Hacker News Reader

Comment by johansch | Hacker News Reader

My beef with Imgur is that it was essentially announced as a non-spammy/crappy no-nonsense image host compared to the alternatives of the day:

https://web.archive.org/web/20090227183112/http://www.reddit...?

In 2009 Imgur was clean, neat and fast. Everyone sane questioned (including in that announcement thread) how that could possibly stay true in the long run. The founder just kept saying "we'll try to solve it if it comes to that", refusing to go into details or presenting anything resembling a plan.

Based on this "commitment" which I would say was either naive or not truthful, the Reddit userbase propelled Imgur to its current position.

Today Imgur looks like this:

https://i.imgsafe.org/102b850.png

(I picked the top link from Reddit 3 minutes ago. Please excuse the Swedish language ads - but I think you get the picture without being able to read the language.)

View on HN

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"

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.

I just found imgsafe.org because I didn't want to use imgur to show how much imgur sucks now compared to 7 years ago. :)

Anyway, at the moment imgsafe.org seems to beat imgur on the qualities you listed.

I see the site a lot more frequently on AlienBlue where it seems to default/redirect to the Standard view vs. Optimized.

Not sure if this is intentional on their part to drive ad views from tablet/mobile that they aren't able to monetize in the Optimized view, or if people are just aren't posting direct image links, but it sure is annoying.

And so is the dropdown for promoting their app, which is clearly trying to funnel Reddit and other traffic into their own social ecosystem.

Imgur seems to selectively redirect direct links (i.imgur.com/image.jpg) to the full site (imgur.com/image/) based on the referrer.

I think they originally only did this for direct images posted on Facebook etc (to avoid pissing off the core Redditors who post all the content), but lately pretty much all direct image links from my mobile Reddit client get redirected to an image page.

It might also be based on the HTTP Accept header, with which you can figure out if a request is for an <img>.

This redirection reminds me of other, less clean image hosting services. :/

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 gone from 0% annoying to 60% annoying. Compared to the 2009 benchmark which was imageshack.us - 100% annoying.

Have you seen the animated cat paw that automatically swipes over to some other dank maymay somebody's posted while you're trying to view an album?

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?

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

Reply on news.ycombinator.com