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It's really unfortunate that Imgur took such a turn for the worse. Originally it seemed like Imgur was a benevolent gift to Reddit users... a clean, simple, ea

It's really unfortunate that Imgur took such a turn for the worse. Originally it seemed like Imgur was a benevolent gift to Reddit users... a clean, simple, easy to use image hosting service that everyone could use for free. I guess it was too good to be true, because now it's tricky to link to a direct image (though not impossible), and the standard landing page is filled with unnecessary clutter. As an aside: if you're looking for an amusing read, the "IgnorantImgur" subreddit[0] is filled with examples of people from the Imgur community who seem to be oblivious to Imgur's origin as an image hosting site for Reddit users. [0]: http://www.reddit.com/r/IgnorantImgur/top http://www.reddit.com/r/IgnorantImgur/top

x5n1 10y ago
Completely expected as soon as they took money. They are exactly what organic "success" stories online look like. Now they want some of reddit's traffic and so reddit is fighting back at first by embedding images directly on the page and now hosting the image themselves. Reddit is also looking to maximize profit.
- cookiecaper 10y ago
  Yes. I also think that part of reddit's unspoken strategy with this is to get more people using their mobile apps instead of the high-quality third-party alternatives (which allows them to control the reddit experience more tightly, which they want to try to rehabilitate their image away from 4chanLite, and also allows them to get the ad views instead of giving them to third-party devs). reddit is trying to squeeze back some of the juice from the third-party devs who use their API without being too overt about it, because they know the community would revolt. Twitter did the same thing much more loudly when they realized that they were giving away the farm by letting most of their userbase access the content via third-party apps. This works because imgur and other image hosts are already well-integrated into third-party reddit apps, but reddit's image hosting isn't yet, and they can change things around/break it repeatedly until users get annoyed and just move to the official app to try to get a more seamless experience.
  - robbbbbbbbb 10y ago
    If this is their plan they aren't doing a very good job at executing it. Their mobile app is honestly outclassed by others. And their mobile web browsing experience is unpleasant to say the least. Each page takes a very long load time to load, despite it being a single page web app, and the load times cannot really be explained by what it is downloading, as other apps, and the desktop site, can load the same amount of data very quickly. If the plan of trying to monetize mobile fails, I wonder who, or if, someone will just try to buy them out and try to do it better themselves. I am convenience that the reddit brand is very popular. The other day I started compiling something, and reflectively I alt tabbed and went to reddit, after realizing I was in the middle of doing something I closed it and got back to work, but I went their out of mussel memory - and I think that just goes to show how valuable their brand is.
cortesoft 10y ago
Imgur started off as a benevolent gift to Reddit users, but then as more and more people started to use it, the expenses became too great to keep it the way it was. There is no money in serving images directly with no advertising, but there is certainly costs. What were they supposed to do?
- toomuchtodo 10y ago
  The only clean route would've been for them to be acquired by Reddit.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- mmanfrin 10y ago
  s/imgur/imageshack s/reddit/somethingawful
  - NamTaf 10y ago
    Absoutely. See also: Waffleimages after it. This is cyclical, an image site gains critical mass, builds in size and then buckles under the weight of providing a free, clean, high-bandwidth service.
ythl 10y ago
> a clean, simple, easy to use image hosting service that everyone could use for free How do you monetize such a site without bloating into the current Imgur? It seems like the only way to have a "clean, simple, easy" image hosting service is to be a billionaire and to do it out of the goodness of your heart.
- revelation 10y ago
  That's what the lore tells us, but maybe it's just plain wrong and the old incumbents were just greedy and terrible. I think imgur was bootstrapped for a long time and didn't have much in the way of monetization, certainly hotlinking still worked then. The changes came when imgur took VC money.
  - pyvpx 10y ago
    imgur worked because a CDN named voxel could readily use the bandwidth bump provided by hosting images to decrease their overall network costs.
    - gohrt 10y ago
      how does that work?
      - pyvpx 10y ago
        I send 5Gbps to an eyeball network (let's say Comcast, for the sake of discussion) it might cost me $5000/month to do that through my transit provider (intentionally inflated cost). Comcast will interconnect, settlement free, to networks who exchange 7 or more Gbps. Three optics and three cross connects are $3000 + $600/month. How much is that additional 2Gbps of traffic (to Comcast) worth?
