out of it's own data.
scorecardresearch is the endpoint for comScore which is used to do exactly what you mentioned. Imgur buys the data from comScore as a sort of "online Nielsen rating" in order to sell the value of the site to ad vendors.
If imgur has to buy profiling data from someone else, it isn't really their data is it? That is, imgur could not recreate that same data alone, they need the partner who can get the missing data from the rest of the partner's network.
The bottom line is imgur's data is probably not worth much, what _is_ worth a lot is imgurs traffic, and that traffic is taking a hit from adblock.
I get the feeling that Imgur set unrealistic expectations when it launched, and they can become very difficult to back away from when they become untenable.
"direct" links to an image uploaded sometimes/usually redirect to imgur page, with lots of ads and shitty content, obnoxious, animated overlays that block out part of the image on mobile, etc
A dark pattern is an UI design that motivates users to use the program/site in a way profitable to the site, but contrary to users' interest. To trick people, see http://darkpatterns.org/. Redirecting to the whole page instead of the link is just a hotlink protection (as debatable as that is for an image hoster). Animated overlays in mobile is just shitty advertising and UX. But no dark pattern here.
I saw that multiple times here on HN now that people misuse the term. It's a pity, the original idea is something to be aware of, and diluting what dark pattern means hinders that awareness.
Having links that used to be hotlinks no longer be hotlinks is a dark pattern; also URLs that look like hotlinks (ending in .jpg or similar) but aren't. I'd argue that serving ads sometimes but not always is a dark pattern (particularly if they use cookies or similar to never serve ads to the original uploader).
Again, no. A dark pattern is an UI that makes the user do something he does not want. The best example is linkedin trying to get people to spam their contacts with invites. The pre-checked "subscribe to the newsletter" checkbox is a dark pattern. Same is the checkbox you need to check to not subscribe to the newsletter.
A hotlink is no user interface, changing its behaviour is not a dark pattern. Serving ads never is one (though ads itself can use dark patterns), regardless whether the uploader sees them or not. Those are different kind of tricks that have (edit: almost) nothing to do with what the term dark pattern describes.
Edit: I'd argue that links that used to be hotlinks not being hotlinks can maybe be part of a dark pattern. If an UI tried to get people to share a site, and the people do that only because they think the links are hotlinks, then that UI could be a dark pattern and the non-hotlinks a part of that. But the dark pattern is then the UI presenting the hotlink, the "share this image directly" widget, not the hotlink itself.
> Edit: I'd argue that links that used to be hotlinks not being hotlinks can maybe be part of a dark pattern. If an UI tried to get people to share a site, and the people do that only because they think the links are hotlinks, then that UI could be a dark pattern and the non-hotlinks a part of that. But the dark pattern is then the UI presenting the hotlink, the "share this image directly" widget, not the hotlink itself.
I'd say the URL itself can be UI - users know what a URL to a direct image looks like and how that differs from what a URL to a page tends to look like.
That does not matter. An URL alone does not entice users to do nothing. You need more to get a proper dark pattern, to get the "convincing the user to do things" part of the definition of what makes something a dark pattern in the first place. Please, look as well at the website http://darkpatterns.org/ to see what a dark pattern is about.
So you're saying if it's not on that website it's not valid?
Come on.. If I see a URL that ends in JPG, my understanding is that I am about to load an image. If the site then shows me a page full of ads with my image somewhere on there, that's exactly what you described.
The site is tricking me into doing something that is to their benefit and to my detriment. Showing me a URL that looks like a link to an image is absolutely encouraging me to do something. It's telling me "hey click here you'll see the image right away"..
I did not want to see a page full of ads, I wanted to see a single image, but now the site has monetized me without my consent.
It feels like you're arguing for argument's sake here.
If you are really arguing that you are inherently more likely to click on the direct link, and it is this click impulse that is used to manipulate you, and that going to a page containing that image plus ads instead is the big negative outcome, then I understand why it is a dark pattern for you.
I did not see that direct link have a higher affordance (that might stretch the term a bit too much) to be clicked on. I still don't – but if you think that there are people that are conditioned to click on those direct links, but would not click on the normal link, then I'll have o give you the point that the heuristically changing of the result page might be a dark pattern for those people.
I'm not aware of that effect, but I can't be sure that for example on reddit for people without adblocker or on mobile for some time the direct link wasn't a positive click signal that conditioned them.
I think that explains why I'm arguing. Dark patterns are a manipulation, and simply showing another page is not something I can count as a manipulation – it is not the same thing as in a window making people click on the wrong button (even though I understand that there is a similarity if you follow a specific line of thinking).
Direct link is a significant "positive signal" for the following reasons:
- you implicitly expect it won't load code to your browser
- you implicitly expect it will serve the one and only one resource that you need
- you implicitly expect that after receiving the resource no further data will be exchanged between the client and the server
- you implicitly expect it will work well with the standard UI of your viewing platform - for instance, it will be pinch-zoomable on mobile, or zoomable with mouse in desktop browsers
- you expect to work well with applicable context; for instance, a direct image link should work in "href" attribute of "a" tag (resulting in an image being embedded on a website), it should work with curl or wget (resulting in a single image file being created on your hard drive), or just browser's "save" feature (again, resulting in a single image file being created)
I'd call breaking these things a dark pattern. A particularly nasty one at that, since it's poisoning the well. Breaking users' trust in that URLs do is one of the many subtle ways of fucking the Internet for everyone for personal profit.
"Showing another page" is not a manipulation? So the redirects of yore when you would change the link-text to a URL that does not match the link-URL is not a manipulation? That is effectively what imgur does.
Masters degrees, card carrying, secret-handshake knowing designer here. I remember when the notion of dark patterns was first discussed and differentiated from anti-patterns and I think this current discussion is quite ironic.
It's ironic because it is hinging on a narrowly constrained definition of "user interface" design - one that has been appropriated by web/app designers in recent years. UI goes well beyond what is IN the browser window. Discussion of user interfaces occurred before they were graphical user interfaces, well before they were web browsers. So for a discussion that hinged on the idea of the misappropriation of terms, this scores high for irony, IMHO.
SO, now that we're clear on the idea UI's can include many things, it's also clear that the URL and the items return based on the url requested absolutely fall under the notion of UI. And, this is most definitely an example of UI manipulation to create unexpected and negative results for the user to the benefit of the website.
Additionally I should point out, the whole notion of interaction design once meant something much broader than digital interfaces - as an easy example, look at Don Norman's early work and you'll see that interaction and interfaces go well beyond windowed interfaces or even digital interfaces.
Guess in what my masters degree is ;) Design of everyday things is one of my favorite books, and definitely the HCI book I enjoyed reading the most.
I'm aware that you can think of many things as being an interface. I even agree that heuristically switching the result page is deceptive. But there is a difference, though it gets hard to pinpoint it. The manipulation is on another level. It is not the same type of thinking as pre-selecting a checkbox in an installer [0]. I don't agree that it is an UI manipulation in the normal sense. I don't see which psyhcological effects are used, where the manipulation is. There is a deception if a .jpg link does not go to the image, but how manipulates that? Is the ending .jpg a something prone to be clicked on? I don't think so.
