28 ms·

Reddit launches image uploads, ditching alliance with Imgur

501 points by coloneltcb 10y ago

Dramatize 10y ago
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.
- static_noise 10y ago
  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.
  - tlrobinson 10y ago
    This seems like a common pattern 1. Realize you need to make a lot more money (to meet investor expectations, pay for the fat the company has accumulated, etc) 2. Panic 3. Apply dark patterns (http://darkpatterns.org/ http://darkpatterns.org/) 4. Something better comes along and eats your lunch 5. Repeat. It's sad because imgur was originally created as the "something better".
    - sotojuan 10y ago
      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.
      - static_noise 10y ago
        Dear lamb, we had a great time but now I have to eat.
      - MasterScrat 10y ago
        These are all good points but I have a strong feeling of déjà-vu with another thread in these comments...
  - siegecraft 10y ago
    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).
  - ashitlerferad 10y ago
    SourceForge got bought by new folks who reversed all the misleading ads and bundling stuff: https://sourceforge.net/blog/sourceforge-acquisition-and-future-plans/ https://sourceforge.net/blog/sourceforge-acquisition-and-fut...
    - metamet 10y ago
      This is good, but I wonder how hard it will be to turn that negative momentum around.
kinkdr 10y ago
Bad news for Imgur...
- wlesieutre 10y ago
  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. One hopes Imgur could see this coming.
  - yarou 10y ago
    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.
  - goalieca 10y ago
    Question. What's wrong with making just a little bit of money?? (which is presumably still more than i will ever see!)
    - sethhochberg 10y ago
      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.
    - static_noise 10y ago
alttab 10y ago
Turns out a S3 bucket in itself isn't a website.
- shawn-butler 10y ago
  Fairly easy to serve a static website from a S3 bucket... http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonS3/latest/dev/HowDoIWebsiteConfiguration.html http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonS3/latest/dev/HowDoIWebsite...
  - alttab 10y ago
    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.
kordless 10y ago
Maybe I'll turn out to be right after all.
pfarnsworth 10y ago
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.
- fooey 10y ago
  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
  - Dobbs 10y ago
    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.
  - bostik 10y ago
    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.
    - rplnt 10y ago
      Do you mean imageshack? It's exactly like that. Though imageshack's biggest crime was delete everything (maybe except stuff from paid accounts) at one point in time.
      - bostik 10y ago
        Yup, that was it. Thanks for the name reminder. 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.
zitterbewegung 10y ago
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.
- EpicEng 10y ago
  >imgur is doing dark patterns Would you mind explaining that to me? I've never heard the term. Edit: Nvm, sorry; easy to google.
  - funkyy 10y ago
    For everyone else wanting to save Google's bandwidth bill: "Dark Patterns are User Interfaces that are designed to trick people."
- Others 10y ago
  What dark patterns are they implementing?
  - ChrisGranger 10y ago
    I'd guess they're referring to the way Imgur puts sponsored content in among the images now, looking almost like any other user-uploaded post. Edit: evidently, direct image links are serving ads on mobile. I haven't tried it to confirm this myself.
  - finnn 10y ago
    "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
    - dopamean 10y ago
      Weird. I've never experienced this or heard of it.
visarga 10y ago
Can reddit clone the pics previously uploaded on imgur or does it have its eggs in someone else's carriage?
- bluedino 10y ago
  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 http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=1880321&userid=0&perpage=40&pagenumber=36 http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=188...
- nacs 10y ago
  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).
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
whalesalad 10y ago
Looks like it's backed by S3 x-amz-storage-class: REDUCED_REDUNDANCY Content-Type: image/jpeg Server: AmazonS3 Can't imagine that AWS bill...
- oolongCat 10y ago
  What are some better alternatives to s3?
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
  - mozumder 10y ago
    Colocation hosting your own servers around the world... you know, the original way.
    - creshal 10y ago
      Is that really cheaper than S3, though?
      - amazon_not 10y ago
        Yes, way, way cheaper. Amazon egress bandwidth is 10-100x more expensive than IP transit.
      - gnarbarian 10y ago
        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.
        pbhjpbhj 10y ago
        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?
siegecraft 10y ago
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.
- draw_down 10y ago
  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.
- jsmthrowaway 10y ago
  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.
  - siegecraft 10y ago
    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.
tdiggity 10y ago
Here's a thread that led to people's hate of imgur: https://www.reddit.com/r/iphone/comments/46cjo5/i_just_want_to_say_fuck_imgur_for_overpowering/?ref=search_posts https://www.reddit.com/r/iphone/comments/46cjo5/i_just_want_... It was really annoying on mobile.
- debaserab2 10y ago
  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.
- oe 10y ago
  The hate seems to go both ways. Imgur community dislikes lame images from Reddit appearing on Imgur front page and would like them to go away.
  - unlinker 10y ago
    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.
clw8 10y ago
I bet Reddit will finally be blocked in China because of this. Imgur has been blocked for years but Reddit's never been blocked.
- bnastic 10y ago