    - ddorian43 10y ago
      please explain, doesn't make sense
swang 10y ago
Same thing with ImageShack. They use to host images for SA and then got really shady with linking images. Hosting images is a high cost service that most people don't want to pay for, so there's very little ways to make money.
- nicotonic 10y ago
  What is SA? Something Awful?
  - swang 10y ago
    Ah oops. Yes.
v1tyaz 10y ago
Imgur was originally offered as a "gift" to Digg users, and when it didn't gain traction there MrGrimm re-branded it as a "gift" to Redditors.
- munificent 10y ago
  Citation? My recollection is that imgur didn't show up until after the Digg exodus and happened on Reddit first, but maybe I just didn't see the Digg side of it.
  - codexon 10y ago
    https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/9tlwi/im_the_imgur_guy_ama/c0edmp6 https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/9tlwi/im_the_imgur_gu... > I posted it on Reddit, Digg, and a couple forums that I frequent at the same time. Imgur was never a reddit exclusive thing. It was just mentioned to advertise and gain loyalty from reddit users.
  - swampthinker 10y ago
    Yeah, unless he was just embellishing when he posted this: https://www.reddit.com/r/reddit.com/comments/7zlyd/my_gift_to_reddit_i_created_an_image_hosting https://www.reddit.com/r/reddit.com/comments/7zlyd/my_gift_t... Which, honestly isn't a bad thing if he did.
- phire 10y ago
  It was posted to both Digg and Reddit on the same day. The Digg post never gained any traction and when the server went down under the load MrGrimm deleted the reddit post (but not the digg post, since it gained no traction). He made a second Reddit post the next day. Source: https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/9tlwi/im_the_imgur_guy_ama/c0edn5u https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/9tlwi/im_the_imgur_gu...
minimaxir 10y ago
In 2014, I wrote a blog post (http://minimaxir.com/2014/02/moved-temporarily/ http://minimaxir.com/2014/02/moved-temporarily/) calling out Imgur's shady redirect practices on Facebook/Twitter, with a warning that things will get chaotic if they try that tactic on Reddit. Guess I was right? Notably, when that post was submitted to Reddit, it got eviscerated, nothing that "hey, they provide a service for free, they deserve ad revenue!"
shalmanese 10y ago
What really killed them was the GIF explosion. Average image size remains largely static and bandwidth and storage costs steadily decline so if you get your timing exactly right, you can hit that sweet spot where your CPM declines slower than your hosting costs and provide an increasingly profitable business. However, GIFs completely upended that calculation by increasing the average file size by an order of magnitude and pushed the viability of a cruft free image host further down the road by another few years. Frankly, I'm surprised Google never just bought imgur and absorbed it under youtube or something. Being the default place on the web to host images seems like something way more strategically valuable to Google than any standalone image host.
- galistoca 10y ago
  Why would Google buy when they can just create one overnight if they wanted? Probably much more stable than Imgur too. Imgur is just a commodity. Youtube is not.
  - slig 10y ago
    Imgur has a community. Tons of users that goes directly there to see funny images and GIFs. Yes, Google can create a infinite scalable image hosting overnight, but creating a community is a lot harder.
    - galistoca 10y ago
      And why would Google purchase a forum site for sharing funny images and GIFs?
      - toxican 10y ago
        Why would they purchase a forum site for sharing funny cat videos?
        galistoca 10y ago
        Because it's a monopoly. Come back when Imgur becomes the only (or one of very few) place on the web to share funny images and Gifs. Farewell.
angryasian 10y ago
The writing was always on the wall. They needed to start their own community because they were essentially a commodity product that could easily be replaced.
bluedino 10y ago
Every single popular free image host goes through that same cycle.
loopbit 10y ago
I was wondering about what you said about linking to a direct image being tricky. As far as I can see, you can put the link to imgur (like http://imgur.com/gKt0Owa http://imgur.com/gKt0Owa) or directly to the image (http://i.imgur.com/gKt0Owa.jpg http://i.imgur.com/gKt0Owa.jpg) and both (as well as the html, bbcode and markdown versions) appear directly in the image page.
- qu4z-2 10y ago
  It's tricky because your direct image link redirects me to the full page with ads, and it's not obvious to you. Try hard refreshing your image link. (I'm pretty sure the way it works is: it shows the image for certain referrers, and when you load the "full" page it requests the image with a referrer of imgur. That way you get the image, and then subsequent requests to the image are served from your browser cache so the direct links work)
