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Imgur is essentially a parasite upon reddit which exploited and relied upon reddit's lack of native image posts. Imgur's dependency on reddit led to it trying t

Imgur is essentially a parasite upon reddit which exploited and relied upon reddit's lack of native image posts. Imgur's dependency on reddit led to it trying to compete directly with it to ensure its survival without its host (Imgur is now also a place to find and comment on images), but also ensured reddit would eventually drop it, thus paradoxically also hurting its survival. Ultimately I think Imgur is destined to the same fate as TwitPic.

chrisguitarguy 9y ago
Though it may have started as a, "parasite upon reddit," imgur does stand pretty well on its own now. Try out their mobile app and you'll see a pretty active community.
- TazeTSchnitzel 9y ago
  It could successfully metamorphise. Without reddit, it would have less traffic, but also less hotlinking, so it might be more profitable. But reddit traffic might be its lifeblood, I'm not sure.
toxican 9y ago
Doesn't help that the Imgur community tends to be incredibly toxic toward reddit's, which is hilarious given the parasitic relationship you described. There's even a subreddit for it! /r/IgnorantImgur
y_u_no_rust 9y ago
yeah and reddit a parasite upon the internet it's the new yahoo news
nazka 9y ago
That's some strong words. Imgur wasn't a parasite, it was offering a service that Reddit didn't offer but we needed. Yes Imgur was quite dependent on Reddit at the beginning but now Imgur has its own community and the two are quite different. If you look at the numbers, after the beta Imgur was starting to grow again. It was a hit yes, but not an exodus.
- castis 9y ago
  Edit: Whoops! I was definitely wrong here. It was absolutely a parasite. It would not have survived to grow to the size it did without Reddit. Parasites can offer a beneficial service to the host but cannot live without it. It has since evolved into something possibly capable of existing on its own but only time will tell. My guess is it lives for a few more years at best.
  - jpfed 9y ago
    >Parasites can offer a beneficial service to the host but cannot live without it. Incidentally, this is not what biologists consider parasitism. To a biologist, a parasitic relationship is one that benefits one while harming the other. Do you think that reddit was harmed by imgur? If imgur benefited but reddit was not harmed, their relationship was commensal. If they both benefited, their relationship was mutual. To capture the idea that imgur was totally dependent on its relationship with reddit (but not vice versa), you would say that their mutualism was obligate for imgur but facultative for reddit.
  - nazka 9y ago
    I don't think we have the same definition of a parasite or we see things differently. For me a parasite is a startup being a copy-cat, eating your market share, stealing your content, and stealing your customers. But Reddit and Imgur are two different websites. If Reddit was that mad about it, they could have done it in a month on S3... If you want a parasite I will say 9gag. It's true that Imgur has to grow its product now to something bigger. I won't even give them many years if they don't do that for a product that simple and ephemeral. They have challenges here.
    - jerf 9y ago
      "For me a parasite is a startup being a copy-cat," The parasite metaphor does not include the idea of being a "copy-cat"; parasites in the real world do not do the same things as their host. Indeed, that is the entire point of a parasite, in some sense; to take advantage of the host setting up various expensive systems to survive and just using them instead of developing their own.
Alex3917 9y ago
> Imgur is essentially a parasite upon reddit which exploited and relied upon reddit's lack of native image posts. Given that many subreddits have in their rules that people submitting images and blog posts should copy and paste the content into Reddit rather than linking to the actual creator, it seems more accurate to say that Reddit was a parasite on Imgur.
gwern 9y ago
Parasite terminology aside, this is also another entry for the 'digital sharecropping'/'own the platform'/'commoditize your complement' files. Imgur built itself on the Reddit platform; then the platform decided, like Twitter or Facebook, to eat it. Now Imgur is going to be pushed even faster along the wheel of reincarnation for filesharing/image-hosting websites... Too bad for any of the artists or photographers or content-creators who were depending on Imgur, but, 'Mister you knew I was a scorpion when you picked me up' as the story goes.
jasonkostempski 9y ago
Where else can an image be posted without having to create an account? That's not parasitic, that's a perfect service if I've ever seen one.
- adventured 9y ago
  Everyone here is taking offense to the word parasite, when it's nearly the perfect definition of the relationship from the first day. Imgur couldn't survive without Reddit, it grew and fed off of Reddit, and it was almost exclusively dependent on Reddit for its early users. I think a lot of people in this thread don't know that one of the primary definitions of parasite can include not harming the host and generically mean: "an organism living in, with, or on another organism." And if you question the dependency part of Imgur being a parasite, just wait until you see how things go for Imgur the next few years post Reddit handling its own images. One can thrive without the other, it's obvious which that is.
  - jasonkostempski 9y ago
    People don't generally use the parasite metaphor unless they're intention is to paint an ugly picture. Anyway, people still use Imgur very heavily in Reddit comments. I don't know if that's because reddit doesn't have a better alternative at the moment or if people just don't know how to use it.
ajross 9y ago
> Imgur is essentially a parasite upon reddit This is true in exactly the same sense that "pastebins are essentially parasites on freenode". Which is to say, kinda not.
- TazeTSchnitzel 9y ago
  That's an unfair comparison. Imgur was originally created specifically to be an image host for reddit users, and succeeding in that market, slowly tried to become a reddit competitor on the back of reddit traffic. Pastebins are merely text hosts.
munificent 9y ago
It started as a symbiotic relationship. Reddit had no good image hosting solution and it was a real problem. Before Imgur came along, you'd often find image posts where the link was dead, dog slow, or took you to a page filled with ads and malware. Imgur made Reddit better. If anything, Reddit was the parasite because its users used a ton of Imgur bandwidth and by direct linking, didn't give anything in return. Once Imgur decided to actually try to become a sustainable business, they had to change how that worked by trying to ensure that people coming to the site also saw ads. Then they started building their own community and working to become a direct competitor to Reddit. At that point, the right biological metaphor is probably too organisms with the same food source in the same ecosystem, competing for resources. Given that, it's no surprise that they are both working to sever ties to each other.
- komali2 9y ago
  But that was back in a time when reddit really was a news-sharing site. Huff huff get off my lawn and all, but back in the day it was more akin to hackernews, and so the "problem" of hosting images wasn't a problem at all - you'd be linking to articles that had their own image hosting solution. Nowadays it's a heavy picture, meme, whatever browser. Makes sense that imgur is trying to take over that niche.
  - f4rker 9y ago
    It was a problem. All the old image host sucked a lot.
  - cakedoggie 9y ago
    Was it ever a news sharing site? I think you might be mis-remembering history.
    - placeybordeaux 9y ago
      Honestly before RES came out the proportion of images on reddit was very low. Going back further before subreddits I remember it as largely just news articles and discussions, much like HN.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]

