How Imgur Became a Megacommunity

If there's an image host as clean, neat, and fast as imgur I'm not aware of it.

You don't have to interact with the "community" part of it ever if you don't want to.

When using it to view images on reddit, RES loads images inline and you never see imgur at all.

The only time I see the site is when uploading images, and that's extremely slick and fast.

It also sometimes includes an animated cat paw that comes up from the bottom right and swipes the image to the next one for you. It's very convenient. I really enjoy that feature. /s

It's funny that it's following almost the exact same path Photobucket and then Tinypic did.

>"here's a great easy way to host your images"

>"we need to add some ads to support the site"

>"we aren't making enough"

>"f' it"

What's wrong with the today version? The image you posted isn't self explanatory to me. In my experience imgur is still really damn fast. It's evolved/grown to serve a community of user who love it. What's wrong with that

It's definitely more about a social network instead of just uploading images to post elsewhere.

Millions of dollars can change lots of strongly held opinions

Your main beef is that Alan was "either naive or not truthful" or that things changed over the course of 7 years?

I understand that the community part bans those things; when you upload an image, you choose whether or not to submit it to the imgur community thing

Pictures are currently being policed by the right holders but I think that there isn't a big why would right holders really care unlike Music and Movies/TV Shows have a strong financial argument.

Pictures seem to be the opposite effect with individual copyright holders caring about if their pictures are stolen and big media only caring if they are liable or not.

Yeah, imgur's primary raison d'etre was hosting porn from nsfw subreddits -- including the worst of the worst like jailbait and creepshots.

And, while "hate speech" is in the eye of the beholder, I've stumbled on far more misogyny, racism, and general assholery than I'm particularly comfortable with on imgur--particularly when it comes to sharing images hosted on imgur with friends on facebook (it now redirects links from facebook to the community discussion page for an image, if there is one). It may or may not be worse than reddit in that regard, as reddit varies wildly based on the moderation policies and practices of the subreddits. imgur seems to have no "safe space"...you can stumble on a shitshow at any moment, and a seemingly normal conversation can go shitshaped at any time.

I really dislike the community part of Imgur as well, mostly because the people seem weird and childish, but also because it fails to add any value.

Attempting to add context is a good idea, but Imgur fails at that. Images on Imgur isn't tagged or titled right, which makes search completely useless. If you see an image, and want to find it, even later that same day, you can pretty much forget about it. The community part of Imgur might even make the problem worse, because the users just stay within the confines of Imgur, meaning they don't feel the need for tagging, good titles and search.

Take this example: http://imgur.com/gallery/X4R7y the title is "useful for arguments", except it's just a bunch of jumbled gif, there are no useful tags, no discover-ability or search-ability.

The community part shows up, because regardless of the original intent, sites do need to make money. There are no real way for sites like Imgur to make money, other than attempting to sell ads. Having a community helps sell those ads.

You can't really make money without a community/context. What value is the non .jpg page if all it has is ads?

Though it's true, Imgur is worse off for it, the reason (I suspect) for "community" is to drive income.

I'll give you an account on https://sr.ht if you like. I think it meets what you're looking for.

> Whats funny to me, is that I stopped liking imgur when when added the community/context stuff. I liked it when it was small and simple. It's gotten so bloated that it's become a pain to use.

Yep, its a pain on mobile, is bloated (so non direct image links like i.imgur/garbage.jpg) load slowly. The sponsored content is annoying too with the adds.

I also find it ironic that the Imgur people hate "reddit" and redditors, even though imgur was pretty much made to service reddit.

Until quite recently, you could append ".jpg" to get just the image, without all the comments and ads.

His strategy seems to have been to provide the images for reddit to comment and vote upon - and then add those features himself. The outsourcee eventually owning the customer.

It's one of the most 'demanding' website too. It's my favorite web browser pressure test these days. Who's imgur's imgur now ?

I get the impression that back then, nobody at Conde Nast really cared what those "weird reddit guys" were doing. The team was mostly just struggling just to keep the lights on.

During the Yishan/Ellen saga, I had wondered whether or not they would shortlist Alan Schaaf for the CEO job given how well Imgur had done and the symbiotic nature between the two companies.

surely imgur is an epiphyte at worst (and a symbiont at best) rather than a parasite. its existence didn't cost reddit anything (other than perhaps an opportunity to do it themselves, which they could have at any time they wanted, and did not).

Before Imgur, it was hit-and-miss as to whether an image would load, either because the Imageshack etc would take it down for bandwidth reasons, or the host would get crushed under traffic load.

Think about how many major subreddits exist because Imgur provides free, reliable hosting. Imgur allowed Reddit to scale its audience massively in quick, easy-to-digest content areas... and Imgur did that for Reddit for free.

Can you imagine how much gratitude that would engender?

I remember that thread. I actually think they took my advice to heart.

On the other hand, they seem to be going down the road of what other image hosting sites have done in the past. Large, intrusive ads. Most recently, that cat that pops up on mobile that covers the content with a large paw encouraging you to swipe to see the next picture. Focusing on building a community instead of focusing on image hosting. Building value-add stuff like their meme generator while continuing to avoid the actual difficult problems. Like having constant infrastructure issues that keeps their site inaccessible for hours at a time more often than they should be.

I appreciate that it's difficult (costly) to do image hosting, and it's nice that they accept hotlinking and other activities that produce no revenue for them, but the Imgur that we have today is a far cry from the Imgur that was promised seven years ago.