Still, while I still value the difference between a dark pattern and any random deceptive behavior, at least I understand a bit better now why people persist on mixing up the term.
The Psychology of Everyday Things (later retitled "The Design of Everyday Things") is indeed a great book. I call out the original title, first, to be a hipster but more to point out that his very aim was to talk about things not Human Computer Interaction. It is not a book primarily about Human Computer Interaction and your regarding it as such or at least lumping it in with HCI shows a serious misunderstanding of the larger point.
It isn't that you can think of many things as interfaces it is that many things are interfaces and interfaces were around long before they became graphical or even digital/computer-based. So, URLs themselves are definitely interfaces – they're UI's and machine interfaces as well, given their multiple roles.
For the concept of Dark Patterns, the manipulation you're talking about is, at its core, abusing convention, expectation and perception to steer people into an experience that they wouldn't choose if it were more obvious. So, essentially, dark patterns are deceptive.
What I gather you're asserting is that they must also be manipulative and get people to do something, themselves? By that bar, I think the imgur returning of pages instead of images when the convention is to return an image for a url ending in .jpg, etc. may be questionable. No URL request will ever rise to the level of nuance that a visual interface will. However, I still think this case fits. It is abusing a set of conventions and intentionally guiding a user into something they weren't expecting.
Additionally, think about the multiple use cases here. It's easy to focus on the casual browser clicking a link from Reddit but it's also about the user creating the reddit post. They are following convention, using what they think is an image link, choosing to post it, only to then unwittingly be involved in serving up that annoying as hell moving cat paw ad on top of the image they're trying to share with others. That sounds a little like a dark pattern at work to me...
> It is not a book primarily about Human Computer Interaction and your regarding it as such or at least lumping it in with HCI shows a serious misunderstanding of the larger point.
The primarily I did not say, did I? The book was required reading at the first university I heard a HCI lecture. It was recommended at my masters (in HCI, both the masters and the lecture), and contents from it were teached. I'm not sure about everyone in my current team, but I know at least some have read it, and I saw general references to its content. And those guys are pretty much the core of european academic HCI.
Everyday things has that role, as I could see, exactly because it is not talking about computers. It manages to show concepts and principals in a way that makes clear how they are universal. Besides, computer interaction does not happen only through display interfaces.
> I call out the original title, first, to be a hipster but more to point out that his very aim was to talk about things not Human Computer Interaction
Actually, the foreword of the 2002 edition I have open right now explains the change of title. It describes that it is because psychology in the title made it go to the wrong bookshelf in stores, in that people did not capture that it was talking about objects and design instead of psychology itself. Where do you have your explanation from?
> What I gather you're asserting is that they must also be manipulative and get people to do something, themselves?
Exactly. Or to not do something they'd usually do.
> That sounds a little like a dark pattern at work to me...
A little, yes. I stand by that manipulation is not enough included, and deception is not enough, and the link look is not enough. But like I said, I now understand why others are mixing it up – and the point with the different use cases might apply. I was serious in my explanation in another comment that there might be a group of people for who it really works as a manipulation, even though I can't see it working in a general way without prior conditioning, and then it fits the dark pattern definition reasonably well.
I think that was his point, different people can define the same word in multiple ways. Just because you/your favourite source says one thing, doesn't mean everyone else agrees, for better or worse.
The deception is really in the URL. If I see an address ending with .jpg, I expect it to load a raw JPEG, and I have some implicit expectations following that that are being broken if the site serves HTML instead.
Also, it's actually much simpler than the discussion makes it to be. Just look at the big picture. The user wants a picture, free of irrelevant or harmful bullshit. The site promises that raw image, by means of providing what looks like a direct URL. Then, it does not deliver on the promise, serving the irrelevant and/or harmful bullshit along with the picture. It's pretty clear that one side is trying to exploit the other one.
There is something labeled very clearly as a "Direct Link." When I paste that link into my browser, I go to the image file.
If people are posting the Direct Link and it is indeed redirecting to the full site (per the claims), then that is most certainly a very dark pattern if not an outright example of blatantly lying to their users.
So in this case it is very much about the UI and what is presented to the user at the time they are grabbing the URL.
I tried to explain above of why that does not feel right to mix it in as dark pattern, but it gets muddy and based on the votes people don't seem to understand it, or just don't find it convincing. Short, adjusted for here: I'm not convinced people would not share and click those links anyway even if it were correctly labeled. But the widget looking like this is a good point against that argumentation of mine.
> if not an outright example of blatantly lying to their users.
That of course. Hotlink protection for an image hoster when even providing official direct link is in any case a deception, maybe a lie. Please don't mistake my argumentation against the use of the dark pattern term as a defense of the behavior.
Advertising is a verb (or a genre). It is not an ad. An ad itself can use dark patterns (good example: the skype ads looking like UI elements) – but that does not make advertising itself one.
sli.mg is the new imgur for /r/the_donald, and other subs whose content imgur regularly censors. I haven't really seen it used "in the wild" on more mainstream subs. It does have a nice, clean and minimalistic interface, similar to what imgur used to have.
It's like on Facebook - if something gets reported enough times on imgur it get's auto-censored until it maybe is manually restored by a imgur employee.
Because of that a lot of relatively benign Trump content gets censored on imgur because a lot of people find even his name to be offensive. Some even think his name is violence.
Not racial hatred, images of Robert Byrd kissing Hillary Clinton will get censored. Basically anything that is a joke at the expense of Hillary Clinton will get removed.
I don't think that's it, quite exactly. I think it's more that when people see stats for lots of eyeballs they too often think "if we monetize those to the max, think of the money we could make" and then that shifts into thinking they're leaving money on the table.
The thing is, while there is huge demand for image hosting sites, that demand is really low "quality". After all, we're talking about sites hosting memes and screenshots from games, not original works of art created after tens and hundreds of hours of laboring in Photoshop.
To be fair, they could have operated a simple and effectively profitable business, and grown at an economically normal rate. But hey, I guess I wouldn't say no to $40M of a16z's money and a $200M valuation either.
I assume your familiar with their operating costs somehow? I have direct experience at a different (older) host. It was simply not possible to serve the tremendous bandwidth needs without increasingly aggressive monetization. I have no idea what they're costs look like and bandwidth is much cheaper than it was 10 years ago, but I'd wager that there was no profitable business for them at any point without intrusive ads.
> but I'd wager that there was no profitable business for them at any point without intrusive ads.
5 years ago: "but it's profitable enough to hopefully hire another guy or two this summer."[0]
The founder has completely bootstrapped the site since day 1, and has done an AMA on Reddit talking about the whole situation[1]. Ads are absolutely necessary to make it profitable, but clearly taking investment now means they are going to squeeze every ounce of dollar out of the site and hence the sentiment of "aggressive monetization".
That was five years ago, they've experienced explosive growth since then which changes the equation. Because they were profitable then doesn't mean that you can simply linearly grow that as the amount of content being served grows. Particularly when you rely on ad revenue which has been on a downward trend over the last few years.