chrisguitarguy 9y ago

Though it may have started as a, "parasite upon reddit," imgur does stand pretty well on its own now. Try out their mobile app and you'll see a pretty active community.

TazeTSchnitzel 9y ago
It could successfully metamorphise. Without reddit, it would have less traffic, but also less hotlinking, so it might be more profitable. But reddit traffic might be its lifeblood, I'm not sure.

toxican 9y ago

Doesn't help that the Imgur community tends to be incredibly toxic toward reddit's, which is hilarious given the parasitic relationship you described. There's even a subreddit for it! /r/IgnorantImgur

y_u_no_rust 9y ago

yeah and reddit a parasite upon the internet it's the new yahoo news

nazka 9y ago

That's some strong words. Imgur wasn't a parasite, it was offering a service that Reddit didn't offer but we needed. Yes Imgur was quite dependent on Reddit at the beginning but now Imgur has its own community and the two are quite different. If you look at the numbers, after the beta Imgur was starting to grow again. It was a hit yes, but not an exodus.

castis 9y ago
Edit: Whoops! I was definitely wrong here. It was absolutely a parasite. It would not have survived to grow to the size it did without Reddit. Parasites can offer a beneficial service to the host but cannot live without it. It has since evolved into something possibly capable of existing on its own but only time will tell. My guess is it lives for a few more years at best.
- jpfed 9y ago
  >Parasites can offer a beneficial service to the host but cannot live without it. Incidentally, this is not what biologists consider parasitism. To a biologist, a parasitic relationship is one that benefits one while harming the other. Do you think that reddit was harmed by imgur? If imgur benefited but reddit was not harmed, their relationship was commensal. If they both benefited, their relationship was mutual. To capture the idea that imgur was totally dependent on its relationship with reddit (but not vice versa), you would say that their mutualism was obligate for imgur but facultative for reddit.
- nazka 9y ago
  I don't think we have the same definition of a parasite or we see things differently. For me a parasite is a startup being a copy-cat, eating your market share, stealing your content, and stealing your customers. But Reddit and Imgur are two different websites. If Reddit was that mad about it, they could have done it in a month on S3... If you want a parasite I will say 9gag. It's true that Imgur has to grow its product now to something bigger. I won't even give them many years if they don't do that for a product that simple and ephemeral. They have challenges here.
  - jerf 9y ago
    "For me a parasite is a startup being a copy-cat," The parasite metaphor does not include the idea of being a "copy-cat"; parasites in the real world do not do the same things as their host. Indeed, that is the entire point of a parasite, in some sense; to take advantage of the host setting up various expensive systems to survive and just using them instead of developing their own.