  s/China/<every large company on earth>/
ljk 10y ago
doesn't reddit have a stake in imgur? http://techcrunch.com/2014/04/03/after-five-years-of-bootstrapping-imgur-raises-40-million-from-andreessen-reddit/ http://techcrunch.com/2014/04/03/after-five-years-of-bootstr...
wassago 10y ago
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. I'm pretty sure the same will be for Imgur.
chjohasbrouck 10y ago
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).
jasonm23 10y ago
The community on Reddit can get pretty salty at times, but the open ugliness of Imgur comments gives "vintage YouTube" a run for its money.
- DanBC 10y ago
  It's a shame because there was a few months where Imgur was brilliant.
esolyt 10y ago
> At this time, the Reddit community can still choose to use Imgur or other sites for image hosting. The fact that they used the phrase "At this time" makes it sound like they are planning to disable external image links in the future.
- imaginenore 10y ago
  Or just convert all image links automatically. Some websites do it.
  - edraferi 10y ago
    There can be very good reasons for this. Gmail, for example, rehosts embedded images with google to protect users against invisible pixel trackers.
- pbhjpbhj 10y ago
  I assumed they hadn't done that so as to keep the wholesale copyright infringement at arm's length from the parent company - is that still Condé Nast?
  - maxerickson 10y ago
    The company that owns Conde Nast, Advance Publications, still has a stake in reddit. There's a variety of other investors involved: http://www.wired.com/2015/07/wired-conde-nast-reddit/ http://www.wired.com/2015/07/wired-conde-nast-reddit/
- shostack 10y ago
  1. Provide a better 1st party image hosting experience free of ads and clutter. 2. Block other image hosts from your service forcing people to use yours. 3. Introduce ads. 4. Profit!!!
yc-kraln 10y ago
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.
- tqkxzugoaupvwqr 10y ago
  How can I contact you?
jug 10y ago
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.
Guest98123 10y ago
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?
- chinathrow 10y ago
  > and foot the bill in exchange for tracking everyone Don't give them ideas. Anyway - that is what lots of companies are doing anyway, even if it's passively. Imgur for example is using Google Analytics.
- pjc50 10y ago
  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)
tech-no-logical 10y ago
and it uses cloudflare, so browsing for pics gives me another gazillion captchas because I'm on a vpn. well thanks al lot... at least imgur didn't use cloudflare.
- teach 10y ago
  This is the life you have chosen.
boyce 10y ago
Spotted this was happening nearly two months ago - surprised it's taken the tech blogs a while to cotton on https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11453224 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11453224
- 6stringmerc 10y ago
  Nicely put; cool to read the tea leaves, so to speak, and see the outcome unfold. Good call.
baldfat 10y ago
> 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-grudin/ http://humanism.ws/featured/a-history-of-humanism-robert-gru...
- pyrophane 10y ago
  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.
  - TeMPOraL 10y ago
    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
zackus 10y ago
Also this one is so bad Theranos is sued for inaccurate blood tests and false marketing http://www.readnews247.com/detail/14883?pageNo=1&prefix=/category/Tech http://www.readnews247.com/detail/14883?pageNo=1&prefix=/cat...
makecheck 10y ago
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.
- joshdickson 10y ago
  "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.
  - fs111 10y ago
    > Gruber has super differentiated, high editorial value content Oh, you mean: "Apple products are the best! Google sucks!" Yes, high quality content indeed...
    - deleted 10y ago
      [deleted]
    - joshdickson 10y ago
      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.
amelius 10y ago
Of course Imgur could take revenge by breaking all images that are still linked to from Reddit. Did Reddit make backup copies?
- whamlastxmas 10y ago
  This exact thing happened with Something Awful and some other image host.
ourcat 10y ago
From 2014 When Imgur took $40MM in Funding : http://techcrunch.com/2014/04/03/after-five-years-of-bootstrapping-imgur-raises-40-million-from-andreessen-reddit/ http://techcrunch.com/2014/04/03/after-five-years-of-bootstr... "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."
Keyframe 10y ago
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.
zkhalique 10y ago
This is what you get for relying on someone else's centralized platform.
albedoa 10y ago
> One last try. I'll stop then. This is the least believable thing you've said.
- dang 10y ago
  No nasty swipes on HN, please. We detached this comment from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11778568 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11778568 and marked it off-topic.
6stringmerc 10y ago
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. It's not just a PR thing, it's a legal thing.
- patrickaljord 10y ago
  > 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.
  - 6stringmerc 10y ago
    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.
- TarpitCarnivore 10y ago
  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.
corndoge 10y ago
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1kh1TZdtyX7UlRd55OBxf7DB-JGj2rsfWckI0FPQRYhE/edit#gid=0 https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1kh1TZdtyX7UlRd55OBxf... There are and have always been plenty of simpler alternatives with a variety of features. I stopped using imgur when direct links stopped working. Personal fav: https://uguu.se/ https://uguu.se/
rezashirazian 10y ago
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 http://www.pixpit.com unfortunately every time I tried to talk about it on reddit, they deleted it.
- dredmorbius 10y ago
  Quite this. I use reddit more-or-less as a blog (https://dredmorbius.reddit.com 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.
ben_jones 10y ago
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.

