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Comment by seanalltogether | Hacker News Reader

I still remember how cautiously negative[1] I was toward the creator in his initial unveiling on reddit many years ago. Contracting at photobucket and seeing the state of media hosting at the time made me very pessimistic of the sector. I'm happy they've grown as large as they have since that moment and broken away from what other image hosting services were doing.

1. https://www.reddit.com/r/reddit.com/comments/7zlyd/my_gift_t...

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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.

I noticed they've made it much harder to hot link, now. I tried to post a direct link to an image on facebook, and no matter what link I used, once clicked it is redirected to the "community" link where discussion and stuff is happening (and the "community" at imgur is...well, they're fucking morons and I'd be embarrassed to post anything to my friends that included that shitshow of racism, drunk-uncle-isms, and misogyny). So, I ended up "uploading" the image to my own imgur account without sharing to the front page, or whatever, and then shared the direct link.

But, that hassle is the kind of thing that might make me consider other image sharing options. I have enjoyed using imgur for a long time, and I've generally trusted the fellow running it had good intentions. But, if them making the cash register ring is going to cause me to accidentally share a link to a cesspool of stupid comments, I'm gonna start being real cautious about using imgur for anything. We've all gotta make a living, but I'm not comfortable with that kind of thing.

> But, that hassle is the kind of thing that might make me consider other image sharing options. I have enjoyed using imgur for a long time, and I've generally trusted the fellow running it had good intentions. But, if them making the cash register ring is going to cause me to accidentally share a link to a cesspool of stupid comments, I'm gonna start being real cautious about using imgur for anything. We've all gotta make a living, but I'm not comfortable with that kind of thing.

Yeah, this is the cycle that keeps repeating with image hosting.

1) Start with a good, low-ad option + donations/memberships that is bootstrap profitable [e.g. It can pay a salary for a skeleton crew of 3-5 people + servers]

2) Raise VC money [this sometimes is step #0]

3) Attempt to increase revenue to justify VC money.

4) A substantial portion of the population abandons ship for the next image host that is at #1.

> and it's nice that they accept hotlinking

They are cracking down on that, unfortunately. For example, FIMFiction users can no longer embed imgur images:

https://www.fimfiction.net/blog/595986/imgur-problems

Oh wow, their ToS actually prohibits hotlinking now? The ability to hotlink was one reason it was so popular!

> 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.

I hate how they've broken their site completely if one browses with JavaScript off (which I suspect was a deliberate choice to force people to accept being tracked and exploited). imgurl is definitely not a site I trust to run just any JavaScript or ad.

And you shouldn't. http://www.dailydot.com/technology/imgur-4chan-8chan-exploit...

That's because Imgur let people upload and serve HTML files from their servers, and not related to js requirements.

They don't do this anymore.

That means at one point, their security model did not prevent malicious javascript. They may have stopped allowing it, but why trust that they've changed their model? It's not like they were audited or something, and they're known to have not cared about javascript security as recently as 6 months ago.

I see no reason to trust them.

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

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