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Imgur recently started doing something really annoying on their mobile site. If you keep scrolling past the picture you were linked to, it shows a bunch of othe
by novia 9y ago
Imgur recently started doing something really annoying on their mobile site. If you keep scrolling past the picture you were linked to, it shows a bunch of other pictures that were not posted by the person who posted the first picture. These extra pictures seem to be generally in the same category as the picture that was meant to be linked to, so if the original picture is a slightly risque photo, the photos that follow might be straight up porn. It's very annoying to me.
- ortusdux 9y agoThat is still better than the giant animated cat paw they had a year ago. It was active just before reddit went live with their image service and I imagine it was a desperate grab for some last minute conversions. https://www.reddit.com/r/IgnorantImgur/comments/4aqf2r/fuck_this_fucking_cat_paw/ https://www.reddit.com/r/IgnorantImgur/comments/4aqf2r/fuck_...
- bhandziuk 9y agoThat was really surprising to me. Recently saw some picture with a woman in it (very SFW picture, nothing risky about it at all) then scrolled down and BAM immediately very NSFW. I thought I did something wrong but I think it was imgur who screwed up now.
- devoply 9y agoFortunately this is an easy thing for Imgur to solve in 2017 if they really want to with machine learning. Enough is available online that almost anyone could do it at this point.
- brookside 9y agoIndeed, this is a solved problem. See: Not Hotdog.
- fictioncircle 9y agoYou don't even need to do that. Just have people opt in for NSFW content on their accounts. Leave them opted out by default (or public). There is no reason it shouldn't be a human controlled flag.
- Endy 9y agoThere is a Mature filter on imgur already that's human-determined. The problem is that people posting pictures will mark things mature unnecessarily, and there have been trolls who put up hardcore pornography without marking the image as mature. The problem is, as always, trusting humans to do the right thing without massive consequence for doing the wrong thing.
- bhandziuk 9y agoI agree that should be the default but getting the data to do it automatically is hard if you're going to ask users to mark things NSFW on their own accord.
- weego 9y agoThat was my biggest wtf when I saw that, along with how they managed to grind a macbookpro to a halt just showing an album of a dozen or so pictures on the page.
- zeveb 9y agoMine is that imgur simply doesn't work much of the time with JavaScript disabled. They serve images. Inline images have been working with HTML for over twenty years now, and somehow imgur breaks them. It's madness!
- criley2 9y agoProbably intentionally. They have a very, very, very large and aggressive javascript package. They probably intentionally break the site for anyone who doesn't want their script payload. I doubt they can make any money without it anyway.
- charred_toast 9y agoYes I noticed that too; it's most likely an image recognition algorithm paired with a AI tag parsing program generating a related image.
- digi_owl 9y agoIs there an equivalent to "every program expands to read email" for web services? Because just about every image hosting service seems to go down this feature creep route.
- Sir_Substance 9y agoIt's because image hosting is a nothing business. It's basically one step up from serving text in the list of bread-and-butter internet functions. Sure, there's some complexity in doing it at scale, but it doesn't actually need to be done at scale to be done easily. 50 different small image hosts is as good as one big one from the perspective of end users. As a result, it's /really/ hard to get people to pay for it, and you cause exoduses by trying to embed advertising. The only thing you can do is grasp for features to validate your business.
- chii 9y agofunny how nobody wants to pay for bread and butter functionality, and yet the internet survives on such bread and butter.
- Sir_Substance 9y agoI'm really not sure what point you're making. It's not surprising that Reddit rolled their own image hosting. In general, most major websites have done that, because it's easy to do. If your business relies upon image hosting, why would you trust others to do it? Anyway, Reddit gets paid via ads and gold, so people are paying for it. They just won't pay for it on it's own, because image hosting on it's own is not really worth much. You could make your own perfectly adequate image host on a raspberry pi. Reddit's value is not in it's image hosting. Nor is Wikipedias or 4chans. Imgur picked a shit business model, the internet will survive their inevitable passing.
- __jal 9y agoI read the OP as pointing out that image hosting, like email, is an awful business to be in, but is something on which tons of other services depend. Think of it as analogous to sanitation. Being in the garbage hauling business isn't something that really revs that many people up, but civilization literally depends on it.
- SN76477 9y agoI use imgur for work sometimes, and this throws my team off every time.
- zkms 9y agoalso if you accidentally hit the left or right arrow (which i have an unfortunate habit of doing when on a website, it's sorta part of my idle animation).
- revelation 9y agoThe most offensive feature is how it tricks novice or unsuspecting users into "sharing" their just uploaded image to the "Imgur community". It's a big green button after the upload. If you click it, not only is your image now public but you'll be ridiculed by imgurs army of sexist unemployed neckbeards that they refer to as "community".
