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Comment by TeMPOraL | Hacker News Reader

Another iteration of the endless cycle of image hosting sites?

The cycle goes like this:

- people want a bullshit-free service to upload images to, so that they can link to them, and there's no option available

- somebody starts such a simple, bullshit-free service

- as time goes by, the service realizes hosting costs money and they can't operate on a loss forever

- they start adding bullshit to try and bring in some revenue

- site turns into the same bloated crap it replaced

- somebody starts a new bullshit-free site, and users migrate

For instance, imgur is at the last stage of this cycle now. If giphy is taking serious investor money, it spells an accelerated period of crappifying the service - investors need to get their return somehow.

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I remember seeing the original post[1] when it was created. Exactly as you say, there wasn't a good service to just host images.

"I got fed up with all the other image hosts out there so I made my own. It doesn't force you to compress your images, and it has neat things like crop, resize, rotate, and compression from 10-100. It's my gift to you. Let's not see anymore imageshack/photobucket around here ;)

I'll be listening if anyone has some suggestions.

EDIT: The server was moved off of shared hosting after about 4 hours of release. It's now on a dedicated server with a 100mb port."

I often think about this post and imgur as an example of how an exceedingly simple utility of the Internet can easily acquiesce, and succumb, to the advertising and marketing forces that be[2].

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

[2] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ubg0BQi57xE

> exceedingly simple

yet expensive to run.

Yes!

I wonder how it started? Did it had some unobtrusive ads or donation since the beginning?

It would also be interesting to know how much it costs to run imgur.com (at day one and now). I imagine that the bill that came after first month or a quarter would have been so large that no indie dev could let that have it out of his own pocket, I even doubt that ad or donation revenue would have covered that either.

Creating 'a simple image hosting service' is rather easy, but oh boy it's expensive, otherwise there would be gazillion 'simple image hosting services' or imageshack, photobucket and similar wouldn't have become bullshit in the first place.

At one point we need to realize that there is a working model for that: public infrastructure. Government-managed and funded.

But the invisible hand of the market will work it all out. Who needs stable public infrastructure if you can have a constant cycle of bubble building and popping to keep you on your toes.

Like we had public access on cable? You had limited resources and serious censorship both by the government and local 'community values.' Half the things on imgur or gify wouldn't be allowed on this hypothetical government hosting.

Having the government do everything has been tried in history and its leads to failure (communism). There's a reason that the PC and internet and mobile revolutions happened via capitalism and private business. Or why wikpedia is a foundation or the wayback machine or whatever. I understand Bernie Sanders is popular here and there's a strange 'have the government do everything, duh' mentality popular with millennials now, but historically it doesn't pan out. The government's role should be something that's carefully considered. Its not remotely a fix-all.

>Having the government do everything has been tried in history and its leads to failure (communism).

Having the government do some things has been tried in history and in many cases has worked out quite well. The roads, schools and fire department are quite good where I live for example. Though not perfect of course.

I'm not suggesting that this particular service is a good thing for the government to take on. Just want to mention that it's not "all-or-nothing" choice.

> There's a reason that the PC and internet and mobile revolutions happened via capitalism and private business.

You realize that Internet was first funded by the government, right?

I somewhat agree, but at least imgur is still way better than the sites it replaced (ex. imageshack, photobucket?).

I'll grant you that. ImageShack and PhotoBucket are one of the worst sites I've ever seen in terms of getting in a way of using the service.

Your blog is full of Viagra and Cialis links.

Right. Thanks for informing me. It seems that my Wordpress install got hacked again :/.

I backed up the db already; I'll scrap this site and replace it with a static one soon.

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