Reddit launches image uploads, ditching alliance with Imgur
techcrunch.com
techcrunch.com
Would you mind explaining that to me? I've never heard the term.
Edit: Nvm, sorry; easy to google.
"Dark Patterns are User Interfaces that are designed to trick people."
Edit: evidently, direct image links are serving ads on mobile. I haven't tried it to confirm this myself.
is this happening for anyone in thread?
maybe try holding down CTRL and hammering the link to see if it's a probability thing?
I have never seen the behavior being described.
There does appear to be some kind of heuristic at work here. For example, following the above link results in the traditional behavior for me, but following your link leads to the full imgur page.
EDIT: Ah-ha, figured it out.
1. Click on an i.imgur.com link
2. If it takes you to the full page, right click on the image and click "Open in new tab"
3. The original i.imgur.com link will now take you to the direct image.
Amusing heuristic. After following these steps, I'm unable to reproduce my own screenshot. http://i.imgur.com/PhY2HUP.jpg always takes me to the direct image.
I'm not on mobile.
When you click on a link the browser sends 'html' as http accept header. If you link the image using img src the browser sends 'image' as http accept header.
So if you send image with a small expire header, the server can redirect you to the site, if you click on a link.
On my Moto G2 loading and rendering even a single image takes way longer than it should be so I guess there is a lot of "beautiful" Javascript hackery going on in the background doing who-knows-what.
The same functionality that loves to go off when I'm scrolling down on an album and lose my position.
I can understand the redirect to a page with ads, and even showing unrelated images. But the cat paw... what in hell.
Supermarkets wouldn't allow, much less encourage, anyone to consume large numbers of free samples instead of buying the actual for-sale product.
Then why did they start a free service to begin with, if they knew from the start it couldn't last?
Right, to trick people into becoming dependent on the free service so they'll be reluctant to leave once the shady, UX-degrading monetization starts.
You'll forgive me if I'm not sympathetic to that business plan.
Nobody has to make a website. If the only way you can think of to make money is bait-and-switch, then you can choose to do that, or you can choose to go back to the drawing board and come up with a less unpleasant business plan. If you choose the former, don't expect me to cheer because you found a way to make money, and you think that's the only thing that matters.
Also, I don't think you're going to make everyone happy as a business, and that's (probably) okay.
While we're at it, let's demand the end of free TV, free email providers, free forums, and even youtube.
If you have a sustainable business model for such a thing, knock yourself out.
If you're just making it free for a couple of years to suck people in before you ratchet up the (not necessarily monetary) cost then yeah, we can do without that.
It's an image hosting service.
You upload cat pictures, you pass the link around. That's it.
Once the hosting service stops being a hosting service, you move on and upload the picture somewhere else.
For example, they may have hoped or believed they could find a better business model over time, an alternative to the traditional ad models. Based on watching their various experiments since the day they got started, I can say for a fact they did try other things (two examples: Imgur as a service via paid API and Imgur Pro accounts).
Is it more likely the Imgur founder was naive or malevolent? The answer is extremely obvious.
I can be sympathetic to the fact that their previous 'business model' wasn't financially viable while still being annoyed that they've changed it.
5 years ago: "but it's profitable enough to hopefully hire another guy or two this summer."[0]
The founder has completely bootstrapped the site since day 1, and has done an AMA on Reddit talking about the whole situation[1]. Ads are absolutely necessary to make it profitable, but clearly taking investment now means they are going to squeeze every ounce of dollar out of the site and hence the sentiment of "aggressive monetization".
[0] - https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/eicjf/im_the_imgur_gu...
Point being: unless you have been directly involved in the decisions accusing them of either malevolence or greed is a pretty tough accusation to make. Sometimes (usually) it's cold hard business realities that drive people to adopting these sorts of monetization strategies.
So now the cycle will repeat. Someone will start a host that simply serves images. People will use it. They'll add some ads, people won't care much. They'll start serving more aggressive ads and someone will start another host... over and over again.
How? I don't see a way from Imgur to monetize on sharing images directly.
If I can see you viewed an image referred from /r/woodwork I might offer you some woodworking tools and drive up the conversation rate of my advertisements.
It is. The wealth of images alone, the sheer amount, from memes to vacation pics is worth so much now that image recognition is taking off.
They did it by building a community around the non-reddit related traffic. Basically redditor's would share imgur links outside the reddit ecosystem (Facebook etc), then other people would visit imgur directly instead of going through reddit. These secondary users are monetizable.
Imgur had to eat the costs of supporting reddit's hotlinking (though not all reddit posts are hotlinked) but that was more or less imgur's "marketing budget."
"Man, all the image hosts suck ass and get in the way of me just seeing the damned image. I'm gonna create a new one, without all the cruft!"