Alex3917 9y ago

> Imgur is essentially a parasite upon reddit which exploited and relied upon reddit's lack of native image posts. Given that many subreddits have in their rules that people submitting images and blog posts should copy and paste the content into Reddit rather than linking to the actual creator, it seems more accurate to say that Reddit was a parasite on Imgur.

gwern 9y ago

Parasite terminology aside, this is also another entry for the 'digital sharecropping'/'own the platform'/'commoditize your complement' files. Imgur built itself on the Reddit platform; then the platform decided, like Twitter or Facebook, to eat it. Now Imgur is going to be pushed even faster along the wheel of reincarnation for filesharing/image-hosting websites... Too bad for any of the artists or photographers or content-creators who were depending on Imgur, but, 'Mister you knew I was a scorpion when you picked me up' as the story goes.

jasonkostempski 9y ago

Where else can an image be posted without having to create an account? That's not parasitic, that's a perfect service if I've ever seen one.

adventured 9y ago
Everyone here is taking offense to the word parasite, when it's nearly the perfect definition of the relationship from the first day. Imgur couldn't survive without Reddit, it grew and fed off of Reddit, and it was almost exclusively dependent on Reddit for its early users. I think a lot of people in this thread don't know that one of the primary definitions of parasite can include not harming the host and generically mean: "an organism living in, with, or on another organism." And if you question the dependency part of Imgur being a parasite, just wait until you see how things go for Imgur the next few years post Reddit handling its own images. One can thrive without the other, it's obvious which that is.
- jasonkostempski 9y ago
  People don't generally use the parasite metaphor unless they're intention is to paint an ugly picture. Anyway, people still use Imgur very heavily in Reddit comments. I don't know if that's because reddit doesn't have a better alternative at the moment or if people just don't know how to use it.

ajross 9y ago

> Imgur is essentially a parasite upon reddit This is true in exactly the same sense that "pastebins are essentially parasites on freenode". Which is to say, kinda not.

TazeTSchnitzel 9y ago
That's an unfair comparison. Imgur was originally created specifically to be an image host for reddit users, and succeeding in that market, slowly tried to become a reddit competitor on the back of reddit traffic. Pastebins are merely text hosts.

munificent 9y ago

It started as a symbiotic relationship. Reddit had no good image hosting solution and it was a real problem. Before Imgur came along, you'd often find image posts where the link was dead, dog slow, or took you to a page filled with ads and malware. Imgur made Reddit better. If anything, Reddit was the parasite because its users used a ton of Imgur bandwidth and by direct linking, didn't give anything in return. Once Imgur decided to actually try to become a sustainable business, they had to change how that worked by trying to ensure that people coming to the site also saw ads. Then they started building their own community and working to become a direct competitor to Reddit. At that point, the right biological metaphor is probably too organisms with the same food source in the same ecosystem, competing for resources. Given that, it's no surprise that they are both working to sever ties to each other.

komali2 9y ago
But that was back in a time when reddit really was a news-sharing site. Huff huff get off my lawn and all, but back in the day it was more akin to hackernews, and so the "problem" of hosting images wasn't a problem at all - you'd be linking to articles that had their own image hosting solution. Nowadays it's a heavy picture, meme, whatever browser. Makes sense that imgur is trying to take over that niche.
- f4rker 9y ago
  It was a problem. All the old image host sucked a lot.
- cakedoggie 9y ago
  Was it ever a news sharing site? I think you might be mis-remembering history.
  - placeybordeaux 9y ago
    Honestly before RES came out the proportion of images on reddit was very low. Going back further before subreddits I remember it as largely just news articles and discussions, much like HN.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]