Comment by throwaway2048 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by throwaway2048 | Hacker News Reader

This is the normal cycle of Internet image host, its shocking photobucket took this long to reach this point.

There is fundamentally no profit in hosting images for free that people embed/link directly.

The same thing has happened to countless image hosts beforehand, and is going to happen to imgur too as soon as the music stops and the stacks of VC cash fueling the furnace are all burned away.

This is a great example of a market failure. Nobody wants a sustainable model where the image host can actually make money. As soon as they start taking away the "direct image links" feature, which is the only feature anyone actually cares about, and the thing that has zero possibility to make money, ever, everyone flees onto the next host, and the cycle starts anew.

We need another solution here. Maybe IPFS? Maybe torrents? Maybe some image hosting foundation?

It sucks badly that the Internet loses its collective image heritage every few years because somebody else thought that they could give it away for free and make it up in volume.

> We need another solution here.

We already have, it's called pay for your own bandwidth.

Alternatives: use a CDN (also not without drawbacks but a lot better than an image host) and yet another one is to accept that these companies will die every couple of years but as long as the average internet pages rots as fast or faster as the image hosts disappear it isn't a huge problem, most of those images have limited freshness anyway, the few that are evergreen and that will continue to be linked from supported pages could be re-uploaded from some kind of cache.

Imgur has already started doing it, just not all the way. They redirect direct image links to the framed version of the image, and they have a growing blacklist of sites that aren't allowed to embed images, including ebay, codepen [1], and probably others.

[1] https://twitter.com/codepen/status/662641042647326720

I'd wager google can do it for free + the click-data + images to train their AI. Surprising they haven't done it yet.

Google already cache a large chunk of the images in their image search. The expensive bit of image hosting is really the abuse detection ...

Could you talk about which services came before? Photobucket is the oldest one I can recall. Except maybe Flickr, which hasn't done this.

Imgur has transitioned to an image-based version of reddit so may be able to survive

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