"This image host is going well, but the bills are killing me. We'll have to add ads, but obviously only where they're unobtrusive."
"We're still bleeding cash, but we've got a huge userbase. We need to monetize it better. We'll toss in a couple interstitials to drive up ARPU."
"Man, all the image hosts suck ass and get in the way of me just seeing the damned image. I'm gonna create a new one, without all the cruft!"
I like their moderation log though, that's a good step.
Because of that a lot of relatively benign Trump content gets censored on imgur because a lot of people find even his name to be offensive. Some even think his name is violence.
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2016/03/24/emory-unive...
Here's the AMA
https://reddit.com/r/The_Donald/comments/4erynj/we_are_slimg...
https://sli.mg/lrrDOF #testt
It appears to still happen if, e.g., the link is on Twitter - random example https://twitter.com/SilentRENE/status/735732252877819904 (seems to be inconsistent - first time I was redirected, but now it goes directly to the image. Opening the Twitter page in another browser also resulted in a redirect)
And aside from that, years back, they've been banning embedding on certain domains.
A dark pattern is an UI design that motivates users to use the program/site in a way profitable to the site, but contrary to users' interest. To trick people, see http://darkpatterns.org/. Redirecting to the whole page instead of the link is just a hotlink protection (as debatable as that is for an image hoster). Animated overlays in mobile is just shitty advertising and UX. But no dark pattern here.
I saw that multiple times here on HN now that people misuse the term. It's a pity, the original idea is something to be aware of, and diluting what dark pattern means hinders that awareness.
Doesn't this definition cover all advertising ?
Sounds like something that's profitable to the site but against the users' interest to me
Also, it's actually much simpler than the discussion makes it to be. Just look at the big picture. The user wants a picture, free of irrelevant or harmful bullshit. The site promises that raw image, by means of providing what looks like a direct URL. Then, it does not deliver on the promise, serving the irrelevant and/or harmful bullshit along with the picture. It's pretty clear that one side is trying to exploit the other one.
A hotlink is no user interface, changing its behaviour is not a dark pattern. Serving ads never is one (though ads itself can use dark patterns), regardless whether the uploader sees them or not. Those are different kind of tricks that have (edit: almost) nothing to do with what the term dark pattern describes.
Edit: I'd argue that links that used to be hotlinks not being hotlinks can maybe be part of a dark pattern. If an UI tried to get people to share a site, and the people do that only because they think the links are hotlinks, then that UI could be a dark pattern and the non-hotlinks a part of that. But the dark pattern is then the UI presenting the hotlink, the "share this image directly" widget, not the hotlink itself.
It's ironic because it is hinging on a narrowly constrained definition of "user interface" design - one that has been appropriated by web/app designers in recent years. UI goes well beyond what is IN the browser window. Discussion of user interfaces occurred before they were graphical user interfaces, well before they were web browsers. So for a discussion that hinged on the idea of the misappropriation of terms, this scores high for irony, IMHO.
SO, now that we're clear on the idea UI's can include many things, it's also clear that the URL and the items return based on the url requested absolutely fall under the notion of UI. And, this is most definitely an example of UI manipulation to create unexpected and negative results for the user to the benefit of the website.
Additionally I should point out, the whole notion of interaction design once meant something much broader than digital interfaces - as an easy example, look at Don Norman's early work and you'll see that interaction and interfaces go well beyond windowed interfaces or even digital interfaces.
I'm aware that you can think of many things as being an interface. I even agree that heuristically switching the result page is deceptive. But there is a difference, though it gets hard to pinpoint it. The manipulation is on another level. It is not the same type of thinking as pre-selecting a checkbox in an installer [0]. I don't agree that it is an UI manipulation in the normal sense. I don't see which psyhcological effects are used, where the manipulation is. There is a deception if a .jpg link does not go to the image, but how manipulates that? Is the ending .jpg a something prone to be clicked on? I don't think so.
Still, while I still value the difference between a dark pattern and any random deceptive behavior, at least I understand a bit better now why people persist on mixing up the term.
It isn't that you can think of many things as interfaces it is that many things are interfaces and interfaces were around long before they became graphical or even digital/computer-based. So, URLs themselves are definitely interfaces – they're UI's and machine interfaces as well, given their multiple roles.
For the concept of Dark Patterns, the manipulation you're talking about is, at its core, abusing convention, expectation and perception to steer people into an experience that they wouldn't choose if it were more obvious. So, essentially, dark patterns are deceptive.