Point being: unless you have been directly involved in the decisions accusing them of either malevolence or greed is a pretty tough accusation to make. Sometimes (usually) it's cold hard business realities that drive people to adopting these sorts of monetization strategies.
So now the cycle will repeat. Someone will start a host that simply serves images. People will use it. They'll add some ads, people won't care much. They'll start serving more aggressive ads and someone will start another host... over and over again.
That's literally what they did for years until taking a16z's money...
They did it by building a community around the non-reddit related traffic. Basically redditor's would share imgur links outside the reddit ecosystem (Facebook etc), then other people would visit imgur directly instead of going through reddit. These secondary users are monetizable.
Imgur had to eat the costs of supporting reddit's hotlinking (though not all reddit posts are hotlinked) but that was more or less imgur's "marketing budget."
Data mining what exactly? Unless you know what in the image, it's hardly interesting that a user with browser fingerprint X viewed some image with a random hash or name.
Sure it is, you can track the site it was hosted on and follow the fingerprint around the web. The image content isn't the juicy bit.
If I can see you viewed an image referred from /r/woodwork I might offer you some woodworking tools and drive up the conversation rate of my advertisements.
I was perhaps too dismissive, it is certainly full of information. But I mostly meant for the moment the information most likely to be gleaned will be from referral links.
As someone who spends millions of dollars on targeted advertising, I can safely say Imgur and similar sites have no worthwhile targeting options unless Facebook buys them.
You seem to be asserting that anything is okay as long as it makes money.
Nobody has to make a website. If the only way you can think of to make money is bait-and-switch, then you can choose to do that, or you can choose to go back to the drawing board and come up with a less unpleasant business plan. If you choose the former, don't expect me to cheer because you found a way to make money, and you think that's the only thing that matters.
I agree with you. When imgur started there was a definite need. Now it's being replaced because there's a new need (caused by imgur changing the way it operates).
Also, I don't think you're going to make everyone happy as a business, and that's (probably) okay.
It's far more reasonable to think there are other explanations than what effectively comes across as very negative intent from the beginning.
For example, they may have hoped or believed they could find a better business model over time, an alternative to the traditional ad models. Based on watching their various experiments since the day they got started, I can say for a fact they did try other things (two examples: Imgur as a service via paid API and Imgur Pro accounts).
Is it more likely the Imgur founder was naive or malevolent? The answer is extremely obvious.
They still provide a 'free to the user at point of use' service. The service they provide doesn't include hotlinking by other site hosts, that's been normal since about 2000 IIRC.
The service they provided DID include hotlinking from other sites, which was one of their major distinguishing features and which is why I (for one) used them almost exclusively as an image host.
I can be sympathetic to the fact that their previous 'business model' wasn't financially viable while still being annoyed that they've changed it.
I think you're forgetting that we live in a world of capitalism. Nobody promised no one nothing. Owners and share holders decide a business model and it's up to you, the consumer, to decide whether you go with it or not. There's always alternatives, if a service seems bad to you, choose a different one, but don't blame the owners for not choosing a business model that would suit you personally.
> While we're at it, let's demand the end of free TV, free email providers, free forums, and even youtube.
If you have a sustainable business model for such a thing, knock yourself out.
If you're just making it free for a couple of years to suck people in before you ratchet up the (not necessarily monetary) cost then yeah, we can do without that.
I think the problem with this particular web service area is that you can set up an image sharing site easily and for little cost. But when it gets popular, and there's a shift to higher bandwidth usage, then costs mount beyond the ability of most people to sustain it. If it's popular then it's going to get acquired or have investors who will push the site to be more commercial; the only other way to go is to close the site or perhaps beg for donations.
The problem is that these sites start out as a small, useful service and then some VC with dollar signs in their eyes throws a few million dollars at them. The clothes make the primate, and suddenly what was three guys in a back room living on instant noodles feels obliged to "act like the million-dollar company that they are."
I imagine you in a grocery store somewhere, railing against free samples. "You never should've given me a piece of sausage if you were going to start charging for them."
A lot of sites/services start for a laugh, and/or because the people who start it assume/hope there'll be some way of making money from it when it gets popular. For a few, this is true. Some go dark, some give up, some sell up. It's up to them I guess.
The biggest problem with imgur is that their mobile site is slow and sluggish as hell.
On my Moto G2 loading and rendering even a single image takes way longer than it should be so I guess there is a lot of "beautiful" Javascript hackery going on in the background doing who-knows-what.
Probably not the right answer, but I only upload to imgur with a CLI client. You get a direct link back that has never shown that behavior. Also if the client only outputs the direct link you can pipe it to `pbcopy` on Mac to put the link in your clipboard.
No, you get a link that looks like a direct link (eg https://i.imgur.com/whatever.png) but it's not (always) a direct link. This is what people are complaining about. Sending that link to people sometimes results in them getting redirected to the ad-laden imgur page.
I've seen the direct links get redirected to the non-direct page on desktop.
It appears to still happen if, e.g., the link is on Twitter - random example https://twitter.com/SilentRENE/status/735732252877819904 (seems to be inconsistent - first time I was redirected, but now it goes directly to the image. Opening the Twitter page in another browser also resulted in a redirect)
Like I said, that hasn't happened to me ever in the couple of years that I've used that method. The people I send links to would complain. I do believe you though—sounds like something they'd do.
probably they only do it IFF the image receives a sustained rate of visualizations?
That would explain why it didn't happen to you (nor me) for "simple" usage.
There does appear to be some kind of heuristic at work here. For example, following the above link results in the traditional behavior for me, but following your link leads to the full imgur page.
EDIT: Ah-ha, figured it out.
1. Click on an i.imgur.com link
2. If it takes you to the full page, right click on the image and click "Open in new tab"
3. The original i.imgur.com link will now take you to the direct image.
Amusing heuristic. After following these steps, I'm unable to reproduce my own screenshot. http://i.imgur.com/PhY2HUP.jpg always takes me to the direct image.
It's not a probability thing, it has to do with the http accept header you are sending.
When you click on a link the browser sends 'html' as http accept header. If you link the image using img src the browser sends 'image' as http accept header.
So if you send image with a small expire header, the server can redirect you to the site, if you click on a link.
> "direct" links to an image uploaded sometimes/usually redirect to imgur page
Actually I like this. It's so stupid that people directly link to the image - I'm always interested in reading the imgur comments, and especially the text comment by the uploader.
On mobile, Imgur has the most distracting, obstructive, and bewildering modal window I've seen. I'm not being hyperbolic; it's worse than the dark patterns on Forbes.com.
It's in the form of a cat's claw, animated – sliding and extending from the top of your screen almost to the bottom – and slow, making users either click it accidentally or wait in frustration until it can be closed.
Despite having seen it countless times, I still don't even know what it's designed to do or what action it's prompting me to take (e.g. login, capture my email address, etc.).
Not only that, but the damn app pop-down from the top of the page when using AlienBlue on iPad is infuriating once it happens enough. Slows the entire experience down.
