3 ms·

This is a naive assessment. Imgur is running a business and with that comes all the surrounding cruft Harry is complaining about. I hate including marketing and

This is a naive assessment. Imgur is running a business and with that comes all the surrounding cruft Harry is complaining about. I hate including marketing and tag management tools in my project at work but that is what the business wants.

buboard 7y ago
You don't care to optimize those ? Don't you guys realize that snappiness is one of the core reasons people keep using a webapp?
csswizardry 7y ago
OP here. My beef wasn’t and isn’t with the ads or monetisation: it’s with the engineering decision to bury the product’s primary content in a 1.2MB JS application. The image itself just needs to be an `IMG` element in a server rendered page—ads, tracking, comments, upvotes, etc. can and should be all loaded as secondary content. My beef is with a ‘mobile-optimised’ image hosting platform taking over 40s to display an image on mobile.
- halfjoking 7y ago
  Imgur used to be just an img tag. They found out they couldn't make money that way. Eventually the images became the 110th most important thing on the page. That wasn't an engineering decision - it was a business decision made to force people to switch to the app. Ever try browsing imgur on mobile web? You can't - it keeps popping up the 'download the app' button. Infinite scrolling breaks because of that popup (by design). If you don't want to support a business that tries to force people to use their app by making the mobile web version horrible you don't have to.
  - jml7c5 7y ago
    >If you don't want to support a business that tries to force people to use their app by making the mobile web version horrible you don't have to. There's no hypocrisy in using something while complaining that it's absolutely terrible. (Particularly if there isn't a real alternative; "don't ever open any link to any image hosted on imgur even though you'd prefer the person had hosted it somewhere else" is not reasonable.)

buboard 7y ago

You don't care to optimize those ? Don't you guys realize that snappiness is one of the core reasons people keep using a webapp?

csswizardry 7y ago

OP here. My beef wasn’t and isn’t with the ads or monetisation: it’s with the engineering decision to bury the product’s primary content in a 1.2MB JS application. The image itself just needs to be an `IMG` element in a server rendered page—ads, tracking, comments, upvotes, etc. can and should be all loaded as secondary content. My beef is with a ‘mobile-optimised’ image hosting platform taking over 40s to display an image on mobile.

halfjoking 7y ago
Imgur used to be just an img tag. They found out they couldn't make money that way. Eventually the images became the 110th most important thing on the page. That wasn't an engineering decision - it was a business decision made to force people to switch to the app. Ever try browsing imgur on mobile web? You can't - it keeps popping up the 'download the app' button. Infinite scrolling breaks because of that popup (by design). If you don't want to support a business that tries to force people to use their app by making the mobile web version horrible you don't have to.
- jml7c5 7y ago
  >If you don't want to support a business that tries to force people to use their app by making the mobile web version horrible you don't have to. There's no hypocrisy in using something while complaining that it's absolutely terrible. (Particularly if there isn't a real alternative; "don't ever open any link to any image hosted on imgur even though you'd prefer the person had hosted it somewhere else" is not reasonable.)