What I gather you're asserting is that they must also be manipulative and get people to do something, themselves? By that bar, I think the imgur returning of pages instead of images when the convention is to return an image for a url ending in .jpg, etc. may be questionable. No URL request will ever rise to the level of nuance that a visual interface will. However, I still think this case fits. It is abusing a set of conventions and intentionally guiding a user into something they weren't expecting.
Additionally, think about the multiple use cases here. It's easy to focus on the casual browser clicking a link from Reddit but it's also about the user creating the reddit post. They are following convention, using what they think is an image link, choosing to post it, only to then unwittingly be involved in serving up that annoying as hell moving cat paw ad on top of the image they're trying to share with others. That sounds a little like a dark pattern at work to me...
The primarily I did not say, did I? The book was required reading at the first university I heard a HCI lecture. It was recommended at my masters (in HCI, both the masters and the lecture), and contents from it were teached. I'm not sure about everyone in my current team, but I know at least some have read it, and I saw general references to its content. And those guys are pretty much the core of european academic HCI.
Everyday things has that role, as I could see, exactly because it is not talking about computers. It manages to show concepts and principals in a way that makes clear how they are universal. Besides, computer interaction does not happen only through display interfaces.
> I call out the original title, first, to be a hipster but more to point out that his very aim was to talk about things not Human Computer Interaction
Actually, the foreword of the 2002 edition I have open right now explains the change of title. It describes that it is because psychology in the title made it go to the wrong bookshelf in stores, in that people did not capture that it was talking about objects and design instead of psychology itself. Where do you have your explanation from?
> What I gather you're asserting is that they must also be manipulative and get people to do something, themselves?
Exactly. Or to not do something they'd usually do.
> That sounds a little like a dark pattern at work to me...
A little, yes. I stand by that manipulation is not enough included, and deception is not enough, and the link look is not enough. But like I said, I now understand why others are mixing it up – and the point with the different use cases might apply. I was serious in my explanation in another comment that there might be a group of people for who it really works as a manipulation, even though I can't see it working in a general way without prior conditioning, and then it fits the dark pattern definition reasonably well.
I'd say the URL itself can be UI - users know what a URL to a direct image looks like and how that differs from what a URL to a page tends to look like.
Come on.. If I see a URL that ends in JPG, my understanding is that I am about to load an image. If the site then shows me a page full of ads with my image somewhere on there, that's exactly what you described.
The site is tricking me into doing something that is to their benefit and to my detriment. Showing me a URL that looks like a link to an image is absolutely encouraging me to do something. It's telling me "hey click here you'll see the image right away"..
I did not want to see a page full of ads, I wanted to see a single image, but now the site has monetized me without my consent.
It feels like you're arguing for argument's sake here.
If you are really arguing that you are inherently more likely to click on the direct link, and it is this click impulse that is used to manipulate you, and that going to a page containing that image plus ads instead is the big negative outcome, then I understand why it is a dark pattern for you.
I did not see that direct link have a higher affordance (that might stretch the term a bit too much) to be clicked on. I still don't – but if you think that there are people that are conditioned to click on those direct links, but would not click on the normal link, then I'll have o give you the point that the heuristically changing of the result page might be a dark pattern for those people.
I'm not aware of that effect, but I can't be sure that for example on reddit for people without adblocker or on mobile for some time the direct link wasn't a positive click signal that conditioned them.
I think that explains why I'm arguing. Dark patterns are a manipulation, and simply showing another page is not something I can count as a manipulation – it is not the same thing as in a window making people click on the wrong button (even though I understand that there is a similarity if you follow a specific line of thinking).
- you implicitly expect it won't load code to your browser
- you implicitly expect it will serve the one and only one resource that you need
- you implicitly expect that after receiving the resource no further data will be exchanged between the client and the server
- you implicitly expect it will work well with the standard UI of your viewing platform - for instance, it will be pinch-zoomable on mobile, or zoomable with mouse in desktop browsers
- you expect to work well with applicable context; for instance, a direct image link should work in "href" attribute of "a" tag (resulting in an image being embedded on a website), it should work with curl or wget (resulting in a single image file being created on your hard drive), or just browser's "save" feature (again, resulting in a single image file being created)
I'd call breaking these things a dark pattern. A particularly nasty one at that, since it's poisoning the well. Breaking users' trust in that URLs do is one of the many subtle ways of fucking the Internet for everyone for personal profit.
You mean like clicking a *.jpg link and getting something other than a raw JPEG file?
There is something labeled very clearly as a "Direct Link." When I paste that link into my browser, I go to the image file.
If people are posting the Direct Link and it is indeed redirecting to the full site (per the claims), then that is most certainly a very dark pattern if not an outright example of blatantly lying to their users.
So in this case it is very much about the UI and what is presented to the user at the time they are grabbing the URL.
