8 ms·

How Imgur Became a Megacommunity

54 points by dsr12 11y ago

flashman 11y ago
> It bans nudity, porn, and hate speech Ha! Imgur is awash with pornography. They could automatically remove a large amount of nudity and porn by looking at the contents of /r/nsfw. As a second gate, they could use Microsoft's image classification service, which has a 'racy' flag. Imgur is lucky that there aren't powerful rightsholder bodies for images the way there are for music and video. That's the only way the massive copyright infringement happening there every day goes unchallenged. Sure, they have DMCA safe harbor, but so did many other video and music startups who ended up slapped with lawsuits.
- Palomides 11y ago
  I understand that the community part bans those things; when you upload an image, you choose whether or not to submit it to the imgur community thing
  - Kiro 11y ago
    How does that work exactly? I'm on Imgur daily and never heard of such a thing. On the other hand I've never understood what "usersub" is either.
    - MatthaeusHarris 11y ago
      Browse "User Submitted" by "Newest First" and you'll see the raw firehose of stuff people are submitting to the main gallery. If you're especially brave, do this at work.
      - scholia 11y ago
        That's the default view at imgur.com, isn't it? I hit that page a couple of times a month and haven't even seen any porn....
      - Kiro 11y ago
        Aren't all images on Imgur user submitted? Who else would upload stuff?
        TheCartographer 11y ago
        Images from the front page of reddit are autopromoted to the front page of imgur. One of the reason I like imgur: it's Reddit without the Reddit UI or redditors.
        milkey_mouse 11y ago
        One of the reasons I like Reddit: It's Imgur without the Imgur UI or "imgurians".
        TheCartographer 11y ago
        Fair enough. If Reddit is what works for you then rock it. Regarding the imgur community, I personally think they are a little too tryhard and silly, myself. But I don't go there for the community. All I want are the best of the funny, amusing and interesting images the Internet can generate, served up in a never ending stream. After a long day of reading, coding, emailing, and everything else, the last thing I want to do is navigate yet another wall of grey on white text. Imgur is pure brain candy in that sense. No thinking, no real discussion, no need to look at comments or interact with the users. Just flip awww, kitty flip hey boobs flip neat!
      - mrweasel 11y ago
        > If you're especially brave, do this at work. People keep saying that, but have you actually tried it? I feel pretty confident that I could browse user submitted, newest first and mature filter off at work and the biggest problem would be "browsing Imgur at work". There's practically no nudity or other offensive stuff. It's actually quit impressive.
- baldfat 11y ago
  Pictures are currently being policed by the right holders but I think that there isn't a big why would right holders really care unlike Music and Movies/TV Shows have a strong financial argument. Pictures seem to be the opposite effect with individual copyright holders caring about if their pictures are stolen and big media only caring if they are liable or not.
- empath75 11y ago
  Yeah, imgur's primary raison d'etre was hosting porn from nsfw subreddits -- including the worst of the worst like jailbait and creepshots.
- SwellJoe 11y ago
  And, while "hate speech" is in the eye of the beholder, I've stumbled on far more misogyny, racism, and general assholery than I'm particularly comfortable with on imgur--particularly when it comes to sharing images hosted on imgur with friends on facebook (it now redirects links from facebook to the community discussion page for an image, if there is one). It may or may not be worse than reddit in that regard, as reddit varies wildly based on the moderation policies and practices of the subreddits. imgur seems to have no "safe space"...you can stumble on a shitshow at any moment, and a seemingly normal conversation can go shitshaped at any time.
seanalltogether 11y ago
I still remember how cautiously negative[1] I was toward the creator in his initial unveiling on reddit many years ago. Contracting at photobucket and seeing the state of media hosting at the time made me very pessimistic of the sector. I'm happy they've grown as large as they have since that moment and broken away from what other image hosting services were doing. 1. https://www.reddit.com/r/reddit.com/comments/7zlyd/my_gift_to_reddit_i_created_an_image_hosting/c07ujci https://www.reddit.com/r/reddit.com/comments/7zlyd/my_gift_t...
- jcromartie 11y ago
  I remember that thread. I actually think they took my advice to heart.
- freehunter 11y ago
  On the other hand, they seem to be going down the road of what other image hosting sites have done in the past. Large, intrusive ads. Most recently, that cat that pops up on mobile that covers the content with a large paw encouraging you to swipe to see the next picture. Focusing on building a community instead of focusing on image hosting. Building value-add stuff like their meme generator while continuing to avoid the actual difficult problems. Like having constant infrastructure issues that keeps their site inaccessible for hours at a time more often than they should be. I appreciate that it's difficult (costly) to do image hosting, and it's nice that they accept hotlinking and other activities that produce no revenue for them, but the Imgur that we have today is a far cry from the Imgur that was promised seven years ago.
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  - SwellJoe 11y ago
    I noticed they've made it much harder to hot link, now. I tried to post a direct link to an image on facebook, and no matter what link I used, once clicked it is redirected to the "community" link where discussion and stuff is happening (and the "community" at imgur is...well, they're fucking morons and I'd be embarrassed to post anything to my friends that included that shitshow of racism, drunk-uncle-isms, and misogyny). So, I ended up "uploading" the image to my own imgur account without sharing to the front page, or whatever, and then shared the direct link. But, that hassle is the kind of thing that might make me consider other image sharing options. I have enjoyed using imgur for a long time, and I've generally trusted the fellow running it had good intentions. But, if them making the cash register ring is going to cause me to accidentally share a link to a cesspool of stupid comments, I'm gonna start being real cautious about using imgur for anything. We've all gotta make a living, but I'm not comfortable with that kind of thing.