I often get "authentic" looking "Your Android device is 63% infected! Install this software to fix it" scams on mobile when opening gifv files on imgur. To top it off, they make my phone vibrate and hitting back just reloads the page and causes another long vibration, which is infuriating. If that isn't a dark pattern, I don't know what is.
It only happens when coming from reddit if I open an incognito tab in chrome (chrome opens incognito tabs in the foreground, rather than the background, which saves me a bunch of taps). It never happens if I use normal tabs, which leads me to believe they're only doing it for non-reddit referers or direct links.
"A Dark Pattern is a user interface that has been carefully crafted to trick users into doing things, such as buying insurance with their purchase or signing up for recurring bills." [1]
Presenting an authentic looking UI dialogue which appears to come from the operating system, and using vibration to further impose the authenticity of a dialogue as having come from the operating system seems very much to be covered under any definition of dark pattern I can find. The aim is to make you click the ad, and they use dark patterns to do that. Simply because the ad content is "malvertising" doesn't mean it's not utilizing dark patterns.
I checked out that site before commenting. All of the examples they use are of sites that employ the so-called dark patterns as part of a larger, otherwise legitimate site. So while your ad fits the definition that they offer I believe that, given the examples listed, the label is applied more narrowly. This might just boil down to descriptivism vs prescriptivism.
No, the fact that they put it as if it was their invention, and the fact that linking imgur.com/XXX.webm redirects to script-ridden ".gifv" nonsense is what I find annoying.
>>> to the point that imgur has its own community based upon the site
The interesting thing is there are a ton of people who are on Imgur that have no idea Reddit exists and vice versa. A lot of people on Reddit have no idea Imgur has its own thriving community.
Imgur forgot its roots as a dumb image host, rapidly crufting-up its service with things that were not only annoying but interfering with its basic function. If you can’t easily see an image as soon as you click on it — on mobile or otherwise — then the image service has completely failed.
The sad thing is, they could have added non-intrusive ads. DaringFireball does it; write a single line of text such as “This image brought to you by FooBar, Inc.” and SHOW THE LINKED IMAGE. No pop-ups, no tricks, no obscurity; ad+image, done.
"Daring Fireball does it" has to be the worst possible comparison imaginable. Gruber has super differentiated, high editorial value content that folks will pay a premium to put their message next to. Imgur is about as far away from that as possible. They have to try to make money, it's crazy to sit here and think you know better than they do on this. Don't you think if they could make enough money doing what you think, they would do that instead? They are in a tough industry. They host images (relatively expensive), they have almost no user information for targeting, most visitors never come back to a page again, and most of the content posted is super low value. Unfortunately, this is the result.
I wish an image service existed that did some image recognition on the picture and provided you with relevant, but subtle 'Learn more about this thing' links.
Oh yes. I run a image hosting service and adsense cant serve any relevant ads because the page hardly contains any text. The only text they identify is 'image hosting' and start serving ads to competitors T_T. My service has more information about user interest though based on topics and other user interactions etc but there is no way to forward these hints to adsense :(
Any tips on ad providers that support more explicit choice of topic per page load?
Hey, yes! If reverse image search is possible now, it should be easy to automatically give credit to original creators, connect them with audiences and bypass blogspam!
I was referring to the way that DaringFireball does ads. I was not talking about any other aspect of DaringFireball.
If Imgur wants ads, there is a way to make ads sane and still make money.
For what anecdotes are worth, DaringFireball’s method is about the only form of ads that has ever worked on me. I actually read what he says about these companies, and I often am curious enough to go learn more. And he’s charging a lot for these ad placements for a week.
Whereas, I have never, ever been interested in something that tried to use trickery to pop up in my face, play audio, play animations, steal my clicks or otherwise force me to acknowledge its existence before continuing. I can’t even remember what those products were; I can only remember the speed at which I searched for a black "X" button to close the things.
The way that Daring Fireball does ads is a product of the entire way that Gruber runs the site - you can't only talk about ads. Not to mention the point that Gruber can do whatever he wants with his site and does not need to maximize revenue or provide a venture-scale return. He certainly makes a lot of money with ads the way they're set up - he could certainly make more with "better" ads. He deserves a lot of credit for valuing his readers so highly.
Can you point to a single Imgur-like property using the sort of ads you cite to generate any kind of significant revenue to the point where they could possibly offer a return on venture cash? I don't know of a single major web property running that style of ads that does so successfully. In fact, we see progressively worse ads are what publications are choosing to run instead (looking at you WaPo, running inline "videos" on mobile that are really huge GIFs). I agree that it sucks - certainly no argument there. But I am unaware of anywhere where what you're suggesting is working competitively with unobtrusive options.
I just want to chime in with a simpler answer. That's not really how Internet ads work. Ad deals between companies are fairly large and complex, at least the kind that are going to support a site like imgur.
Content is king and imgurs content is random and most likely junk. There's no consistency you could sell to a partner where'd they be willing to pay enough to allow something like DaringFireball does to work. The only way they're making enough is to put the junk we're dealing with now.
If you Google 'DF Sponsorship' you can get all the info (&rates). I believe a weekly sponsorship is about $13k and he does $15k-20k per podcast across 3-4 ad reads.
Gruber has done more to get high-level Apple people talking publicly answering unscripted questions than maybe anyone else in the media. Read him, learn from him, and like him or not, that's up to you, but at least respect what the guy has done.
>
Imgur forgot its roots as a dumb image host, rapidly crufting-up its service with things that were not only annoying but interfering with its basic function.
Imgur is my main form on entertainment and the app currently lives on my homescreen. Mindless fun and good vibes unlike reddit which makes me angry/sad/depressed.
Imgur would have been dead with this Reddit move if they had not evolved, they obviously saw it coming. Building an image hosting site is not hard; building a fun community is. And Imgur did a great job with it. I love imgur.
I know there is some kind of community on Imgur, but I wonder what percent of it (or the content it enjoys) only exists because it was the unofficial image host for Reddit.
Once Reddit is largely gone, will the community survive?
Yes, absolutely; the Imgur community is completely and totally distinct from Reddit (to the point where people bitch about even seeing the reddit stuff! There's even the comment-meme 'roddit pls' etc)
The big question is simply how Imgur will continue to (sustainably) grow that community. This really brings the question back to the very root: "How do we make Imgur the de-facto image hosting/sharing site in the world"
They bitch about the obvious reddit stuff, but do they realize that most of their content comes from reddit? What happens when most of their posts disappear?
I wish I had an actual statistic, but it's definitely not most. It is quite a large, active community, and they seem to vastly prefer content submitted directly to imgur. I would expect that few will even notice a difference, honestly.
Imgur has its own community. By now you can't even tell if something is posted on imgur and someone submits it on reddit or if a reddit user uploads something and it gets upvotes on imgur.
I think that imgur can exist on its own and will have more than enough content.
And then, sadly, the periodic misogyny-denial post, anti-feminist circle jerk that usually originates on Reddit but then enough people in the Imgur community upvote. This exact thing has made me decide to stop even looking at Imgur. :/
I'm currently working on a competitive image hosting project with a feature called SafeSpace. Just configure your profile with your various triggers and enjoy safe browsing!