I tried to explain above of why that does not feel right to mix it in as dark pattern, but it gets muddy and based on the votes people don't seem to understand it, or just don't find it convincing. Short, adjusted for here: I'm not convinced people would not share and click those links anyway even if it were correctly labeled. But the widget looking like this is a good point against that argumentation of mine.
> if not an outright example of blatantly lying to their users.
That of course. Hotlink protection for an image hoster when even providing official direct link is in any case a deception, maybe a lie. Please don't mistake my argumentation against the use of the dark pattern term as a defense of the behavior.
Actually I like this. It's so stupid that people directly link to the image - I'm always interested in reading the imgur comments, and especially the text comment by the uploader.
Most people I've seen vastly prefer direct links, since all they want is the image content.
It's likely significant that I mostly encounter imgur links via reddit, which of course has its own comments/community.
2) WHAT THE HELL, IMGUR?
It's in the form of a cat's claw, animated – sliding and extending from the top of your screen almost to the bottom – and slow, making users either click it accidentally or wait in frustration until it can be closed.
Despite having seen it countless times, I still don't even know what it's designed to do or what action it's prompting me to take (e.g. login, capture my email address, etc.).
It only happens when coming from reddit if I open an incognito tab in chrome (chrome opens incognito tabs in the foreground, rather than the background, which saves me a bunch of taps). It never happens if I use normal tabs, which leads me to believe they're only doing it for non-reddit referers or direct links.
It isn't. What you are describing is better describe as malicious advertising, or malvertising.
Presenting an authentic looking UI dialogue which appears to come from the operating system, and using vibration to further impose the authenticity of a dialogue as having come from the operating system seems very much to be covered under any definition of dark pattern I can find. The aim is to make you click the ad, and they use dark patterns to do that. Simply because the ad content is "malvertising" doesn't mean it's not utilizing dark patterns.
Does it mean they cut their throat or does it mean the creator just set himself up for a life of money? Genuine question, maybe this is just a way to become rich, maybe these shitty upload sites make enough money that they simply pick this way instead of keeping it pure.
Once people started shifting to sharing content mostly as really-inefficiently-compressed ten-second videos (which are still pretty large when efficiently recompressed), Imgur's original business model was dead in the water. Maybe one day gifs will be as cheap to serve as images are now—but it won't be any time in the next few years.
It's worth highlighting that Gfycat is managing to operate as a short gif/video hosting service without turning awful, though I obviously don't know what their financials look like.
Gfycat does have a homepage of popular gifs, but they've never shown them to me unless I wanted to see them. The viewer page is just the viewer.
They are still often 1-2MB however, which I'm sure adds up, compared to the jpegs they started off distributing.
I think the larger narrative is that imgur wasn't some geek's side project. It was a VC-run enterprise that will eventually find a way to be profitable. I think ultimately, this type of service is difficult to monetize. Reddit running its own makes a lot of sense.
From an experience perspective, my god, its terrible. I'm constantly being nagged to install the imgur app and sometimes Im not sure if the comments I'm seeing are reddit's or imgur's due to using a dark theme on my reddit app. Its all around a shitshow and I'm surprised reddit tolerated them for so long.
Their transition has VC written all over it.
It should also be noted that reddit has an ownership stake in imgur, so they must have really been concerned about the degrade in imgur experience to have done something like this.
http://techcrunch.com/2014/04/03/after-five-years-of-bootstr...
While I certainly can't speak to the intentions of the founder, I would assume that he didn't have many exceptions at all.
(or until you get an investment from less ethical companies)
But to be honest monetizing things like imgurl is hard. Most of the users cost more than they earn
I think with adblockers becomming more common we'll have to think of better ways of coming out with feasible arrangements. Sharing bandwidth between users? JS bitcoin mining (or some other kind of processing)? Mechanical Turk style work for users?
I call bullshit. Can you spell datamining?
also: native advertising.
Also, I know that on a website like imgur native pays about as little as display. The fact that imgur tried Taboola a while ago and eventually ditched it seems to corroborate this.
Pretty sure you just suggested they make money by datamining cat gif and dank meme traffic...
- facebook
- twitter
- amazon ads
- google ads
- quantserve
- google analytics
- scorecardresearch
No one is arguing that facebook/google/tw... (well maybe twitter heheh) aren't profitably mining lots of user data. But imgur probably isn't able to mine much value out of it's own data.
The bottom line is imgur's data is probably not worth much, what _is_ worth a lot is imgurs traffic, and that traffic is taking a hit from adblock.
My only annoyance there is that sometimes the embed bugs out a bit, but that's mostly firefox's fault.
But a self-funded (and then donations) college student working in his spare time did.
