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Comment by owenversteeg | Hacker News Reader

Why on earth would Reddit want to add a massive expense (image hosting) at a time that they're already hemorrhaging money? Especially since imgur was still a fairly adequate host for the site. Reddit's image hosting seems like burning money for nothing. Not to mention the Reddit image URLs are horrifying. I upload stuff to imgur just for the nice, short URLs.

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Reddit did the right thing - they realized a majority of their users are on Reddit for the images, which makes it a core competency. Reddit was using Imgur as a free image host, which Imgur was obviously not ok with. I realized this last summer when imgur started redirecting direct image links into its ad-ridden bloated mess of a social image page. It was an obvious attack on reddit. I don't know if imgur ended up undoing this or not, but it made it painfully obvious that reddit and imgur cannot peacefully coexist in the way it used to.

edit: just found this, it looks like they're continuing to move away from being a simple image host for reddit. https://www.reddit.com/r/assholedesign/comments/6eip2q/imgur...

Imgur was more than OK with it. Without Reddit Imgur would not be where it is today.

> Reddit was using Imgur as a free image host, which Imgur was obviously not ok with.

It's funny though, because that's what Imgur was created to be. The problem is it's absolutely unsustainable as a “business model”.

Reddit's URLs got much shorter within a few iterations of the product.

As to why compete with imgur? User experience. It's much easier to share a picture on Reddit now, with it being a native feature, rather than having to go to imgur or elsewhere, upload something, find the best/right URL to share with, and the submit that to Reddit.

Right, but why not just pay imgur some $$$ for the privilege of a simple little upload form? That seems like a far smarter idea. Now Reddit is responsible for running not only its current business but also an entirely separate image hosting business. Keep in mind how ridiculously expensive it is to run an image host. Even imgur, which is by far the most acceptable of the popular hosts, has a ton of obtrusive ads.

I have a feeling that this image upload thing was dreamed up by an intern who thought "oh, this would improve our user flow!" while not realizing it might literally double the company's costs in exchange for a gain of a few percentage points more users.

Reddit can't run obtrusive ads (they'd piss off their user base) so where is that money going to come from?

Example reddit url: https://i.redd.it/2n0gpcrfes4z.jpg

Example imgur url: http://i.imgur.com/ykbUTZG.jpg (and that can even be shortened to http://imgur.com/ykbUTZG)

>so where is that money going to come from?

presumably ownership of the image.

http://redd.it/6idi12

The money argument is an odd one to make. Why would paying imgur money per image be substantially different cost wise to self hosting? At reddit's scale, it would be a similar hosting cost whether done in house or passed along to a 3rd party. The difference is that with in house, Reddit maintains more control over the underlying image data. If it costs $x million to host all reddit's submitted images for a year, imgur isn't going to magically let Reddit pay them less than that. (Assuming direct linking, i.e. no imgur ads, which is what you want to be able to best deal with embedding the images inline on Reddit)

And those URL lengths are both fine. No one is typing those in manually very often. (Reddit's URLs used to have a bunch of long query params - those were a bit ridiculous)

Keeps eyeballs (and thus ad dollars) on the site? Avoids allowing a parasitical competitor to grow?

> Especially since imgur was still a fairly adequate host for the site.

I'll argue against this. Imgur used to be a good site to host images, but they started getting way too big, bloated and slow. Reddit probably saw this as degrading their viewer experience, and rightly so, imo.

My significant other couldn't figure out how to easily post images on Reddit (without switching between two websites).

Now she's posting more content on Reddit, because it's easier and self contained.

There's also many advantages to keeping users "on site".

When will they start hosting short videos?

> I upload stuff to imgur just for the nice, short URLs.

genuinely curious, why is that important? is it common to memorize the URLs instead of copying and pasting?

When I want to share an image over chat with a friend, the long, odd looking reddit image urls disrupt the natural flow. It's like virtually slapping someone on the face. A nice, short and sweet URL is much nicer in text conversations.

Also, being a developer and security conscious, I inspect URLs before I click on them. The longer they are, the more frustrated I get examining them.

The flow comment is interesting, especially because it's one I resonate with. Every time I want to hotlink an image from Facebook I cringe at the multi-line horror in the clipboard.

Reddit has short URLs; they're in the sidebar of every submission, e.g., http://redd.it/6idi12

That goes to the post, when I'm sharing an image I don't want it to load Reddit.

Oh; I'm the opposite: when I come upon a bare image link, I prepend `reddit.com/` to get taken to its reddit discussion. :)

> being a developer and security conscious, I inspect URLs before I click on them. The longer they are, the more frustrated I get examining them.

it doens't really matter if a url is long or short, right? as long as the domain looks good then there's no reason to check every character in the url? not sure why it's more secure to have a shorter url if the domain is safe

*not a security expert

Short URLs are nice. Less to go wrong for starting. Slashes, and any non \w character, is potential mistake in sharing, due to copy paste errors, bad decoders, etc. Plus they look nice and can literally be typed out from a screen shot or something.

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