So why did they terminate my recurring paypal subscription? I got an email saying "Hey, we don't need your money anymore!" and after that their service went downhill fast.
Imgur was able to pivot from a simple image hosting service to a standalone community. Many people browse imgur every day without ever having visited reddit. That's no small feat, and definitely much easier to monetize than dumb image host.
> Many people browse imgur every day without ever having visited reddit
I didn't even know you could do that. Last time I went to the site directly (years ago) I recollect all you could do was upload an image or browse random images.
Which is, unfortunately, what users need. I wonder if we're doomed to have a new "dumb image host" every few years or if someone will someday figure out how to make a sustainable business out of delivering value in this space, without having to clutter the site with crap.
I think it would have to be a larger organization that has other revenue sources and provides the image hosting as a loss leader. Someone where the bandwidth costs are a drop in the bucket, local edge caches already exist, etc. Netflix, Cloudflare, Akamai, Amazon, Google, etc.
There were several other such services that learnt it the hard way, back the when MySpace was the big thing and decided to host their images themselves (and video too). One such service survived in those days (Google bought Youtube), the others died.
Another narrative is that Imgur got tired of its roots and created their own community, that for some people was better than Reddit in more or less any conceivable way.
Yeah, and when you have multiple images the zoom/expand thing is maddening because it can be super hard to figure out how to unzoom to scroll and see the next image.
Now they're getting those horrifying autoforward fake-virus-scan vibrating ads.
There's a difference between serveing mostly text content and mostly image content. Just the difference in bandwidth/server cost makes this a bad comparison.
imgur didn't forget its roots, its roots were a marketing ploy to win Reddit's trust before dialing up monetization.
imgur got popular because it originally eschewed the bloated ad-laden crapware that paid the bills of the previous imagehosts, until the runway ran out and imgur took its turn in the cycle.
John Gruber needs to feed and house himself, his wife, and his kids. I'm just guessing here, knowing nothing about the internal workings of the company, but I'm pretty sure Imgur has a few more mouths to feed than a single founder's immediate family.
I think you're severely underestimating the success of Imgur. It has essentially become an image-based Reddit clone, with its own thriving community of users who never leave the site.
It's no longer just a place for Redditors to dump their images. And it's a good thing too, because this probably would've killed them if they hadn't gone that direction.
It seemed like Imgur has been getting ready for this for awhile. The experience using it hasn't been that great since direct linking stopped working on mobile.
Last time I've opened an imgur link on mobile I got served with an ad popup and a "virus warning" dialog. That is something I haven't seen in a long time. Imgur seems to go the way of SourceForge.
I'm sure they made mistakes but when you see massive growth like imgur did someone's gotta pay the sever bills somehow. Plenty of image uploading sites have come and gone because of server costs.
To be fair, I think those are usually the fault of malicious ads getting into whatever ad networks imgur uses and they usually get rid of them fairly quickly. They used to pop up every few weeks but I haven't seem them recently (in my experience as a daily imgur user for the past year or so).
Hardly huge. When I was at a web agency with about 70 people on staff here in Australia, we were an AWS partner with negotiated rates, and honestly we weren't doing massive clients really (aside from some government stuff now and then).
It has happened, though I'm not sure if it's common or not. I worked for a big hadoop user (5 years ago: 6k boxes/over 50k cores/30 pb) that aws really wanted on their platform. They offered huge discounts to get us as a marquee customer, much better than their public pricing. Unfortunately, they were still ludicrously expensive compared to O&O but we were good at running huge automated clusters with 1.5 ops.
TIL. After reading about Spotify negotiating with Google Compute Cloud I just thought it was common place for such orgs to negotiate vs everyone else that will rarely reach that scale.
> Apple’s operating system offers numerous advantages over other platforms when it comes to image processing, and it is also favored by many designers for the same reasons. imgix has written tools which allow us to leverage these strengths with our service, using OS X for image operations where it provides superior quality and performance.
What advantages? If you're running these as headless servers, then what advantages does OSX possibly provide over cheaper, more powerful Linux boxes using e.g. ImageMagick (ok, ok, not having massive remote code execution vulnerabilities is one of them).
s3 is awesome. Keep using it but put your own boxes in a colo with a direct connect to aws (not all colos offer this unfortunately). Your boxes can then g3 20+tb of ssd cache in front of your raw pb+ datasets in s3.
One of the earlier Imgur style hosts, ImageVenue, did this very successfully (they were extremely large in terms of traffic at their peak and for the time, until better options came along).
The founder, Vlad, used to rent out cheap dedicated boxes with about 500gb of bandwidth per box for $60 to $80 per month. He'd cycle upload machines - eg 123.imagevenue.com - and fill up the drives on them until no more space was available; when bandwidth was exhausted, that was that for the month. Typically image file downloads would decline on any given upload over time, so machine resources would free back up in terms of bandwidth and deleting images that weren't viewed after N amount of time.
How do you figure that? You can rent the exact same server as a dedicated server. The difference is, you have no capital outlay up front, you don't need to ship and rack it or replace broken parts and there is only a month-to-month commitment.
I've never had problems ordering custom hardware from my dedicated server providers. At worst, all I've had to do is pay a one-time fee for a particular component. SSDs have never been a problem. Neither has any Intel CPU.
It of course depends on your provider.
Rent vs buy depends a lot on the circumstances. Maybe if your requirements don't change and you don't upgrade your server hardware it's cheaper in the long run to buy. However, when I've kept a server for more than a year, I've always been able to negotiate a discount.
You didn't post your config, so I can't tell how exotic your requirements are.
Many people do. S3 is convenient though. It handles durability, replication, uptime, etc... and even with the insane markup on bandwidth many startups / companies can afford a $10k/mo bandwidth bill because it's cheaper than hiring some devops and a team to build out the appropriate infrastructure.
It depends on how you define AWS-like services. Lots of VPS providers cater to bandwidth-intensive applications and are hosted on cheap dedicated servers.
But you don't have to store and serve all the content from Amazon or your own platform. You can easily set up aggressive caching, in a network you control, backed by S3.
And you pay premium for premium bandwidth. You can't just assume that all your users will have a good experience if you buy hardware and bandwidth from the cheapest providers around.
Way cheaper. Amazon is a middleman for hardware. Even at smallest scales the cost of buying a server pays off within a year. In exchange you get convenience and the ability to scale up on demand without buying more hardware.
I'm sure buying the server pays off, but what about running and administering it?
What's the minimum commercially you'd spend to get cross-continent redundancy on hardware you manage in-house. Just the accounting cost of paying wages for technicians in two countries probably means you need to be a quite large company.
There are middle grounds, managed co-location say, but then you're not likely to save much over using AWS are you?
Even managed co-location is cheaper than AWS when you factor in the egress bandwidth charges at scale.