dipnuggetron 11y ago
How is that Ohanian et al (or whoever was running the Reddit ship around Imgur's launch) weren't browbeaten by Conde Nast for letting another startup parasitically use it as a host organism to sucessfully launch and scale? At some point in the future Imgur could be more valuable than Reddit.
- simonw 11y ago
  I get the impression that back then, nobody at Conde Nast really cared what those "weird reddit guys" were doing. The team was mostly just struggling just to keep the lights on.
  - moreisee 11y ago
    Yep, if I remember correctly, Imgur also started before the 'Digg Exodus', so reddit wasn't the biggest kid on the block yet.
  - deleted 11y ago
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- calbear81 11y ago
  During the Yishan/Ellen saga, I had wondered whether or not they would shortlist Alan Schaaf for the CEO job given how well Imgur had done and the symbiotic nature between the two companies.
- zem 11y ago
  surely imgur is an epiphyte at worst (and a symbiont at best) rather than a parasite. its existence didn't cost reddit anything (other than perhaps an opportunity to do it themselves, which they could have at any time they wanted, and did not).
- flashman 11y ago
  Before Imgur, it was hit-and-miss as to whether an image would load, either because the Imageshack etc would take it down for bandwidth reasons, or the host would get crushed under traffic load. Think about how many major subreddits exist because Imgur provides free, reliable hosting. Imgur allowed Reddit to scale its audience massively in quick, easy-to-digest content areas... and Imgur did that for Reddit for free. Can you imagine how much gratitude that would engender?
e40 11y ago
My 15 yr old spends lots of time on imgur. He gets news from it, as well as humor and gamer stuff, much like the previous generation got news from The Daily Show, though the imgur news is very much more watered down than what one would get from The Daily Show. He often has a warped sense of what's going on in the world, but he often knows stuff before I do (because it hasn't percolated up on HN or reddit).
CaptSpify 11y ago
> At first, the service took off not because it did a lot, but because it did so little. "Nobody really wants to put images up on the Internet," he explains. "What you actually want to do is share it with somebody. So I stripped out everything that other image hosts even had, because when you just get to the point of sharing, what's really important is speed." > "I had this insight—that ended up being wrong, by the way—which was, 'This content's so good, let's just have it stand on its own,'" he remembers. "'I'm not even going to put titles or descriptions or anything on this stuff.' Turns out that's actually a dumb idea, because people need context." Whats funny to me, is that I stopped liking imgur when when added the community/context stuff. I liked it when it was small and simple. It's gotten so bloated that it's become a pain to use. It seems like nobody can have a "community-less" image sharing site.
- mrweasel 11y ago
  I really dislike the community part of Imgur as well, mostly because the people seem weird and childish, but also because it fails to add any value. Attempting to add context is a good idea, but Imgur fails at that. Images on Imgur isn't tagged or titled right, which makes search completely useless. If you see an image, and want to find it, even later that same day, you can pretty much forget about it. The community part of Imgur might even make the problem worse, because the users just stay within the confines of Imgur, meaning they don't feel the need for tagging, good titles and search. Take this example: http://imgur.com/gallery/X4R7y http://imgur.com/gallery/X4R7y the title is "useful for arguments", except it's just a bunch of jumbled gif, there are no useful tags, no discover-ability or search-ability. The community part shows up, because regardless of the original intent, sites do need to make money. There are no real way for sites like Imgur to make money, other than attempting to sell ads. Having a community helps sell those ads.
  - DanBC 11y ago
    > I really dislike the community part of Imgur as well, mostly because the people seem weird and childish, but also because it fails to add any value. Like /r9k/ it had a great three months, and then everyone found it.
johansch 11y ago
My beef with Imgur is that it was essentially announced as a non-spammy/crappy no-nonsense image host compared to the alternatives of the day: https://web.archive.org/web/20090227183112/http://www.reddit.com/r/reddit.com/comments/7zlyd/my_gift_to_reddit_i_created_an_image_hosting/ https://web.archive.org/web/20090227183112/http://www.reddit...? In 2009 Imgur was clean, neat and fast. Everyone sane questioned (including in that announcement thread) how that could possibly stay true in the long run. The founder just kept saying "we'll try to solve it if it comes to that", refusing to go into details or presenting anything resembling a plan. Based on this "commitment" which I would say was either naive or not truthful, the Reddit userbase propelled Imgur to its current position. Today Imgur looks like this: https://i.imgsafe.org/102b850.png https://i.imgsafe.org/102b850.png (I picked the top link from Reddit 3 minutes ago. Please excuse the Swedish language ads - but I think you get the picture without being able to read the language.)
- cdr 11y ago
  If there's an image host as clean, neat, and fast as imgur I'm not aware of it. You don't have to interact with the "community" part of it ever if you don't want to. When using it to view images on reddit, RES loads images inline and you never see imgur at all. The only time I see the site is when uploading images, and that's extremely slick and fast.
  - johansch 11y ago
    I just found imgsafe.org because I didn't want to use imgur to show how much imgur sucks now compared to 7 years ago. :) Anyway, at the moment imgsafe.org seems to beat imgur on the qualities you listed.
  - shostack 11y ago
    I see the site a lot more frequently on AlienBlue where it seems to default/redirect to the Standard view vs. Optimized. Not sure if this is intentional on their part to drive ad views from tablet/mobile that they aren't able to monetize in the Optimized view, or if people are just aren't posting direct image links, but it sure is annoying. And so is the dropdown for promoting their app, which is clearly trying to funnel Reddit and other traffic into their own social ecosystem.

