7 ms·

What's interesting about imgur, and telling of how times changed, was that it was created mostly to fill the gap in unreliable uploading of images to reddit. W

• jtokoph 1y ago
  My guess would be cost. I don’t think Reddit had much, if any, revenue at the time and images would likely require orders of magnitude more storage.
  • AngryData 1y ago
    Yeah, when imgur came about reddit was 99% text on the site. Hosting images would have been a huge step up in cost considering the user count. Then of course people realized that if imgur can make money on ads thanks to reddit's traffic, reddit could potentially make even more and it has been all down hill from there.
    • pak9rabid 1y ago
      Not to mention the liability of hosting users' media, which would have needed costly moderation to ensure nothing too illegal made its way in.
      • NewJazz 1y ago
        Nowadays just hosting text can get you in trouble if it is too pornographic in nature.
        • 0cf8612b2e1e 1y ago
          It’s probably now a lot easier to detect porn and automatically reject it. Set the filter to lean towards rejection for edge cases. You will lose out on racy bikini pictures, but maybe that is an acceptable compromise.
      • hellojesus 1y ago
        How much protection do platforms have against user media submissions? If you implement a dcma/illegal report button tbat instantly takes the media down, maybe even logically, is that sufficient?
        • Analemma_ 1y ago
          It might, but then you’ve created a whole new set of problems: if anyone can take down anyone else’s content with one click, they’ll do it against anybody they dislike just for the hell of it (this was the case on Tumblr for a brief period: the Report button almost automatically banned the user, until they immediately realized this was unworkable). So if you don’t want everyone to ban everyone, you need a moderation team anyway to handle false reports, and you’re right back where you started.
          • hellojesus 1y ago
            Agreed. I was mostly asking about any legal issues. The problems are like you stated. We even see this happen with invalid dcma complaints in moderation-heavy environments. There are certainly safety rails such as rate limited reports per user, etc., but then you need some moderation anyway. But if the legal requirement is, "take down media if the fbi comes knocking", maybe it's just easier to deal with it that way if there is no budget for moderation.
            • efilife 1y ago
              fyi it's DMCA
    • beAbU 1y ago
      Reddit was a link aggregator till the recent shitty redesign. So image posts were just a post with a URL. You needed RES if you wanted to open the image inline with the post and comments.
  • koakuma-chan 1y ago
    Isn't storage cheap? Telegram advertises as free unlimited storage.
    • Scaevolus 1y ago
      Storage and bandwidth were way more expensive in 2009.
    • llm_nerd 1y ago
      Storage multiplies and becomes more expensive once you're replicating across regions, backing up into an eternally growing corpus, and so on. But the biggest impediment by far were internet transport costs. I mean, they're still onerous for a lot of media-heavy sites, but it was much worse at the time. Offloading that to third parties made an incredible amount of sense. It's actually kind of bizarre that there is an Imgur "community". I know the operation ran at a massive money-losing proposition for quite some time.
  • akho 1y ago
    And yet imgur, with no revenue at all, managed to fill that gap.
    • fckgw 1y ago
      They made hotlinking increasingly difficult, turned the site into a social network and sold ads against content. It is no longer a "image hosting site" the way it was back then, it was going bankrupt as well.
      • kjkjadksj 1y ago
        It still is the same old imgur for making posts. One button to upload, you get served your album link, right click image for direct link. Same as its been for 15 years. Just used it as such last week.
        • LikesPwsh 1y ago
          Imgur deleted a huge number of old reddit posts when retroactively banning nudity. They broke the social contract of being a trusted host, that's the biggest change.
• add-sub-mul-div 1y ago
  Also it was a different internet. We hadn't fully internalized that Reddit was becoming more a stupid meme/image/video dump primarily than a place for discussion of articles.
• whywhywhywhy 1y ago
  > What the hell was reddit doing that they didn't immediately implement an image hosting feature Maybe partly because it wasn't Imgur that added image hosting to reddit it was more reddit always had images they were just on ImageShack, PhotoBucket and there was another reddit darling one who's name escapes me before imgur which I think added ads or started deleting images that caused Imgur to be created. So Imgur was more just the most successful in a long line of image hosts and the only one to successfully transplant reddit users to their own thing.
  • gryfft 1y ago
    I remember waffleimages
    • datpiff 1y ago
      that was somethingawful
  • birdman3131 1y ago
    Tinypic maybe? I know we used it a lot on Gaia back in the day.
    • hnuser123456 1y ago
      Might've been Minus
      • fckgw 1y ago
        Yeah, that's it! I remember Min.us because they had a larger file size limit so you could actually post GIFs there where longer ones wouldn't upload to Imgur.
  • deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
• barrkel 1y ago
  Once you start hosting images, you open up a whole bucket of worms for moderation, separate from handling storage, bandwidth etc. I can see plenty of rationale for deferring that, knowing that you can always add it later with an easier to use UI than going to a third party site.
• jart 1y ago
  Imgur was created because ImageShack was what everyone used and they'd gotten increasingly terrible. In the beginning, ImageShack was good. But images were expensive to host in the 2000's. So they moved very quickly into the exploit phase, and they exploited it hard. ImageShack removed images that became too popular, which created maximal outrage with the most people, just as content was going viral. Images hosted on ImageShack would randomly get corrupted, and it'd be difficult to reach support to fix this. ImageShack was annoying. You'd try to go directly to the .jpg URL and it'd load the HTML website with lots of ads. In order to upload to ImageShack, you'd have to register an account and potentially pay money. Imgur was a breath of fresh air. They didn't do any of those things. It was just the simple reliable free image upload service people wanted. So it took over ImageShack's role almost overnight. Imgur eventually rolled in their own exploitation, but they did it a lot more moderately than ImageShack.