Another way to do it is to use dedicated servers. The datacenter will take care of repairs and remote hands functions and all you need is to manage the server from the OS level upwards. No need to have technicians in multiple countries, everything can be done remotely.
can you explain the math? I honestly don't have a working knoweldge of the inputs, but let's say i wanted the equivalent of ec2? How would I go about setting it up and the costs? If I wanted to serve a few million english speaking people my web application, how coud I calculate the price? Do I literally buy my own hardware, or I rent hardware at a dedicated rate? These are real questions btw, not rhetoric, it's hard to find a solid blog post or comparison of setting this up and the long term cost v convenience benefits of scaling this because almost everyone uses cloud providers, and by cloud providers I mean digital ocean, AWS, azure, rackspace or now google. Heroku (last I checked) sits on AWS as well and maybe even ngineyard does. actually pretty curious now if a few million people would be worth running your own gear, and if running that gear was lease v buy
The cost difference depends on how much your administration costs go up because you need to do things yourself, rather than through the AWS API. That's why it's hard to calculate.
We can and do imagine. We even calculate estimate values so we don't have to stay in the dark and reason without a solid basis.
I'd encourage you to find some traffic numbers provided by imgur and some S3 pricing to do a rough estimate. Maybe someone more knowledgable will pop in and improve on that. When we argue everyone involved shall be wiser after. That's how it works around here.
In fairness to imgur, they did start off as the user friendly image upload site when compared to others such as tinypic or imageshack. At one point I remember them being the good guys.
They seem to have spent their good will in exchange for crappy auto-playing sound ads, incessant mobile-app install prompts, non-obvious URL resolving rules, and browser hijacking navigation. I don't think this was done in bad spirit, they are a growing company with investors to report to. It seems like they forgot what made them popular in the first place and makes me wonder if user experience was more of a company principle if they'd be in this predicament now.
It makes total sense that reddit would want to not only improve the image content sharing experience but also acknowledge that imgur is indeed a competitor with it's now own thriving community. It has been for a while and now reddit is treating it as such.
In retrospect this whole thing looks as inevitable as Twitter pulling the rug out from it's third party developers.
That's funny, when the quality of imgur images and comments is similar to that of 9gag and reddit itself.
At least on the default subs of reddit you can find a handful of good comments if you only read the parents. If you go to the children, they all become obnoxious.
Searched this entire thread and no mention of DMCA or Safe Harbors. Linking to a 3rd party is good to avoid worrying about that sort of stuff. Not that I'm an advocate for illicit rehosting, but just commenting as an observer.
It gets briefly touched on at the very end of the article, but self-hosting may carry with it a whole lot of extra work to avoid getting a big bullseye painted on the company. I'm sure more than a few content creators - probably in the adult business - have their lawyers on speed dial. Will be interesting to see how this plays out.
Wouldn't this give Reddit more control though? If the files are hosted somewhere else they have to rely on that service to handle takedowns. It means they can still show up all over Reddit and to a lot of users come across like Reddit is hosting them; speaking from the stand point of your average user, not Reddit/HN user.
I would imagine Reddit wants to have control and be able to more quickly take down things versus waiting for moderators to automod or manually remove posts.
> no mention of DMCA or Safe Harbors. Linking to a 3rd party is good to avoid worrying about that sort of stuff
As an ex-isoHunter, I can tell you still need to worry about that kind of stuff, even if you're not hosting, linking to a massive amount of pirated content will get you sued quickly too.
Sure, you're not wrong on that at all. I follow that linking third party is not a guaranteed pass, but in the scope of infringement penalties the actual hosting is where the real penalty cash can add up from what I've observed. The massive scale of Reddit helps it claim - in my personal perspective - that infringement isn't its main business model, that infringement has been incidental as part of the greater operation. ISO sites probably couldn't make the same sort of claim, I'd guess.
When you're growing as fast as Reddit was, you don't change the recipe, you just keep cooking it. They already had the ingredients for exponential growth, so change in general just introduces unnecessary risks. They had no need for a larger exponent.
The outcome of that is:
-Alien Blue beat Reddit to mobile optimization of Reddit's own platform
-Imgur beat Reddit to sharing images on Reddit
-Reddit and Imgur now exist as pseudo-sister-sites with features that overlap on a fundamental level, and Reddit is cannibalizing its own equity in Imgur
Now that they can't just hire site reliability engineers and watch their graph go up like a volcano, their only play is to improve their product, but now they're running uphill.
I think it's generally correct to play it safe and maintain organic exponential growth if you have it, but when it comes to things as obvious as mobile optimization and image sharing, maybe it's ok for a company to come out of their shell and iterate on obvious stuff (even though they don't have to).
"In addition, the Reddit investment will finally formalize the already friendly relationship between the two sites, making them more symbiotic and maybe even more integrated in some way, though Schaaf declined to go into details as to what’s ahead for the two, only saying that there’s no promise of Imgur being Reddit’s “official” image host at this time."
The imgur hate in here is odd. It seems like people are just assuming the worst based on one critical comment thread that got turned into a techcrunch article. Which is understandable, I don't understand how they can offer a free unlimited image hosting site (and they've offered it for so long that, well, you can see the backlash they got when direct linking is taken away). Still, their management seems savvy enough to know that they would have to carefully manage that change.
There's at least two distinct types of imgur users, those who only use imgur as an image host and "imgurians." The huge usage numbers come from the former while the actual value (IMHO) is in the unpaid labor of the latter group (like most social media). That means imgur can piss off their freeloaders as long as they don't upset their community, but this is really no help at all because the community is far more critical than the freeloaders. Freeloaders don't care about imgur's community drama.
People who have negative opinions of things you clearly like often found those opinions in experiences you are unaware of. My opinion on Imgur involves eight years of context, remembering pre-Imgur Reddit as well as Quickmeme, watching Imgur rise and fall, observing the psychology of i.imgur.com leading to upvotes of Reddit, knowing a pretty religious Imgurian who goes to meetups, etc.
However, because I disagree with you, according to you I reacted to a TechCrunch article; there's no better way to get me running to share that opinion than by poisoning the thread with the assumption that naysayers are misinformed or oblivious.
Assume people are informed and you'll end up on the right side of disappointed when they aren't, instead of being embarrassed when they are.
I would very much like to be informed of those opinions, hence my post, although apparently not in a mild enough tone to avoid a scolding.
Regardless, I'm a daily user on a variety of platforms (mobile w/o adblock being one of them) so I am confused that I haven't encountered the highly annoying behaviors people are describing: direct image links being hijacked or super annoying browser-highjacking mobile ads (which I have run into in the past). If I had then I would be rightfully pissed as everyone else seems to be.
Even with the distinction, don't the imgurians feed off content posted on imgur with the intention of being linked to reddit? I think imgur relies on the freeloaders for content as well, if a whole bunch of people stop posting fresh content won't people go elsewhere?
It got really bad, to the point that now you click a link to see an image, and the page loads a bunch of thumbnails and JS before the image you wanted finally loads.
I don't know why reddit would want to take on the burden and cost of dealing with images. It might make it incrementally easier, but with something like RES the entire thing was seamless. Seems like a misplaced focus on a feature that doesn't bring that much value, and a lot more cost. I'll be curious to see how successful this ends up being. If they wanted to concentrate on making the site easier to use, they should have hired the people who made RES.