The interesting thing is there are a ton of people who are on Imgur that have no idea Reddit exists and vice versa. A lot of people on Reddit have no idea Imgur has its own thriving community.
The sad thing is, they could have added non-intrusive ads. DaringFireball does it; write a single line of text such as “This image brought to you by FooBar, Inc.” and SHOW THE LINKED IMAGE. No pop-ups, no tricks, no obscurity; ad+image, done.
Oh, you mean: "Apple products are the best! Google sucks!"
Yes, high quality content indeed...
The only thing I give him credit for is markdown. That is a very good contribution, but I really don't have to read his "blog".
If Imgur wants ads, there is a way to make ads sane and still make money.
For what anecdotes are worth, DaringFireball’s method is about the only form of ads that has ever worked on me. I actually read what he says about these companies, and I often am curious enough to go learn more. And he’s charging a lot for these ad placements for a week.
Whereas, I have never, ever been interested in something that tried to use trickery to pop up in my face, play audio, play animations, steal my clicks or otherwise force me to acknowledge its existence before continuing. I can’t even remember what those products were; I can only remember the speed at which I searched for a black "X" button to close the things.
There is also "a way" to win at the Olympics.
Can you point to a single Imgur-like property using the sort of ads you cite to generate any kind of significant revenue to the point where they could possibly offer a return on venture cash? I don't know of a single major web property running that style of ads that does so successfully. In fact, we see progressively worse ads are what publications are choosing to run instead (looking at you WaPo, running inline "videos" on mobile that are really huge GIFs). I agree that it sucks - certainly no argument there. But I am unaware of anywhere where what you're suggesting is working competitively with unobtrusive options.
Content is king and imgurs content is random and most likely junk. There's no consistency you could sell to a partner where'd they be willing to pay enough to allow something like DaringFireball does to work. The only way they're making enough is to put the junk we're dealing with now.
It might work ok for some of the larger comics/image producers.
Any tips on ad providers that support more explicit choice of topic per page load?
I don't see any other occurrence of the sponsors name.
Here's the link for reference: https://daringfireball.net/feeds/sponsors/
I think they are just the most recent organization to figure out that there's no viable standalone business model in "dumb image host".
I didn't even know you could do that. Last time I went to the site directly (years ago) I recollect all you could do was upload an image or browse random images.
Imgur is my main form on entertainment and the app currently lives on my homescreen. Mindless fun and good vibes unlike reddit which makes me angry/sad/depressed.
Imgur would have been dead with this Reddit move if they had not evolved, they obviously saw it coming. Building an image hosting site is not hard; building a fun community is. And Imgur did a great job with it. I love imgur.
Once Reddit is largely gone, will the community survive?
The big question is simply how Imgur will continue to (sustainably) grow that community. This really brings the question back to the very root: "How do we make Imgur the de-facto image hosting/sharing site in the world"
I think that imgur can exist on its own and will have more than enough content.
And then, sadly, the periodic misogyny-denial post, anti-feminist circle jerk that usually originates on Reddit but then enough people in the Imgur community upvote. This exact thing has made me decide to stop even looking at Imgur. :/
More details soon...
Imgur would have been dead because they were running out of money.
John Gruber needs to feed and house himself, his wife, and his kids. I'm just guessing here, knowing nothing about the internal workings of the company, but I'm pretty sure Imgur has a few more mouths to feed than a single founder's immediate family.
Now they're getting those horrifying autoforward fake-virus-scan vibrating ads.
The mobile experience needs a lot of tlc.
that's promoting the app installe :(
It's no longer just a place for Redditors to dump their images. And it's a good thing too, because this probably would've killed them if they hadn't gone that direction.
imgur got popular because it originally eschewed the bloated ad-laden crapware that paid the bills of the previous imagehosts, until the runway ran out and imgur took its turn in the cycle.
1. Realize you need to make a lot more money (to meet investor expectations, pay for the fat the company has accumulated, etc)
2. Panic
3. Apply dark patterns (http://darkpatterns.org/)
4. Something better comes along and eats your lunch
5. Repeat.
It's sad because imgur was originally created as the "something better".
https://sourceforge.net/blog/sourceforge-acquisition-and-fut...
The fact that they used the phrase "At this time" makes it sound like they are planning to disable external image links in the future.
2. Block other image hosts from your service forcing people to use yours.
3. Introduce ads.
4. Profit!!!
x-amz-storage-class: REDUCED_REDUNDANCY
Content-Type: image/jpeg
Server: AmazonS3
What's the minimum commercially you'd spend to get cross-continent redundancy on hardware you manage in-house. Just the accounting cost of paying wages for technicians in two countries probably means you need to be a quite large company.