  - pki 10y ago
    Also variably checks http accept headers (<img src> produces accept of image/* iirc)
  - loopbit 10y ago
    Weird... I actually tried with a couple of different browsers (FF, Chrome and Safari) to check that it wasn't me logged in or something like that. Could it be ip-based, as I did all my tests with the same computer? Hmm... Anyway, thanks for expanding on it; I've shared a few images through imgur and never had this issue (maybe it was before this change, or maybe the people receiving them never complained), so I was a bit puzzled by your comment.
    - qu4z-2 10y ago
      I've been able to reproduce it with different browsers on the same computer. I'm not sure of the exact strategy, but it's just a big UX problem that I don't know what I'm sending another user. ... aaaaand now I want to make a malicious image host that always shows you your uploaded images but serves up goatse to anyone you link it to. Or maybe just flips the images, upsidedownternet style.
chadscira 10y ago
This was the reason why I created http://img42.com http://img42.com. They bombard you with ads, and other "features". I wanted something where I could just click, drag and drop, or pate and it would be uploaded.
- krackers 10y ago
  Neat service. How do you plan to offset the hosting, storage, and bandwidth costs though?
  - chadscira 10y ago
    Costs haven't been that bad, I have floated it since 2012 (only around 1M images have been uploaded). But I have some scalable plans if it were to take off without breaking the bank.
- robbbbbbbbb 10y ago
  What an awesome UI, I love it. Thanks for making something so cool.
  - chadscira 10y ago
    I have long overdue v2v2 (killed the original v2) update for the UI. I'll try to post it on HN when I complete it. The UI you see now was done in 2012.
- JorgeGT 10y ago
  > I got fed up with all the other image hosts out there so I made my own. It doesn't force you to compress your images, and it has neat things like crop, resize, rotate, and compression from 10-100. It's my gift to you. Let's not see anymore imageshack/photobucket around here ;) I'll be listening if anyone has some suggestions. EDIT: The server was moved off of shared hosting after about 4 hours of release. It's now on a dedicated server with a 100mb port. EDIT2: This is an old post and it's no longer on just one 1 dedicated server. It's on many, and utilizes a CDN provided by Voxel. This was the original post [0] announcing the creation of imgur 7 years ago. Maybe in 7 years from now you have your own img42 image hosting emporium! :) --- [0] https://www.reddit.com/r/reddit.com/comments/7zlyd/my_gift_to_reddit_i_created_an_image_hosting/c07u7kr https://www.reddit.com/r/reddit.com/comments/7zlyd/my_gift_t...
ben_jones 10y ago
Well they took a bunch of VC money so they could have a nice office in the middle of San Francisco and presumably so the founder could cash in a little bit. You can't blame him for his choice to take VC money, but this was inevitable. EDIT: It's actually worse if you read their wiki [1]. They were profitable enough early on to have 10 employees AND move to San Francisco, going as far to win a "best bootstrapped start-up award". THEN they took 40 million in funding. [1]:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imgur https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imgur
beefsack 10y ago
Imgur was the epitome of setting user expectations way too high. The service they offered was fantastic but costly, but users came to expect they should get it for free without clutter and monetisation wrapped around it. It's a reinforcement of how important setting expectations with customers early is very important to avoid stepping on their toes later on.
bane 10y ago
There was also a muddy middle when Reddit's management was going through various messy leadership dramas. Reddit gave Imgur an almost impossibly wide berth compared to other "made for Reddit" sites and allowed the owner to get away with all kinds of site policy violations. Imgur also set up various restrictions on content that were conveniently waived for Reddit images. It turns out it was because Reddit took an investment stake in the service and didn't make it known for a long while. Then Imgur decided to just become Reddit because, hey after all, they're responsible for some huge percentage of all traffic for the site -- this being entirely contrary to the communication the site put out about what they were and were going to be doing. Now Reddit is just wholesale replacing it with an internal service -- which is what should have happened in the first place. It's been obvious for years that this should have been a core service, but the terrible previous management of the place had pretty much frozen all improvements to the site. I think this move speaks more to the sane new management team doing the correct things than anything else. I'm really happy with the job that Steve Huffman et al are doing with the site, the decisions seem reasonable, well intentioned and generally in a good direction.

