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You'd think that all the recent technological advancements (compression, cheaper hosting etc) would make a difference here. To me it seems like it's not necess

You'd think that all the recent technological advancements (compression, cheaper hosting etc) would make a difference here. To me it seems like it's not necessarily budgeting issue but natural greed kicking in. I'm sure imgur people are not tightening their belts over this.

govolckurself 4y ago
You can't host something like Imgur for free. No technological advancement can get over the fact that even electricity still costs money. And at their volume, they have nontrivial expenses. I have no idea how or where they're hosted, but my hobbyist hosting budget tops out around $20 a month. Beyond that, either pay me or leave.
- sumtechguy 4y ago
  Take google for example. I think they got big at first for 2 big reasons. 1 their landing page was tiny I think the whole thing was maybe 20-50k on first load and 1k on second. It was fast to load. Then on top of that their search results were better. But that tiny front page made the thing look amazing. Remember this was at a time when their nearest competitors had ad laden bloated home pages that took a minute to render. That also helped them keep their costs wildly low at first. As network/hosts/drives/people costs money. They threw all of that out later on though as they took over the ad network. Starting off with 'fast loading ads'.
- hbn 4y ago
  I wonder if there's enough demand for a good, free image host that someone could make one that ran completely on community donations. There are plenty of podcasts on Patreon that pull in tens of thousands of dollars per month just from like $5-$20 monthly pledges. That should be enough to not only cover costs but pay devs. Could even give some perks to backers if it was some incentive.
  - Joker_vD 4y ago
    That's a pretty simple solution: if some service inevitably deteriorates in quality when run for a profit, then run it as a non-profit! I mean, isn't that how imgur actually started? The Reddit team wanted a decent image hosting so they made it and just accepted that running it would cost them money so they'll have to finance it from the profits of their main business. But then apparently profit-optimization kicked in... There are quite a lot of examples in the past (all the way to the Roman empire) of rich people spending their money on community projects just because they wanted some things to exist, not to make even more money.
    - samus 4y ago
      Rich people and companies will typically stop doing that once the costs explode and eat all their income. Unlike governments, they can't exactly print money...
  - nemothekid 4y ago
    There is a huge graveyard of image hosts - it's not for lack of trying. There are all the pomf.se clones that are community supported (like catbox.moe) which don't even break even from patreon. The problem I see is that once you get even to the scale of a 10th of size of imgur your hosting bills (storage + bandwidth) will cross into the 10s of thousands per month, which would require you to be in the top 1% of Patreon users. I don't think you'd find people lining up to donate for such a service, especially given there are so many copycats.
    - hbn 4y ago
      Well I was going off what the above parent comment was saying, that recent advances in compression + cheaper hosting should make it more viable. I don't know much about what any of those costs cause I've never run anything that needs a lot of serving costs at scale. So I'm guessing even with that it's still too expensive? On the other hand, I think Imgur also pushed way more traffic upon itself by trying to make itself into another social media site. Like, if it just stayed an image host it probably could have stayed more niche and wouldn't have had thousands of casual internet users scrolling through images all day at work.

govolckurself 4y ago

You can't host something like Imgur for free. No technological advancement can get over the fact that even electricity still costs money. And at their volume, they have nontrivial expenses. I have no idea how or where they're hosted, but my hobbyist hosting budget tops out around $20 a month. Beyond that, either pay me or leave.

sumtechguy 4y ago
Take google for example. I think they got big at first for 2 big reasons. 1 their landing page was tiny I think the whole thing was maybe 20-50k on first load and 1k on second. It was fast to load. Then on top of that their search results were better. But that tiny front page made the thing look amazing. Remember this was at a time when their nearest competitors had ad laden bloated home pages that took a minute to render. That also helped them keep their costs wildly low at first. As network/hosts/drives/people costs money. They threw all of that out later on though as they took over the ad network. Starting off with 'fast loading ads'.
hbn 4y ago
I wonder if there's enough demand for a good, free image host that someone could make one that ran completely on community donations. There are plenty of podcasts on Patreon that pull in tens of thousands of dollars per month just from like $5-$20 monthly pledges. That should be enough to not only cover costs but pay devs. Could even give some perks to backers if it was some incentive.
- Joker_vD 4y ago
  That's a pretty simple solution: if some service inevitably deteriorates in quality when run for a profit, then run it as a non-profit! I mean, isn't that how imgur actually started? The Reddit team wanted a decent image hosting so they made it and just accepted that running it would cost them money so they'll have to finance it from the profits of their main business. But then apparently profit-optimization kicked in... There are quite a lot of examples in the past (all the way to the Roman empire) of rich people spending their money on community projects just because they wanted some things to exist, not to make even more money.
  - samus 4y ago
    Rich people and companies will typically stop doing that once the costs explode and eat all their income. Unlike governments, they can't exactly print money...
- nemothekid 4y ago
  There is a huge graveyard of image hosts - it's not for lack of trying. There are all the pomf.se clones that are community supported (like catbox.moe) which don't even break even from patreon. The problem I see is that once you get even to the scale of a 10th of size of imgur your hosting bills (storage + bandwidth) will cross into the 10s of thousands per month, which would require you to be in the top 1% of Patreon users. I don't think you'd find people lining up to donate for such a service, especially given there are so many copycats.
  - hbn 4y ago
    Well I was going off what the above parent comment was saying, that recent advances in compression + cheaper hosting should make it more viable. I don't know much about what any of those costs cause I've never run anything that needs a lot of serving costs at scale. So I'm guessing even with that it's still too expensive? On the other hand, I think Imgur also pushed way more traffic upon itself by trying to make itself into another social media site. Like, if it just stayed an image host it probably could have stayed more niche and wouldn't have had thousands of casual internet users scrolling through images all day at work.