54 points by dsr12 11y ago

> It bans nudity, porn, and hate speech Ha! Imgur is awash with pornography. They could automatically remove a large amount of nudity and porn by looking at the contents of /r/nsfw. As a second gate, they could use Microsoft's image classification service, which has a 'racy' flag. Imgur is lucky that there aren't powerful rightsholder bodies for images the way there are for music and video. That's the only way the massive copyright infringement happening there every day goes unchallenged. Sure, they have DMCA safe harbor, but so did many other video and music startups who ended up slapped with lawsuits.

Palomides 11y ago
I understand that the community part bans those things; when you upload an image, you choose whether or not to submit it to the imgur community thing
- Kiro 11y ago
  How does that work exactly? I'm on Imgur daily and never heard of such a thing. On the other hand I've never understood what "usersub" is either.
  - MatthaeusHarris 11y ago
    Browse "User Submitted" by "Newest First" and you'll see the raw firehose of stuff people are submitting to the main gallery. If you're especially brave, do this at work.
    - scholia 11y ago
      That's the default view at imgur.com, isn't it? I hit that page a couple of times a month and haven't even seen any porn....
    - Kiro 11y ago
      Aren't all images on Imgur user submitted? Who else would upload stuff?
      - TheCartographer 11y ago
        Images from the front page of reddit are autopromoted to the front page of imgur. One of the reason I like imgur: it's Reddit without the Reddit UI or redditors.
        milkey_mouse 11y ago
        One of the reasons I like Reddit: It's Imgur without the Imgur UI or "imgurians".
        TheCartographer 11y ago
        Fair enough. If Reddit is what works for you then rock it. Regarding the imgur community, I personally think they are a little too tryhard and silly, myself. But I don't go there for the community. All I want are the best of the funny, amusing and interesting images the Internet can generate, served up in a never ending stream. After a long day of reading, coding, emailing, and everything else, the last thing I want to do is navigate yet another wall of grey on white text. Imgur is pure brain candy in that sense. No thinking, no real discussion, no need to look at comments or interact with the users. Just flip awww, kitty flip hey boobs flip neat!
    - mrweasel 11y ago
      > If you're especially brave, do this at work. People keep saying that, but have you actually tried it? I feel pretty confident that I could browse user submitted, newest first and mature filter off at work and the biggest problem would be "browsing Imgur at work". There's practically no nudity or other offensive stuff. It's actually quit impressive.
baldfat 11y ago
Pictures are currently being policed by the right holders but I think that there isn't a big why would right holders really care unlike Music and Movies/TV Shows have a strong financial argument. Pictures seem to be the opposite effect with individual copyright holders caring about if their pictures are stolen and big media only caring if they are liable or not.
empath75 11y ago
Yeah, imgur's primary raison d'etre was hosting porn from nsfw subreddits -- including the worst of the worst like jailbait and creepshots.
SwellJoe 11y ago
And, while "hate speech" is in the eye of the beholder, I've stumbled on far more misogyny, racism, and general assholery than I'm particularly comfortable with on imgur--particularly when it comes to sharing images hosted on imgur with friends on facebook (it now redirects links from facebook to the community discussion page for an image, if there is one). It may or may not be worse than reddit in that regard, as reddit varies wildly based on the moderation policies and practices of the subreddits. imgur seems to have no "safe space"...you can stumble on a shitshow at any moment, and a seemingly normal conversation can go shitshaped at any time.

