4 ms·

Imgur was founded as a reddit-friendly image host. "The new site for reddit images, written by a redditor. None of the slow ad-laden crap of imageshack!" Now,

by judk 13y ago

Imgur was founded as a reddit-friendly image host. "The new site for reddit images, written by a redditor. None of the slow ad-laden crap of imageshack!" Now, it is slow ad-laden crap, to the point that I just hit Back button after hitting a link and seeing the page frame load before the image. It has been fascinating to watch the common startup pattern of "I am one of us, making our life awesome" messaging covering a standard 2-year bait-and-switch free product flip. Imgur will be dumped as fast as all the image hosting sites it replaced on reddit.

Grue3 13y ago
>reddit-friendly Exactly. Not Facebook-friendly. Not Twitter-friendly. Not Google-Plus-friendly Those can host images themselves.
brubaker 13y ago
Except that it isn't..either of those. So basically still nothing like imageshack.
mzs 13y ago
Back in 2012 Sarah basically said try DnD when the simple choose a file to upload /?noFlash page went away. The flash uploader didn't work on FreeBSD any more and DnD on FF would upload the file and then return an error. She nor anyone else never replied again after I tried to follow-up with that. Imgur had changed.
rgbrgb 13y ago
But isn't it incredibly naive to think you can get something for nothing? I don't really see this as a bait and switch, a site like that needs ads so that they can keep it free for users. Imgur tried a donation based model early on but it just didn't work (costs exceeded donations because donations don't scale linearly with bandwidth costs). I'm not really satisfied with the status quo of giant data silos profiting off of user submitted content but the extreme opposite (always directly linking to images) isn't sustainable either. I'm working on an ad-based image site [1] that I hope will be perceived as a little friendlier to users but your disdain for ads is not uncommon. Do you have an alternative to ads for making high traffic image hosting sustainable? [1]: https://surfer.io/ https://surfer.io/

by judk 13y ago

Grue3 13y ago

>reddit-friendly Exactly. Not Facebook-friendly. Not Twitter-friendly. Not Google-Plus-friendly Those can host images themselves.

brubaker 13y ago

Except that it isn't..either of those. So basically still nothing like imageshack.

mzs 13y ago

Back in 2012 Sarah basically said try DnD when the simple choose a file to upload /?noFlash page went away. The flash uploader didn't work on FreeBSD any more and DnD on FF would upload the file and then return an error. She nor anyone else never replied again after I tried to follow-up with that. Imgur had changed.

rgbrgb 13y ago

But isn't it incredibly naive to think you can get something for nothing? I don't really see this as a bait and switch, a site like that needs ads so that they can keep it free for users. Imgur tried a donation based model early on but it just didn't work (costs exceeded donations because donations don't scale linearly with bandwidth costs). I'm not really satisfied with the status quo of giant data silos profiting off of user submitted content but the extreme opposite (always directly linking to images) isn't sustainable either. I'm working on an ad-based image site [1] that I hope will be perceived as a little friendlier to users but your disdain for ads is not uncommon. Do you have an alternative to ads for making high traffic image hosting sustainable? [1]: https://surfer.io/ https://surfer.io/