There are middle grounds, managed co-location say, but then you're not likely to save much over using AWS are you?
Another way to do it is to use dedicated servers. The datacenter will take care of repairs and remote hands functions and all you need is to manage the server from the OS level upwards. No need to have technicians in multiple countries, everything can be done remotely.
Any dedicated hosting company (OVH, Hetzner, etc...) will cost less than 3% of that (and that's on the high end).
Bandwidth is cheap, but AWS marks it up roughly 30x-50x what you'd pay in a dedicated environment.
And you pay premium for premium bandwidth. You can't just assume that all your users will have a good experience if you buy hardware and bandwidth from the cheapest providers around.
The founder, Vlad, used to rent out cheap dedicated boxes with about 500gb of bandwidth per box for $60 to $80 per month. He'd cycle upload machines - eg 123.imagevenue.com - and fill up the drives on them until no more space was available; when bandwidth was exhausted, that was that for the month. Typically image file downloads would decline on any given upload over time, so machine resources would free back up in terms of bandwidth and deleting images that weren't viewed after N amount of time.
I made a Skylake Xeon system with all enterprise components for $2k. You can't even rent Skylake Xeons anywhere right now.
It of course depends on your provider.
Rent vs buy depends a lot on the circumstances. Maybe if your requirements don't change and you don't upgrade your server hardware it's cheaper in the long run to buy. However, when I've kept a server for more than a year, I've always been able to negotiate a discount.
You didn't post your config, so I can't tell how exotic your requirements are.
That's not how things work over here.
We can and do imagine. We even calculate estimate values so we don't have to stay in the dark and reason without a solid basis.
I'd encourage you to find some traffic numbers provided by imgur and some S3 pricing to do a rough estimate. Maybe someone more knowledgable will pop in and improve on that. When we argue everyone involved shall be wiser after. That's how it works around here.
What advantages? If you're running these as headless servers, then what advantages does OSX possibly provide over cheaper, more powerful Linux boxes using e.g. ImageMagick (ok, ok, not having massive remote code execution vulnerabilities is one of them).
(Guessing they use the fastly private cdn or have some sort of deal with them considering the imgix branded cages on their blog).
It was really annoying on mobile.
They seem to have spent their good will in exchange for crappy auto-playing sound ads, incessant mobile-app install prompts, non-obvious URL resolving rules, and browser hijacking navigation. I don't think this was done in bad spirit, they are a growing company with investors to report to. It seems like they forgot what made them popular in the first place and makes me wonder if user experience was more of a company principle if they'd be in this predicament now.
It makes total sense that reddit would want to not only improve the image content sharing experience but also acknowledge that imgur is indeed a competitor with it's now own thriving community. It has been for a while and now reddit is treating it as such.
In retrospect this whole thing looks as inevitable as Twitter pulling the rug out from it's third party developers.
At least on the default subs of reddit you can find a handful of good comments if you only read the parents. If you go to the children, they all become obnoxious.
It gets briefly touched on at the very end of the article, but self-hosting may carry with it a whole lot of extra work to avoid getting a big bullseye painted on the company. I'm sure more than a few content creators - probably in the adult business - have their lawyers on speed dial. Will be interesting to see how this plays out.
It's not just a PR thing, it's a legal thing.
As an ex-isoHunter, I can tell you still need to worry about that kind of stuff, even if you're not hosting, linking to a massive amount of pirated content will get you sued quickly too.
I would imagine Reddit wants to have control and be able to more quickly take down things versus waiting for moderators to automod or manually remove posts.
A lot of users are very twitchy about anything that even hints at censorship right now.
The outcome of that is:
-Alien Blue beat Reddit to mobile optimization of Reddit's own platform
-Imgur beat Reddit to sharing images on Reddit
-Reddit and Imgur now exist as pseudo-sister-sites with features that overlap on a fundamental level, and Reddit is cannibalizing its own equity in Imgur
Now that they can't just hire site reliability engineers and watch their graph go up like a volcano, their only play is to improve their product, but now they're running uphill.
I think it's generally correct to play it safe and maintain organic exponential growth if you have it, but when it comes to things as obvious as mobile optimization and image sharing, maybe it's ok for a company to come out of their shell and iterate on obvious stuff (even though they don't have to).
"In addition, the Reddit investment will finally formalize the already friendly relationship between the two sites, making them more symbiotic and maybe even more integrated in some way, though Schaaf declined to go into details as to what’s ahead for the two, only saying that there’s no promise of Imgur being Reddit’s “official” image host at this time."
There's at least two distinct types of imgur users, those who only use imgur as an image host and "imgurians." The huge usage numbers come from the former while the actual value (IMHO) is in the unpaid labor of the latter group (like most social media). That means imgur can piss off their freeloaders as long as they don't upset their community, but this is really no help at all because the community is far more critical than the freeloaders. Freeloaders don't care about imgur's community drama.