x5n1 10y ago

Completely expected as soon as they took money. They are exactly what organic "success" stories online look like. Now they want some of reddit's traffic and so reddit is fighting back at first by embedding images directly on the page and now hosting the image themselves. Reddit is also looking to maximize profit.

cookiecaper 10y ago
Yes. I also think that part of reddit's unspoken strategy with this is to get more people using their mobile apps instead of the high-quality third-party alternatives (which allows them to control the reddit experience more tightly, which they want to try to rehabilitate their image away from 4chanLite, and also allows them to get the ad views instead of giving them to third-party devs). reddit is trying to squeeze back some of the juice from the third-party devs who use their API without being too overt about it, because they know the community would revolt. Twitter did the same thing much more loudly when they realized that they were giving away the farm by letting most of their userbase access the content via third-party apps. This works because imgur and other image hosts are already well-integrated into third-party reddit apps, but reddit's image hosting isn't yet, and they can change things around/break it repeatedly until users get annoyed and just move to the official app to try to get a more seamless experience.
- robbbbbbbbb 10y ago
  If this is their plan they aren't doing a very good job at executing it. Their mobile app is honestly outclassed by others. And their mobile web browsing experience is unpleasant to say the least. Each page takes a very long load time to load, despite it being a single page web app, and the load times cannot really be explained by what it is downloading, as other apps, and the desktop site, can load the same amount of data very quickly. If the plan of trying to monetize mobile fails, I wonder who, or if, someone will just try to buy them out and try to do it better themselves. I am convenience that the reddit brand is very popular. The other day I started compiling something, and reflectively I alt tabbed and went to reddit, after realizing I was in the middle of doing something I closed it and got back to work, but I went their out of mussel memory - and I think that just goes to show how valuable their brand is.

cortesoft 10y ago

Imgur started off as a benevolent gift to Reddit users, but then as more and more people started to use it, the expenses became too great to keep it the way it was. There is no money in serving images directly with no advertising, but there is certainly costs. What were they supposed to do?

toomuchtodo 10y ago
The only clean route would've been for them to be acquired by Reddit.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
mmanfrin 10y ago
s/imgur/imageshack s/reddit/somethingawful
- NamTaf 10y ago
  Absoutely. See also: Waffleimages after it. This is cyclical, an image site gains critical mass, builds in size and then buckles under the weight of providing a free, clean, high-bandwidth service.

ythl 10y ago

> a clean, simple, easy to use image hosting service that everyone could use for free How do you monetize such a site without bloating into the current Imgur? It seems like the only way to have a "clean, simple, easy" image hosting service is to be a billionaire and to do it out of the goodness of your heart.

revelation 10y ago
That's what the lore tells us, but maybe it's just plain wrong and the old incumbents were just greedy and terrible. I think imgur was bootstrapped for a long time and didn't have much in the way of monetization, certainly hotlinking still worked then. The changes came when imgur took VC money.
- pyvpx 10y ago
  imgur worked because a CDN named voxel could readily use the bandwidth bump provided by hosting images to decrease their overall network costs.
  - gohrt 10y ago
    how does that work?
    - pyvpx 10y ago
      I send 5Gbps to an eyeball network (let's say Comcast, for the sake of discussion) it might cost me $5000/month to do that through my transit provider (intentionally inflated cost). Comcast will interconnect, settlement free, to networks who exchange 7 or more Gbps. Three optics and three cross connects are $3000 + $600/month. How much is that additional 2Gbps of traffic (to Comcast) worth?
  - ddorian43 10y ago
    please explain, doesn't make sense

swang 10y ago

Same thing with ImageShack. They use to host images for SA and then got really shady with linking images. Hosting images is a high cost service that most people don't want to pay for, so there's very little ways to make money.