seanalltogether 11y ago

I still remember how cautiously negative[1] I was toward the creator in his initial unveiling on reddit many years ago. Contracting at photobucket and seeing the state of media hosting at the time made me very pessimistic of the sector. I'm happy they've grown as large as they have since that moment and broken away from what other image hosting services were doing. 1. https://www.reddit.com/r/reddit.com/comments/7zlyd/my_gift_to_reddit_i_created_an_image_hosting/c07ujci https://www.reddit.com/r/reddit.com/comments/7zlyd/my_gift_t...

jcromartie 11y ago
I remember that thread. I actually think they took my advice to heart.
freehunter 11y ago
On the other hand, they seem to be going down the road of what other image hosting sites have done in the past. Large, intrusive ads. Most recently, that cat that pops up on mobile that covers the content with a large paw encouraging you to swipe to see the next picture. Focusing on building a community instead of focusing on image hosting. Building value-add stuff like their meme generator while continuing to avoid the actual difficult problems. Like having constant infrastructure issues that keeps their site inaccessible for hours at a time more often than they should be. I appreciate that it's difficult (costly) to do image hosting, and it's nice that they accept hotlinking and other activities that produce no revenue for them, but the Imgur that we have today is a far cry from the Imgur that was promised seven years ago.
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- SwellJoe 11y ago
  I noticed they've made it much harder to hot link, now. I tried to post a direct link to an image on facebook, and no matter what link I used, once clicked it is redirected to the "community" link where discussion and stuff is happening (and the "community" at imgur is...well, they're fucking morons and I'd be embarrassed to post anything to my friends that included that shitshow of racism, drunk-uncle-isms, and misogyny). So, I ended up "uploading" the image to my own imgur account without sharing to the front page, or whatever, and then shared the direct link. But, that hassle is the kind of thing that might make me consider other image sharing options. I have enjoyed using imgur for a long time, and I've generally trusted the fellow running it had good intentions. But, if them making the cash register ring is going to cause me to accidentally share a link to a cesspool of stupid comments, I'm gonna start being real cautious about using imgur for anything. We've all gotta make a living, but I'm not comfortable with that kind of thing.

dipnuggetron 11y ago

How is that Ohanian et al (or whoever was running the Reddit ship around Imgur's launch) weren't browbeaten by Conde Nast for letting another startup parasitically use it as a host organism to sucessfully launch and scale? At some point in the future Imgur could be more valuable than Reddit.

simonw 11y ago
I get the impression that back then, nobody at Conde Nast really cared what those "weird reddit guys" were doing. The team was mostly just struggling just to keep the lights on.
- moreisee 11y ago
  Yep, if I remember correctly, Imgur also started before the 'Digg Exodus', so reddit wasn't the biggest kid on the block yet.
- deleted 11y ago
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calbear81 11y ago
During the Yishan/Ellen saga, I had wondered whether or not they would shortlist Alan Schaaf for the CEO job given how well Imgur had done and the symbiotic nature between the two companies.
zem 11y ago
surely imgur is an epiphyte at worst (and a symbiont at best) rather than a parasite. its existence didn't cost reddit anything (other than perhaps an opportunity to do it themselves, which they could have at any time they wanted, and did not).
flashman 11y ago
Before Imgur, it was hit-and-miss as to whether an image would load, either because the Imageshack etc would take it down for bandwidth reasons, or the host would get crushed under traffic load. Think about how many major subreddits exist because Imgur provides free, reliable hosting. Imgur allowed Reddit to scale its audience massively in quick, easy-to-digest content areas... and Imgur did that for Reddit for free. Can you imagine how much gratitude that would engender?