Mobile. They recently released an official app and the Imgur experience is terrible. Gifs (~%50% of the front page) take multiple clicks to play and are not pre-cached. By hosting their own images they can take control of the user experience and make their app much more pleasant to use.
Reddit basically needs an image hosting service to succeed, and Imgur is now at least as obnoxious as all the previous generation of hosts that lead to it being created in the first place
While I agree with Imgur being obnoxious and a far cry from their early days, they are not as awful as the previous de-facto image sharing site - whatever it was with the green frog as their mascot.
And I still stand by my earlier statement: Imgur has declined, but they have not yet stooped to the level of end-user abuse shack did. (Granted, hijacking direct image URLs is sleezy as hell.)
Imageshack made even uploads a chore. Sure, picking the image from your drive was easy - but then they made every attempt possible to force their inline branding into all inbound links.
Getting a hot-linkable image from shack uploads required extra effort. And they tried to trick you into using their quality-degraded downscaled versions everywhere. It was dreadful. I even remember couple of cases where after the upload there was no way of getting the image link out. At all. All you got was a 80x80 thumbnail and a link to their shitty pages where you could, MAYBE, view the image. (Which was, of course, downscaled and further compressed. The original was gone.)
So no, as far as I am concerned, Imgur has not yet reached the imageshack abusement park level.
The bigger issue is Imgur has been leveraging their monopoly on Reddit's image hosting to build a new social commentary system to replace Reddit. If Reddit didn't do something then maybe in five years Reddit will be dead and Imgur will be the front page of the internet.
I think you're mistaking value to redditors with value to reddit. Clearly the benefit to the average redditor is minimal at best. But considering imgur is creating its own communities at this point, and linkjacking direct images to point to ad-serving pages on mobile, imgur is arguably increasingly a direct competitor to reddit. By serving images directly through reddit, reddit can increase the time you spend there, increasing their ad revenue.
Reddit needs to grow its revenue to be sustainable.
It looks to me as if all recent changes work towards the goal of making reddit a mainstream site platable to the average customer who does not know or care about adblock and innovative marketing techniques.
RES is for the power user who does not generate any revenue.
It won't be very long before we need a new reddit for power users where we can move on to with our guns, cocaine and hookers.
Are they going to host NSFW images also? I wonder how long the darker side of Reddit is going to last in that case. Seems like they're asking for a whole slew of liability issues.
Not any more liability than imgur has. Reddit already removes and ban tons of bad stuff when it's reported to them, even though they host anything.
I'd be more concerned about copyright. Most of the stuff posted on reddit already violates copyright to some degree (e.g. /r/gifs which is entirely people reuploading segments of youtube videos without the consent of the creators.)
Long story short, imgur is no longer just an image host - it is an image-sharing site to compete with reddit's image-based subreddits. Providing significant traffic to it is likely slowly bleeding reddit's image-based communities dry.
Additionally, having to upload images to a different website which isn't linked from anywhere on reddit, needing an entirely different account to manage them, is just confusing. Reddit isn't really a pure link-sharing website, and original/remixed content is important to its users - so managing that should probably be something integrated into the site.
It's basically their way to control the content that gets posted to the platform; I'd be surprised if a lot of subreddits don't get shut down if they switch to using it rather than imgur or reddpics.
It was inevitable. Not because of imgur going bad (did they? They did take some questionable moves regarding direct image links, but can't blame them considering volume). It's because of ye olde adage here on HN. If you your business relies on someone else, be prepared for their moves (to not use harsher words). Large volume of popular reddit-submitted content is imgur based. They have to get (back) that under control. Smarter move would be to outright buy or merge with imgur, considering their content and user base, but that probably have been considered.
I think it'll be the same when StackOverflow introduced snippers and everyone thought JSFiddle would fade away because of it... In reality there was zero impact on the traffic from SO.
The announcement Reddit thread contained a Reddit employee mentioning that they already have a cache of the majority of Imgur images because they've been using it to create thumbnails Reddit displays alongside the headlines.
Apparently they've been storing the full size images too and not throwing it away after creating thumbnails (wise move).
It could - SomethingAwful basically did that when ImageShack got annoying. They mirrored all the linked images to their own servers, and the community came up with a new host - WaffleImages
My point was supplying an S3 bucket as a service, and putting lipstick on it to make it look like a website isn't valuable in the long term, on its own.
All we want is an easy and reliable image hoster. You upload an image, they host it, you can link it, fin.
Perfect plan!
Except for the plot hole of not generating any money this way. That's where the suits creep in. First they finance you to grow and grow quickly you must. Imgur did it. Then you experiment with some methods of generating ad views or other revenue. People realize they hit on a gold mine and business starts to grow like cancer. Then there are some minor changes to optimize revenue. Then some founders start to cash out and jump the ship. Then the suits, loudmouths and ginas slowly but surely take over the company and due process replaces the dictatorship of the personal union of owner and leader. There's guitars and barbecue as the corporate drones dance around the firepit of burning money as they hurry to please the gods of corporate capitalism. A spiral is forming like a siphon circling around itself pulling everything in like a black hole. And it's great.
If you listen carefully in the storm of excitement you can hear a faint voice who still remebers the core of the business: Provide the service and don't fuck with the customer.
Or as some politicians said: You can fuck over some of your customers all the time and you can fuck over all of your customers for some time. Both is a great business plan. But you cannot fuck over all of your customers all of the time. Especially not if you don't have a stranglehold on their necks like a dictator or monopoly has.
The imgur we have today deserves to die.
It may redeem itself by remembering its roots and not wanting to become more than it is. That would be great!
One thing that is more important over the whole debacle is to watch reddit closely and be ready to jump ship quickly as they stumble deeper into the corporate trap. Having a plan B "just in case" for everything important will cost you resources but it pays out for itself in the long run.
>If you listen carefully in the storm of excitement you can hear a faint voice who still remebers the core of the business: Provide the service and don't fuck with the customer.
The people looking at images for free are NOT THE CUSTOMER.
Yep. Imgur realized that being solely a user-friendly image host wasn't much of a money maker, so they started gradually turning into the Photobucket style messes that it was originally aiming to destroy. Now they run their own community/discussion site and try to show it down the throat of anyone who lands there trying to look at a picture. It's not been good for the user experience of anyone who was just there for one image. And it's also in pretty direct competition with reddit's popular non-text subreddits.
I really can't fault reddit for taking this step. They're the ones who have the ad views on pages linking to (or embedding) these images, they may as well streamline things and manage the uploads/hosting in house.
I agree that the user experience overall is just plain shitty on imgur right now.
The home page itself is riddled with "viral images". Why would I use imgur like a *chan site? That need is already filled and done much better by other sites.
They raised millions of dollars of VC funding. There certainly are ways to raise money to grow your business slowly and under terms that you're in better control of (small business loans from traditional banks are a great example), but when you agree to take VC money you do it with the intent that you'll grow, baby, grow.
However, when the barrier to entry for providing a service is low you have to be _very_ careful about making that money by negatively impacting the user experience.
If you make money, that's fine. If you make money by taking advantage of users, you can't really be surprised when a competitor pops up and users leave.