501 points by coloneltcb 10y ago

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.

static_noise 10y ago
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.
- tlrobinson 10y ago
  This seems like a common pattern 1. Realize you need to make a lot more money (to meet investor expectations, pay for the fat the company has accumulated, etc) 2. Panic 3. Apply dark patterns (http://darkpatterns.org/ http://darkpatterns.org/) 4. Something better comes along and eats your lunch 5. Repeat. It's sad because imgur was originally created as the "something better".
  - sotojuan 10y ago
    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.
    - static_noise 10y ago
      Dear lamb, we had a great time but now I have to eat.
    - MasterScrat 10y ago
      These are all good points but I have a strong feeling of déjà-vu with another thread in these comments...
- siegecraft 10y ago
  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).
- ashitlerferad 10y ago
  SourceForge got bought by new folks who reversed all the misleading ads and bundling stuff: https://sourceforge.net/blog/sourceforge-acquisition-and-future-plans/ https://sourceforge.net/blog/sourceforge-acquisition-and-fut...
  - metamet 10y ago
    This is good, but I wonder how hard it will be to turn that negative momentum around.

kinkdr 10y ago

Bad news for Imgur...

wlesieutre 10y ago
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. One hopes Imgur could see this coming.
- yarou 10y ago
  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.
- goalieca 10y ago
  Question. What's wrong with making just a little bit of money?? (which is presumably still more than i will ever see!)
  - sethhochberg 10y ago
    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.
  - static_noise 10y ago

alttab 10y ago

Turns out a S3 bucket in itself isn't a website.

shawn-butler 10y ago
Fairly easy to serve a static website from a S3 bucket... http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonS3/latest/dev/HowDoIWebsiteConfiguration.html http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonS3/latest/dev/HowDoIWebsite...
- alttab 10y ago
  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.

kordless 10y ago

Maybe I'll turn out to be right after all.

pfarnsworth 10y ago

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.

fooey 10y ago
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
- Dobbs 10y ago
  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.
- bostik 10y ago
  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.
  - rplnt 10y ago
    Do you mean imageshack? It's exactly like that. Though imageshack's biggest crime was delete everything (maybe except stuff from paid accounts) at one point in time.
    - bostik 10y ago
      Yup, that was it. Thanks for the name reminder. 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.

zitterbewegung 10y ago

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.