nicotonic 10y ago
What is SA? Something Awful?
- swang 10y ago
  Ah oops. Yes.

v1tyaz 10y ago

Imgur was originally offered as a "gift" to Digg users, and when it didn't gain traction there MrGrimm re-branded it as a "gift" to Redditors.

munificent 10y ago
Citation? My recollection is that imgur didn't show up until after the Digg exodus and happened on Reddit first, but maybe I just didn't see the Digg side of it.
- codexon 10y ago
  https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/9tlwi/im_the_imgur_guy_ama/c0edmp6 https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/9tlwi/im_the_imgur_gu... > I posted it on Reddit, Digg, and a couple forums that I frequent at the same time. Imgur was never a reddit exclusive thing. It was just mentioned to advertise and gain loyalty from reddit users.
- swampthinker 10y ago
  Yeah, unless he was just embellishing when he posted this: https://www.reddit.com/r/reddit.com/comments/7zlyd/my_gift_to_reddit_i_created_an_image_hosting https://www.reddit.com/r/reddit.com/comments/7zlyd/my_gift_t... Which, honestly isn't a bad thing if he did.
phire 10y ago
It was posted to both Digg and Reddit on the same day. The Digg post never gained any traction and when the server went down under the load MrGrimm deleted the reddit post (but not the digg post, since it gained no traction). He made a second Reddit post the next day. Source: https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/9tlwi/im_the_imgur_guy_ama/c0edn5u https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/9tlwi/im_the_imgur_gu...

minimaxir 10y ago

In 2014, I wrote a blog post (http://minimaxir.com/2014/02/moved-temporarily/ http://minimaxir.com/2014/02/moved-temporarily/) calling out Imgur's shady redirect practices on Facebook/Twitter, with a warning that things will get chaotic if they try that tactic on Reddit. Guess I was right? Notably, when that post was submitted to Reddit, it got eviscerated, nothing that "hey, they provide a service for free, they deserve ad revenue!"

shalmanese 10y ago

What really killed them was the GIF explosion. Average image size remains largely static and bandwidth and storage costs steadily decline so if you get your timing exactly right, you can hit that sweet spot where your CPM declines slower than your hosting costs and provide an increasingly profitable business. However, GIFs completely upended that calculation by increasing the average file size by an order of magnitude and pushed the viability of a cruft free image host further down the road by another few years. Frankly, I'm surprised Google never just bought imgur and absorbed it under youtube or something. Being the default place on the web to host images seems like something way more strategically valuable to Google than any standalone image host.

galistoca 10y ago
Why would Google buy when they can just create one overnight if they wanted? Probably much more stable than Imgur too. Imgur is just a commodity. Youtube is not.
- slig 10y ago
  Imgur has a community. Tons of users that goes directly there to see funny images and GIFs. Yes, Google can create a infinite scalable image hosting overnight, but creating a community is a lot harder.
  - galistoca 10y ago
    And why would Google purchase a forum site for sharing funny images and GIFs?
    - toxican 10y ago
      Why would they purchase a forum site for sharing funny cat videos?
      - galistoca 10y ago
        Because it's a monopoly. Come back when Imgur becomes the only (or one of very few) place on the web to share funny images and Gifs. Farewell.

angryasian 10y ago

The writing was always on the wall. They needed to start their own community because they were essentially a commodity product that could easily be replaced.

bluedino 10y ago

Every single popular free image host goes through that same cycle.

loopbit 10y ago

I was wondering about what you said about linking to a direct image being tricky. As far as I can see, you can put the link to imgur (like http://imgur.com/gKt0Owa http://imgur.com/gKt0Owa) or directly to the image (http://i.imgur.com/gKt0Owa.jpg http://i.imgur.com/gKt0Owa.jpg) and both (as well as the html, bbcode and markdown versions) appear directly in the image page.