- DanBC 9y agoIt's a shame, because for the first two months the community was nice.
- mackal 9y agoTheir apps also suck. Uploading on mobile has extra steps pushing their app, but then their app sends push notices for shit I don't care about.
- bbrian 9y agoI use imgapp for imgur. It's not perfect but it's better! What I'd love would be images to be marked as seen so I don't have to scroll past again, and I'd like it to be a meme social network so I can share the lolz with my friends without inundating group chats or Facebook/Instagram. https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/imgapp-for-imgur/id501416446?mt=8 https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/imgapp-for-imgur/id501416446...
- conradfr 9y agoWhat is really annoying is that it makes you think you're watching an album but as the image is not related it's confusing.
- chimeracoder 9y ago> What is really annoying is that it makes you think you're watching an album but as the image is not related it's confusing. They even do it with albums, which is unbelievably annoying on mobile devices. If you don't click the "Load X remaining images", and just keep scrolling, instead you see related images from other posts. More than once, I've clicked through a link, gotten confused why the fourth or fifth image doesn't quite seem to match the original description, and then realized that I never loaded the full album. I don't know who made that UI decision, or why. I can't think of a single good reason for it, because it doesn't even incentivize you to click through images to see other albums.
- rasz 9y agoThey do it even on normal website. Iv seen a couple of cases of twitch streamers showing viewer submitted fanart (pre screened), and the MOST VIRAL IMAGES sidebar had some almost pron 'click to look at tits' suggestions :/
- drzaiusapelord 9y agoThis isn't just annoying, its a dark pattern to get people to scroll their listings instead of going back to reddit. Its one of the more dishonest interfaces I've used. Worse, it just doesn't do this, it purposely collapses galleries that before would auto-expand, so its easy to miss the expand button and keep scrolling onto other galleries and pics.
- tyingq 9y agoReddit killed the model that allows them to be financially viable and "not annoying". I suspect the alternative is to shut down. The bit of community that exists solely within imgur can't be enough to subsidize the bandwidth costs of everyone else, can it? Thus far every image hosting site has gone the cycle of initially good, annoying attempts at monetizing, then shutting down. Which, of course, leaves a trail of forum posts, comments, etc, with broken images and links. I wish some entity with deep pockets would just offer it as a public service / loss leader so we could stop the cycle. Google, Amazon, etc.
- lisper 9y agoOr you could, you know, pay for it.
- joosters 9y agoThe problem is that it requires everyone to pay for it. Any one individual will get no noticeable benefit by paying for an image hosting site, since all the rest of the content they view will be from free sites. As a result, no-one pays for these sites. It's a vicious circle.
- ChrisArchitect 9y agoI was paying for it, then they removed that option and went 'free' for everyone....with ads. Never understood why really....and always always wondered about the bandwidth etc
- tyingq 9y agoEven if I'm willing to pay, there aren't enough other people to make it viable. Plus, a large part of the value is the low friction upload.
- yjftsjthsd-h 9y agoThat doesn't make sense to me. You could do this now with S3 (although you might need to write the slick interface); scaling shouldn't break anything, though pricing might need to correspond to how much you upload.
- moomin 9y agoGrief, their mobile site is horrible. I tried using it today after reading this article. I won't be tomorrow.
- sametmax 9y agoIt's ok. It's just images. Nothing important is hosted on those sites, and only on those, so that it will be lost forever when they close. It's kinda a good system really: investors pay to host our images. So the money is here. The service is here. Free hosting for your pictures for 1 or 2 years paid by VC is a cool with me.
- rhaps0dy 9y agoWould it be possible and good to use desktop users' browsers as WebTorrent hosts for images? This would make the users pay for their browsing, allowing for the experience to be without ads.
- takeda 9y agoIsn't what projects like https://freenetproject.org/ https://freenetproject.org/ or https://www.torproject.org/ https://www.torproject.org/ essentially do?
- rhaps0dy 9y agoI don't know about freenet, but definitely not tor. Tor uses a kinda-p2p net to mask the destination of your traffic, but doesn't reduce your bandwidth hosting bill.
- monochromatic 9y agoThey also got rid of the link to the upload page. They really want you to download the app.
- vit05 9y agoIt's funny because they've quintupled the team of engineers to make changes that most people are criticizing. The strategy of Youtube to offer similar content and hold the user for a longer time on the site works because they are very good at understanding the average user's taste. But Imgur is very weak, totally dependent on the information the uploader provides, not from the viewer. They could have grown in markets where Reddit is weak like South America, Asia and Africa as a totally independent and mobile-focused product. But they make little effort in that direction.
- thekashifmalik 9y agoI know right? I noticed this too and it really put me off the platform.