EpicEng 10y ago
>imgur is doing dark patterns Would you mind explaining that to me? I've never heard the term. Edit: Nvm, sorry; easy to google.
- funkyy 10y ago
  For everyone else wanting to save Google's bandwidth bill: "Dark Patterns are User Interfaces that are designed to trick people."
Others 10y ago
What dark patterns are they implementing?
- ChrisGranger 10y ago
  I'd guess they're referring to the way Imgur puts sponsored content in among the images now, looking almost like any other user-uploaded post. Edit: evidently, direct image links are serving ads on mobile. I haven't tried it to confirm this myself.
- finnn 10y ago
  "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
  - dopamean 10y ago
    Weird. I've never experienced this or heard of it.

visarga 10y ago

Can reddit clone the pics previously uploaded on imgur or does it have its eggs in someone else's carriage?

bluedino 10y ago
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 http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=1880321&userid=0&perpage=40&pagenumber=36 http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=188...
nacs 10y ago
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).

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

whalesalad 10y ago

Looks like it's backed by S3 x-amz-storage-class: REDUCED_REDUNDANCY Content-Type: image/jpeg Server: AmazonS3 Can't imagine that AWS bill...

oolongCat 10y ago
What are some better alternatives to s3?
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- mozumder 10y ago
  Colocation hosting your own servers around the world... you know, the original way.
  - creshal 10y ago
    Is that really cheaper than S3, though?
    - amazon_not 10y ago
      Yes, way, way cheaper. Amazon egress bandwidth is 10-100x more expensive than IP transit.
    - gnarbarian 10y ago
      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.
      - pbhjpbhj 10y ago
        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?

siegecraft 10y ago

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.

draw_down 10y ago
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.
jsmthrowaway 10y ago
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.
- siegecraft 10y ago
  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.

tdiggity 10y ago

Here's a thread that led to people's hate of imgur: https://www.reddit.com/r/iphone/comments/46cjo5/i_just_want_to_say_fuck_imgur_for_overpowering/?ref=search_posts https://www.reddit.com/r/iphone/comments/46cjo5/i_just_want_... It was really annoying on mobile.

debaserab2 10y ago
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.
oe 10y ago
The hate seems to go both ways. Imgur community dislikes lame images from Reddit appearing on Imgur front page and would like them to go away.
- unlinker 10y ago
  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.

clw8 10y ago

I bet Reddit will finally be blocked in China because of this. Imgur has been blocked for years but Reddit's never been blocked.

bnastic 10y ago
s/China/<every large company on earth>/

ljk 10y ago

doesn't reddit have a stake in imgur? http://techcrunch.com/2014/04/03/after-five-years-of-bootstrapping-imgur-raises-40-million-from-andreessen-reddit/ http://techcrunch.com/2014/04/03/after-five-years-of-bootstr...

wassago 10y ago

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. I'm pretty sure the same will be for Imgur.

chjohasbrouck 10y ago

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).

jasonm23 10y ago

The community on Reddit can get pretty salty at times, but the open ugliness of Imgur comments gives "vintage YouTube" a run for its money.