• duped 1y ago
  > What the hell was reddit doing that they didn't immediately implement an image hosting feature to keep users on the platform Reddit was a hub for illegal porn so presumably, they didn't want to face a crackdown for hosting that kind of content. It still is, but nsfw posts are banned from /r/all now.
  • Jleagle 1y ago
    I don't think any of the porn on Reddit is illegal.
    • Aurornis 1y ago
      Illegal posts were never allowed, but I imagine any site focused on sharing porn is going to become filled with copyrighted content. They also had a lot of severely creepy subreddits involving underage children or adult photos talents and shared with consent. It was really bad. I left the site for years because that type of content was everywhere.
    • mock-possum 1y ago
      Ohhhhhh think again
    • duped 1y ago
      Except for all the revenge porn, creep shots, and the infamous "fappening" over 10 years ago
      • cindyllm 1y ago
        [dead]
• Aurornis 1y ago
  I was an early Reddit user. Very early Reddit was a popular spot for programming discussion because it was mostly tech people using it. That quickly flipped, as /r/NSFW became the most popular subreddit. You could avoid it by browsing as a guest or by curating your feed, but porn was everywhere. Early Reddit also had a strong attitude about minimal moderation. The early days were characterized by a feeling that anything goes as long as it wasn’t illegal or too extreme to defend. Combined with the popularity of porn on the website it created strange situations where a lot of subreddits were focused on things like legal-enough photos of underage children. There were also a lot of weird alt-right and white supremacist forums. There was an unofficial (if I recall correctly) “Subreddit of the Day” that attracted controversy because it actually highlighted one of the “jailbait” subreddits and even a white supremacist subreddit. So if you were there at the time, it was obvious why Reddit wasn’t going to host their own images: It would have been a legal nightmare with all of the porn (copyrighted material), the creepy underage stuff, and white supremacist memes Reddit did a decent job of containing this stuff out of view of the average user and later removing it from the site. It took many years. If you peeked at /r/all or browsed new during the early days it would have been clear why image hosting would have been out of the question at the time.
  • giraffe_lady 1y ago
    I was a mod of a few semipopular subs back then and this is accurate. Understating it even.
  • logifail 1y ago
    > The early days were characterized by a feeling that anything goes as long as it wasn’t illegal or too extreme to defend. Q: Wouldn't most of us want to defend the right to publish content that's "not illegal"?
    • HeyImAlex 1y ago
      Reddit’s eventual livelihood would be based on selling ads, so legality is not the line they were aiming for.
    • 1y ago
• paradox460 1y ago
  One of the other reddit admins will likely have a better answer, but at the time I worked for them (10-11), the answer was it was a complexity the reddit team didn't want to have to deal with. Running an image host takes a lot of effort. You have to deal with removals, content policing, and the other nasties, as well as just having to deal with the sheer volume of data, which was a much larger concern in the 2010 era internet than it is now. Reddit at the time just wanted to focus on being a link and text post site, much like HN is.
• exreddit 1y ago
  Image hosting used to be expensive, so forums avoided it and image hosts were scummy and filled with ads. Imgur was a first mover when cloud hosting and CDNs meant it could be relatively cheap for a small shop to do quality image hosting. Meanwhile, reddit was a forgotten subsidiary of Condé Nast working out of a corner in Wired's SF office. Jedberg will chime in, but when imgur was founded, reddit's handful of engineers were busy keeping the site from falling over. They didn't have time to build out image hosting.
• dec0dedab0de 1y ago
  The other responses are correct, but they're not including an important detail. Reddit was originally a replacement for all of the niche bulletin board sites that had cropped up around the internet. It was a way to create and manage a community without the cost and technical expertise required for phpBB. It also gave you access to existing users without them having to create a new account. All of those previous Bulletin Board sites did not host images themselves either.
• ChrisArchitect 1y ago
  Doesn't beg the question. There's a whole evolving history there. Reddit didn't need to 'keep users on the platform' because they weren't leaving it. Most images on imgur shared on reddit (and a billion forums elsewhere) were direct links to the images, they weren't going to any sort of imgur landing page or whatever. Imgur just slowly developed that later and surprisingly developed its own also-ran community onsite. Similarly over on twitter without any image hosting capabilities let third party sites like twitpic host images for years before evetually developing their own service. Twitpic eventually caved under the load of hosting so much stuff without income and it was good that Twitter was successful enough to take it all on directly.
• stefantalpalaru 1y ago
  [dead]
• tw04 1y ago
  > What the hell was reddit doing that they didn't immediately implement an image hosting feature to keep users on the platform? Image hosting is insanely expensive and they couldn’t afford to do it or were smart enough not to. Every image host that added paid accounts or ads all over the place had a horrible reputation at the time (see photobucket). They likely wanted to avoid ruining their reputation before going public. Heck even Imgur caught heat when they needed to start paying the bills.
• iamthejuan 1y ago
  I remember that time on Reddit.
• deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]