However, because I disagree with you, according to you I reacted to a TechCrunch article; there's no better way to get me running to share that opinion than by poisoning the thread with the assumption that naysayers are misinformed or oblivious.
Assume people are informed and you'll end up on the right side of disappointed when they aren't, instead of being embarrassed when they are.
Regardless, I'm a daily user on a variety of platforms (mobile w/o adblock being one of them) so I am confused that I haven't encountered the highly annoying behaviors people are describing: direct image links being hijacked or super annoying browser-highjacking mobile ads (which I have run into in the past). If I had then I would be rightfully pissed as everyone else seems to be.
Yes, imgur can do what it wants. But so can we. Also we may complain as much as we want for being deceived for so long.
Thanks for the free bandwidth and farewell imgur.
Though imageshack's biggest crime was delete everything (maybe except stuff from paid accounts) at one point in time.
And I still stand by my earlier statement: Imgur has declined, but they have not yet stooped to the level of end-user abuse shack did. (Granted, hijacking direct image URLs is sleezy as hell.)
Imageshack made even uploads a chore. Sure, picking the image from your drive was easy - but then they made every attempt possible to force their inline branding into all inbound links.
Getting a hot-linkable image from shack uploads required extra effort. And they tried to trick you into using their quality-degraded downscaled versions everywhere. It was dreadful. I even remember couple of cases where after the upload there was no way of getting the image link out. At all. All you got was a 80x80 thumbnail and a link to their shitty pages where you could, MAYBE, view the image. (Which was, of course, downscaled and further compressed. The original was gone.)
So no, as far as I am concerned, Imgur has not yet reached the imageshack abusement park level.
It looks to me as if all recent changes work towards the goal of making reddit a mainstream site platable to the average customer who does not know or care about adblock and innovative marketing techniques.
RES is for the power user who does not generate any revenue.
It won't be very long before we need a new reddit for power users where we can move on to with our guns, cocaine and hookers.
I'd be more concerned about copyright. Most of the stuff posted on reddit already violates copyright to some degree (e.g. /r/gifs which is entirely people reuploading segments of youtube videos without the consent of the creators.)
Additionally, having to upload images to a different website which isn't linked from anywhere on reddit, needing an entirely different account to manage them, is just confusing. Reddit isn't really a pure link-sharing website, and original/remixed content is important to its users - so managing that should probably be something integrated into the site.
I'm pretty sure the same will be for Imgur.
http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=188...
Apparently they've been storing the full size images too and not throwing it away after creating thumbnails (wise move).
http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonS3/latest/dev/HowDoIWebsite...
I really can't fault reddit for taking this step. They're the ones who have the ad views on pages linking to (or embedding) these images, they may as well streamline things and manage the uploads/hosting in house.
One hopes Imgur could see this coming.
The home page itself is riddled with "viral images". Why would I use imgur like a *chan site? That need is already filled and done much better by other sites.
Also money is like a drug. What's wrong with taking a little cocaine in the morning and a little heroin in the evening? Nothing, except there are very few people who can sustain that over an extended period of time. You also wouldn't know about them because they neither become very rich nor very famous. ("Hey look there is the most average guy in the whole country who has no exceptional qualities.") The world belongs to the candles who burn from both ends.
However, when the barrier to entry for providing a service is low you have to be _very_ careful about making that money by negatively impacting the user experience.
If you make money, that's fine. If you make money by taking advantage of users, you can't really be surprised when a competitor pops up and users leave.
Source: I work for and use Stack Exchange.
All we want is an easy and reliable image hoster. You upload an image, they host it, you can link it, fin.
Perfect plan!
Except for the plot hole of not generating any money this way. That's where the suits creep in. First they finance you to grow and grow quickly you must. Imgur did it. Then you experiment with some methods of generating ad views or other revenue. People realize they hit on a gold mine and business starts to grow like cancer. Then there are some minor changes to optimize revenue. Then some founders start to cash out and jump the ship. Then the suits, loudmouths and ginas slowly but surely take over the company and due process replaces the dictatorship of the personal union of owner and leader. There's guitars and barbecue as the corporate drones dance around the firepit of burning money as they hurry to please the gods of corporate capitalism. A spiral is forming like a siphon circling around itself pulling everything in like a black hole. And it's great.
If you listen carefully in the storm of excitement you can hear a faint voice who still remebers the core of the business: Provide the service and don't fuck with the customer.