DanBC 10y ago
It's a shame because there was a few months where Imgur was brilliant.

esolyt 10y ago

> At this time, the Reddit community can still choose to use Imgur or other sites for image hosting. The fact that they used the phrase "At this time" makes it sound like they are planning to disable external image links in the future.

imaginenore 10y ago
Or just convert all image links automatically. Some websites do it.
- edraferi 10y ago
  There can be very good reasons for this. Gmail, for example, rehosts embedded images with google to protect users against invisible pixel trackers.
pbhjpbhj 10y ago
I assumed they hadn't done that so as to keep the wholesale copyright infringement at arm's length from the parent company - is that still Condé Nast?
- maxerickson 10y ago
  The company that owns Conde Nast, Advance Publications, still has a stake in reddit. There's a variety of other investors involved: http://www.wired.com/2015/07/wired-conde-nast-reddit/ http://www.wired.com/2015/07/wired-conde-nast-reddit/
shostack 10y ago
1. Provide a better 1st party image hosting experience free of ads and clutter. 2. Block other image hosts from your service forcing people to use yours. 3. Introduce ads. 4. Profit!!!

yc-kraln 10y ago

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.

tqkxzugoaupvwqr 10y ago
How can I contact you?

jug 10y ago

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.

Guest98123 10y ago

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?

chinathrow 10y ago
> and foot the bill in exchange for tracking everyone Don't give them ideas. Anyway - that is what lots of companies are doing anyway, even if it's passively. Imgur for example is using Google Analytics.
pjc50 10y ago
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)

tech-no-logical 10y ago

and it uses cloudflare, so browsing for pics gives me another gazillion captchas because I'm on a vpn. well thanks al lot... at least imgur didn't use cloudflare.

teach 10y ago
This is the life you have chosen.

boyce 10y ago

Spotted this was happening nearly two months ago - surprised it's taken the tech blogs a while to cotton on https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11453224 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11453224

6stringmerc 10y ago
Nicely put; cool to read the tea leaves, so to speak, and see the outcome unfold. Good call.

baldfat 10y ago

> 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-grudin/ http://humanism.ws/featured/a-history-of-humanism-robert-gru...

pyrophane 10y ago
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.
- TeMPOraL 10y ago
  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

zackus 10y ago

Also this one is so bad Theranos is sued for inaccurate blood tests and false marketing http://www.readnews247.com/detail/14883?pageNo=1&prefix=/category/Tech http://www.readnews247.com/detail/14883?pageNo=1&prefix=/cat...

makecheck 10y ago

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.

joshdickson 10y ago
"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.
- fs111 10y ago
  > Gruber has super differentiated, high editorial value content Oh, you mean: "Apple products are the best! Google sucks!" Yes, high quality content indeed...
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
  - joshdickson 10y ago
    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.

amelius 10y ago

Of course Imgur could take revenge by breaking all images that are still linked to from Reddit. Did Reddit make backup copies?

whamlastxmas 10y ago
This exact thing happened with Something Awful and some other image host.

ourcat 10y ago

From 2014 When Imgur took $40MM in Funding : http://techcrunch.com/2014/04/03/after-five-years-of-bootstrapping-imgur-raises-40-million-from-andreessen-reddit/ http://techcrunch.com/2014/04/03/after-five-years-of-bootstr... "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."

Keyframe 10y ago

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.

zkhalique 10y ago

This is what you get for relying on someone else's centralized platform.

albedoa 10y ago

> One last try. I'll stop then. This is the least believable thing you've said.

dang 10y ago
No nasty swipes on HN, please. We detached this comment from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11778568 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11778568 and marked it off-topic.

6stringmerc 10y ago

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. It's not just a PR thing, it's a legal thing.

patrickaljord 10y ago
> 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.
- 6stringmerc 10y ago
  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.
TarpitCarnivore 10y ago
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.

corndoge 10y ago

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1kh1TZdtyX7UlRd55OBxf7DB-JGj2rsfWckI0FPQRYhE/edit#gid=0 https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1kh1TZdtyX7UlRd55OBxf... There are and have always been plenty of simpler alternatives with a variety of features. I stopped using imgur when direct links stopped working. Personal fav: https://uguu.se/ https://uguu.se/

rezashirazian 10y ago

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 http://www.pixpit.com unfortunately every time I tried to talk about it on reddit, they deleted it.

dredmorbius 10y ago
Quite this. I use reddit more-or-less as a blog (https://dredmorbius.reddit.com 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.

ben_jones 10y ago

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.