qu4z-2 10y ago
It's tricky because your direct image link redirects me to the full page with ads, and it's not obvious to you. Try hard refreshing your image link. (I'm pretty sure the way it works is: it shows the image for certain referrers, and when you load the "full" page it requests the image with a referrer of imgur. That way you get the image, and then subsequent requests to the image are served from your browser cache so the direct links work)
- pki 10y ago
  Also variably checks http accept headers (<img src> produces accept of image/* iirc)
- loopbit 10y ago
  Weird... I actually tried with a couple of different browsers (FF, Chrome and Safari) to check that it wasn't me logged in or something like that. Could it be ip-based, as I did all my tests with the same computer? Hmm... Anyway, thanks for expanding on it; I've shared a few images through imgur and never had this issue (maybe it was before this change, or maybe the people receiving them never complained), so I was a bit puzzled by your comment.
  - qu4z-2 10y ago
    I've been able to reproduce it with different browsers on the same computer. I'm not sure of the exact strategy, but it's just a big UX problem that I don't know what I'm sending another user. ... aaaaand now I want to make a malicious image host that always shows you your uploaded images but serves up goatse to anyone you link it to. Or maybe just flips the images, upsidedownternet style.

chadscira 10y ago

This was the reason why I created http://img42.com http://img42.com. They bombard you with ads, and other "features". I wanted something where I could just click, drag and drop, or pate and it would be uploaded.

krackers 10y ago
Neat service. How do you plan to offset the hosting, storage, and bandwidth costs though?
- chadscira 10y ago
  Costs haven't been that bad, I have floated it since 2012 (only around 1M images have been uploaded). But I have some scalable plans if it were to take off without breaking the bank.
robbbbbbbbb 10y ago
What an awesome UI, I love it. Thanks for making something so cool.
- chadscira 10y ago
  I have long overdue v2v2 (killed the original v2) update for the UI. I'll try to post it on HN when I complete it. The UI you see now was done in 2012.
JorgeGT 10y ago
> I got fed up with all the other image hosts out there so I made my own. It doesn't force you to compress your images, and it has neat things like crop, resize, rotate, and compression from 10-100. It's my gift to you. Let's not see anymore imageshack/photobucket around here ;) I'll be listening if anyone has some suggestions. EDIT: The server was moved off of shared hosting after about 4 hours of release. It's now on a dedicated server with a 100mb port. EDIT2: This is an old post and it's no longer on just one 1 dedicated server. It's on many, and utilizes a CDN provided by Voxel. This was the original post [0] announcing the creation of imgur 7 years ago. Maybe in 7 years from now you have your own img42 image hosting emporium! :) --- [0] https://www.reddit.com/r/reddit.com/comments/7zlyd/my_gift_to_reddit_i_created_an_image_hosting/c07u7kr https://www.reddit.com/r/reddit.com/comments/7zlyd/my_gift_t...

ben_jones 10y ago

Well they took a bunch of VC money so they could have a nice office in the middle of San Francisco and presumably so the founder could cash in a little bit. You can't blame him for his choice to take VC money, but this was inevitable. EDIT: It's actually worse if you read their wiki [1]. They were profitable enough early on to have 10 employees AND move to San Francisco, going as far to win a "best bootstrapped start-up award". THEN they took 40 million in funding. [1]:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imgur https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imgur

beefsack 10y ago

Imgur was the epitome of setting user expectations way too high. The service they offered was fantastic but costly, but users came to expect they should get it for free without clutter and monetisation wrapped around it. It's a reinforcement of how important setting expectations with customers early is very important to avoid stepping on their toes later on.

bane 10y ago

There was also a muddy middle when Reddit's management was going through various messy leadership dramas. Reddit gave Imgur an almost impossibly wide berth compared to other "made for Reddit" sites and allowed the owner to get away with all kinds of site policy violations. Imgur also set up various restrictions on content that were conveniently waived for Reddit images. It turns out it was because Reddit took an investment stake in the service and didn't make it known for a long while. Then Imgur decided to just become Reddit because, hey after all, they're responsible for some huge percentage of all traffic for the site -- this being entirely contrary to the communication the site put out about what they were and were going to be doing. Now Reddit is just wholesale replacing it with an internal service -- which is what should have happened in the first place. It's been obvious for years that this should have been a core service, but the terrible previous management of the place had pretty much frozen all improvements to the site. I think this move speaks more to the sane new management team doing the correct things than anything else. I'm really happy with the job that Steve Huffman et al are doing with the site, the decisions seem reasonable, well intentioned and generally in a good direction.