In some fields the winner takes it all. Either you win or you die.
Also money is like a drug. What's wrong with taking a little cocaine in the morning and a little heroin in the evening? Nothing, except there are very few people who can sustain that over an extended period of time. You also wouldn't know about them because they neither become very rich nor very famous. ("Hey look there is the most average guy in the whole country who has no exceptional qualities.") The world belongs to the candles who burn from both ends.
But 90% if not more, of the good content comes form Reddit. If Reddit stops using Imgur, then it will turn into 9GAG, and all the users will wonder why all the content is shitter than it's ever been, and many will leave.
To be clear, Stack Exchange buys image hosting from Imgur; images are hosted on a separate domain and don't get any of the cruft folks are complaining about here. This relationship has been in place for years and has been mostly pain-free for a involved.
Wow that sounds strange coming from StackExchange. It seems hard to believe imgur would have a cheaper way to host images than what SE could get, and it's not like an image upload page is that difficult right? I suppose it's one less thing to deal with does it make that much sense? (Honest question, not trying to "weekend project" imgur.)
Images aren't exactly a core requirement; if someone else can handle that without a significant down-side, then why not free up people to work on other things?
Plus countless forums and community sites around the internet.
And it's not like redditors will switch away from imgur all at once, it's going to be a long process..
I'm surprised one of the big companies (Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Amazon), or one of the world's governments doesn't start up a simple image hosting site with direct linking, and foot the bill in exchange for tracking everyone, and having more of the world under their umbrella, visiting daily.
I'm assuming those companies also have the infrastructure to reduce bandwidth expenses, and they could accept the loss in the short term, to have a well established service and community for when imaging hosting becomes more profitable in the future.
A simple image hosting service is relatively quick to develop, and it's almost guaranteed to be one of the most used services on the internet. Why are these companies wasting hundreds of millions of dollars on all sorts of failed projects, when they could easily win this market?
Hosting an image site means you're responsible for its content. That means you need to have some policy for dealing with all the copyright infringement, child porn, racial hatred, leaked celebrity nudes, shock images, etc. It's a potential lightning rod for brand damage.
Note that all of Facebook, Google, Microsoft, & Amazon already allow you to host your own photos but aren't used in this way.
(Everyone has more or less given up on copyright enforcement for images, possibly because there's no central enforcement mafia, but that doesn't mean it's not still the law)
I think this is a good move. Imgur got used only because it was convenient and that it didn't have any stuff brewing around the service. That it was created by a redditor probably also helped. Now it is a service with a lot of stuff going on around it, and a competitor to Reddit in a sense, being its own community oriented around discussing trending topics or creating memes.
Since Reddit has their own service for this now, hopefully they can use their revenue to keep it clean and at least reasonably ad free and focused on its simple mission. If that can happen, I think this is a step forward from what Imgur has become. Not anything bad per se if you want a different community, but not optimal if you already are on one and just want to view the pictures.
No matter where your personal beliefs put you on the subject, Reddit has been taking a lot more interest in the quality and nature of its content lately. This means subreddit bans, shadow bans, and similar activity. I wonder if this will see an increase once Reddit has complete control and monitoring over its Image hosting. It also opens them up to DMCA and other complaints.
From an engineering perspective Reddit had frequent crashes and severe lag for years. They've improved a lot in the past two, and seeing them confident enough to launch a service like this says something about their progress in that regard. However I could see it be a complete flop as well. Time will tell.
Viewing images on reddit has always been broken. Without RES (Reddit Enhancement Suite) the UX on the site is horrendous. And even with RES, images not hosted on imgur wouldn't work most of the time.
It was so bad I took on myself to aggregate images from /r/funny and put them in a mobile friendly and fast website. http://www.pixpit.com
unfortunately every time I tried to talk about it on reddit, they deleted it.
I use reddit more-or-less as a blog (https://dredmorbius.reddit.com). What I particularly like is the extended community, Markdown, mod tools, Wiki (though it's underpowered), search (though it's posts-only, no comments), and, through RES, some nice features for composing, and viewing images in posts.
But that last applies to a very small subset of readers. And as I make a fair bit of use of images (to illustrate and document points in my essays), that's a considerable pain point.
Ello, whilst lacking many other features, and having broken Markdown (notably: no blockquote support), does have phenomenal image support.
Other options are fairly thin, though Medium might be worth another look.
I posted a version of this comment seven years ago in the original reddit launch thread for imgur: I have server resources and happy to host any reasonable attempts to make a quality image host, that have a (to me) valid business plan.
> I saw that multiple times here on HN now that people misuse the term. It's a pity, the original idea is something to be aware of, and diluting what dark pattern means hinders that awareness.
Sorry long post TL/DR Fighting people on word definitions is frustrating and words change meaning when one aspect gets popular.
I have fought this war over and over again over the following words:
Troll - Everything is a troll now. It use to be just someone that tried to ruin other people's fun. Now if anything that makes anyone laugh is a troll.
Hacker - This site is case in point. Hacker was a person who would make inventions with pieces that didn't normally get take apart and put back together into something different then its original intent. Then it became criminals. Now it's start up coverage websites were if you use terms of Hackers of long gone days (i.e. M$) you get down voted for being unprofessional. :)
Humanism - Means Atheist? Humanism was founded by the leaders of the Renaissance and the Reformation Movement Leaders would self-identify as Humanist. I went on a 5 day Reddit AMA with the President of the American Humanist Society (Secular Humanist) saying they can't hijack the word and change its meaning.
Humanism and related terms are frequently applied to modern doctrines and techniques that are based on the centrality of human experience. In the 20th century, the pragmatic humanism of Ferdinand C.S. Schiller, the Christian humanism of Jacques Maritain, and the movement known as secular humanism, though differing from each other significantly in content, all show this anthropocentric emphasis. http://humanism.ws/featured/a-history-of-humanism-robert-gru...
Well maybe this is the wrong place for actual communication and talking. I really see "Hacker" News as less hacker and more Start Ups trying to look professional.
Trolling, in its original Usenet definition, was still more subtle than that: it was making a provocative posting solely to stir up responses. The troll probably didn't agree with the sentiment they were posting, they were just doing it to cause trouble.
"The old definition of a Troll is one who posts to generate the maximum number of follow ups. These are a very minor irritation, and can be considered to be advantageous to newsgroups."
Hacker still gets me. The dilution of the term to simply mean "programmer" or perhaps more specifically "startup programmer in his 20s who crushes it" causes a little pain in my side every time.
I have two[0] separate buckets in my head under the same key "hacker" - one for actual hackers, per old meaning, and the other for "just a programmer" & "a random startup person".
Sometimes this confusion actually gets beneficial for the old-word-meaning crowd - you can get +10 to marketing of your hackerspace on startup events based solely on the tern "hacker" meaning something else than the crowd there think it means :).
[0] - actually three, if you count "hacker as a criminal" thing
I want to make a blog series about these words. Mansplaining? Used to mean condescending entitled douchebag. Now it's anytime a man says something I don't like. Feminism? Putting an end to sexism. Or anytime a woman say something I don't like.
