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

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/