e40 11y ago

My 15 yr old spends lots of time on imgur. He gets news from it, as well as humor and gamer stuff, much like the previous generation got news from The Daily Show, though the imgur news is very much more watered down than what one would get from The Daily Show. He often has a warped sense of what's going on in the world, but he often knows stuff before I do (because it hasn't percolated up on HN or reddit).

CaptSpify 11y ago

> At first, the service took off not because it did a lot, but because it did so little. "Nobody really wants to put images up on the Internet," he explains. "What you actually want to do is share it with somebody. So I stripped out everything that other image hosts even had, because when you just get to the point of sharing, what's really important is speed." > "I had this insight—that ended up being wrong, by the way—which was, 'This content's so good, let's just have it stand on its own,'" he remembers. "'I'm not even going to put titles or descriptions or anything on this stuff.' Turns out that's actually a dumb idea, because people need context." Whats funny to me, is that I stopped liking imgur when when added the community/context stuff. I liked it when it was small and simple. It's gotten so bloated that it's become a pain to use. It seems like nobody can have a "community-less" image sharing site.

mrweasel 11y ago
I really dislike the community part of Imgur as well, mostly because the people seem weird and childish, but also because it fails to add any value. Attempting to add context is a good idea, but Imgur fails at that. Images on Imgur isn't tagged or titled right, which makes search completely useless. If you see an image, and want to find it, even later that same day, you can pretty much forget about it. The community part of Imgur might even make the problem worse, because the users just stay within the confines of Imgur, meaning they don't feel the need for tagging, good titles and search. Take this example: http://imgur.com/gallery/X4R7y http://imgur.com/gallery/X4R7y the title is "useful for arguments", except it's just a bunch of jumbled gif, there are no useful tags, no discover-ability or search-ability. The community part shows up, because regardless of the original intent, sites do need to make money. There are no real way for sites like Imgur to make money, other than attempting to sell ads. Having a community helps sell those ads.
- DanBC 11y ago
  > I really dislike the community part of Imgur as well, mostly because the people seem weird and childish, but also because it fails to add any value. Like /r9k/ it had a great three months, and then everyone found it.

johansch 11y ago

My beef with Imgur is that it was essentially announced as a non-spammy/crappy no-nonsense image host compared to the alternatives of the day: https://web.archive.org/web/20090227183112/http://www.reddit.com/r/reddit.com/comments/7zlyd/my_gift_to_reddit_i_created_an_image_hosting/ https://web.archive.org/web/20090227183112/http://www.reddit...? In 2009 Imgur was clean, neat and fast. Everyone sane questioned (including in that announcement thread) how that could possibly stay true in the long run. The founder just kept saying "we'll try to solve it if it comes to that", refusing to go into details or presenting anything resembling a plan. Based on this "commitment" which I would say was either naive or not truthful, the Reddit userbase propelled Imgur to its current position. Today Imgur looks like this: https://i.imgsafe.org/102b850.png https://i.imgsafe.org/102b850.png (I picked the top link from Reddit 3 minutes ago. Please excuse the Swedish language ads - but I think you get the picture without being able to read the language.)

cdr 11y ago
If there's an image host as clean, neat, and fast as imgur I'm not aware of it. You don't have to interact with the "community" part of it ever if you don't want to. When using it to view images on reddit, RES loads images inline and you never see imgur at all. The only time I see the site is when uploading images, and that's extremely slick and fast.
- johansch 11y ago
  I just found imgsafe.org because I didn't want to use imgur to show how much imgur sucks now compared to 7 years ago. :) Anyway, at the moment imgsafe.org seems to beat imgur on the qualities you listed.
- shostack 11y ago
  I see the site a lot more frequently on AlienBlue where it seems to default/redirect to the Standard view vs. Optimized. Not sure if this is intentional on their part to drive ad views from tablet/mobile that they aren't able to monetize in the Optimized view, or if people are just aren't posting direct image links, but it sure is annoying. And so is the dropdown for promoting their app, which is clearly trying to funnel Reddit and other traffic into their own social ecosystem.