Or as some politicians said: You can fuck over some of your customers all the time and you can fuck over all of your customers for some time. Both is a great business plan. But you cannot fuck over all of your customers all of the time. Especially not if you don't have a stranglehold on their necks like a dictator or monopoly has.
The imgur we have today deserves to die.
It may redeem itself by remembering its roots and not wanting to become more than it is. That would be great!
One thing that is more important over the whole debacle is to watch reddit closely and be ready to jump ship quickly as they stumble deeper into the corporate trap. Having a plan B "just in case" for everything important will cost you resources but it pays out for itself in the long run.
Where are the "I'll paint that!" guys when you need them?
(Personally, I'm more the 'abstract art' type of person, for good reason, ahem ...)
The people looking at images for free are NOT THE CUSTOMER.
Hint: the customer pays for service.
I'm assuming those companies also have the infrastructure to reduce bandwidth expenses, and they could accept the loss in the short term, to have a well established service and community for when imaging hosting becomes more profitable in the future.
A simple image hosting service is relatively quick to develop, and it's almost guaranteed to be one of the most used services on the internet. Why are these companies wasting hundreds of millions of dollars on all sorts of failed projects, when they could easily win this market?
Don't give them ideas.
Anyway - that is what lots of companies are doing anyway, even if it's passively. Imgur for example is using Google Analytics.
Note that all of Facebook, Google, Microsoft, & Amazon already allow you to host your own photos but aren't used in this way.
(Everyone has more or less given up on copyright enforcement for images, possibly because there's no central enforcement mafia, but that doesn't mean it's not still the law)
Since Reddit has their own service for this now, hopefully they can use their revenue to keep it clean and at least reasonably ad free and focused on its simple mission. If that can happen, I think this is a step forward from what Imgur has become. Not anything bad per se if you want a different community, but not optimal if you already are on one and just want to view the pictures.
at least imgur didn't use cloudflare.
From an engineering perspective Reddit had frequent crashes and severe lag for years. They've improved a lot in the past two, and seeing them confident enough to launch a service like this says something about their progress in that regard. However I could see it be a complete flop as well. Time will tell.
It was so bad I took on myself to aggregate images from /r/funny and put them in a mobile friendly and fast website. http://www.pixpit.com
unfortunately every time I tried to talk about it on reddit, they deleted it.
I use reddit more-or-less as a blog (https://dredmorbius.reddit.com). What I particularly like is the extended community, Markdown, mod tools, Wiki (though it's underpowered), search (though it's posts-only, no comments), and, through RES, some nice features for composing, and viewing images in posts.
But that last applies to a very small subset of readers. And as I make a fair bit of use of images (to illustrate and document points in my essays), that's a considerable pain point.
Ello, whilst lacking many other features, and having broken Markdown (notably: no blockquote support), does have phenomenal image support.
Other options are fairly thin, though Medium might be worth another look.
There are and have always been plenty of simpler alternatives with a variety of features. I stopped using imgur when direct links stopped working.
Personal fav: https://uguu.se/
Did Reddit make backup copies?
Sorry long post TL/DR Fighting people on word definitions is frustrating and words change meaning when one aspect gets popular.
I have fought this war over and over again over the following words:
Troll - Everything is a troll now. It use to be just someone that tried to ruin other people's fun. Now if anything that makes anyone laugh is a troll.
Hacker - This site is case in point. Hacker was a person who would make inventions with pieces that didn't normally get take apart and put back together into something different then its original intent. Then it became criminals. Now it's start up coverage websites were if you use terms of Hackers of long gone days (i.e. M$) you get down voted for being unprofessional. :)
Humanism - Means Atheist? Humanism was founded by the leaders of the Renaissance and the Reformation Movement Leaders would self-identify as Humanist. I went on a 5 day Reddit AMA with the President of the American Humanist Society (Secular Humanist) saying they can't hijack the word and change its meaning.
Humanism and related terms are frequently applied to modern doctrines and techniques that are based on the centrality of human experience. In the 20th century, the pragmatic humanism of Ferdinand C.S. Schiller, the Christian humanism of Jacques Maritain, and the movement known as secular humanism, though differing from each other significantly in content, all show this anthropocentric emphasis. http://humanism.ws/featured/a-history-of-humanism-robert-gru...
Sometimes this confusion actually gets beneficial for the old-word-meaning crowd - you can get +10 to marketing of your hackerspace on startup events based solely on the tern "hacker" meaning something else than the crowd there think it means :).
[0] - actually three, if you count "hacker as a criminal" thing
http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/07/social-justice-and-word...
"The old definition of a Troll is one who posts to generate the maximum number of follow ups. These are a very minor irritation, and can be considered to be advantageous to newsgroups."
This is the least believable thing you've said.
We detached this comment from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11778568 and marked it off-topic.