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Comment by minimaxir | Hacker News Reader

A couple months ago I found that Reddit submissions using Reddit's native image hosting, a year after its implementation, surpassed those of its main competitor, Imgur (HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14595212)

I'm not entirely sure the same will happen with video. Not only are the videos typically posted on Reddit's largest video subreddits are from the YouTube community (and intended for the YouTube community), the video player beta is apparently a worse user experience than YouTube. (in contrast with images, where the competitor was the one with the worse user experience)

And that's not even getting into the logistical concerns. Hosting images is much, much easier than video, as video has much higher bandwidth/storage requirements AND Reddit will have to frequently remove pirated/NSFW videos for Safe Harbor protection/advertiser friendliness, which is a challenge even Google has not been able to solve at scale.

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Image hosting is easy, if you don't care about losing money. As long as you provide direct links to images, you're better than everybody else.

Video hosting? You need a good player (nothing will ever top YouTube's) and a good CDN. That's a tough nut to crack. Especially for a company with no money.

The proliferation of HTML5 video support in browsers has made the player massively less of a concern than it used to be. I recently led a move of my employer's video hosting (many TBs worth of video) from a third-party platform to an in-house solution and it was quite a lot simpler than one might expect.

Video is super expensive in terms of bandwidth, but the technical pipeline for ingesting, transcoding, delivering, and presenting it is extremely simple now.

On the web the only usable player I interact with is YouTube. No other site has video that I would describe as watchable.

>extremely simple

Yet nearly every time I use a player that isn't YouTube's it stinks. Cursor doesn't disappear. Inconsistent interaction model (does double click move in/out of full screen? Do the arrow keys work? Does 'm' mute? Etc.)

It's not just about the ability to play a video, you have to get the UX right as well, and most don't.

Not just the UX, the performance as well: there are few things more infuriating than going to pause an autoplaying video, but you can't, because it slows down scrolling on the whole web page. Then you finally get your mouse over it and if you're unlucky enough that the controls have disappeared you've got to wait for whatever 1 sec+ latency for them to re-appear. Then you've got to click them - an action once again, slave to huge amounts of latency provided it even works the first time. Then once it's paused (if it had started playing), you've just got to hope that it won't just continue loading the rest of the video in the background.

Definitely. Performance at scale is tough to get right here.

At scale? You only have one player.

Yeah, fair enough. Forgot we were talking specifically about the player here.

> nothing will ever top YouTube's

A video player that doesn't make me wait a long time before going to full resolution,or that lets me select full resolution when I'll not on desktop, would be a huge plus for me.

In the last week goon to YouTube's site on mobile to watch videos has often been broken. Turning off my adblocker doesn't fix it. Going to the desktop site sometimes fixes it. Very off-putting.

And you know what I would kill for? A display of how long a video is before I play it. And maybe an indication of if it has sound.

I'll point out I don't use any apps and even on mobile I use the desktop site.

But YouTube seems to be getting slowly worse, which doesn't really surprise me. Imgur had DEFINITELY gotten WAY worse than even a year or so ago.

Good luck to Reddit. This may be a serious improvement.

> And you know what I would kill for? A display of how long a video is before I play it

Every youtube video thumbnail has that in the lower right corner.

Not on mobile. I don't see it until I start playing.

The mobile app absolutely has that.

I don't use the app. I mean in Safari.

When I click a link that takes me to YouTube I can't see it until I start playing.

> Imgur had DEFINITELY gotten WAY worse than even a year or so ago

There is vicious cycle with all image hosting services and Imgur(and Photobucket) has reached the last step:

1. Notice all other services are filled with ads and full of bloat

2. Create new, free and very simple image uploading site

3. Site gains popularity

4. Operating costs go through the roof

5. Try to monetize by adding ads or move to paid accounts

6. goto 1

> Especially for a company with no money.

Reddit doesn't exactly have "no money": https://techcrunch.com/2017/07/31/reddit-just-raised-a-new-r...

Do you have data about how reddit images score vs imgur images? Right now /r/all first page has 14 imgur.com and 4 i.reddit.com

In terms of arithmetic mean, Imgur submissions do have a higher score (about 20%), but there are a lot of confounding variables in play.

Reddit doesn't universally prohibit NSFW content, and already has to remove links to it or assure that it is properly flagged, depending on the particular sub, so I don't think the NSFW side really changes things.

In the copyright side, hosting vs. linking has both similar risks and similar DMCA protections around user generated content, so while they'll probably have a higher volume of complaints when they are both the link venue and the source host, I don't think that fundamentally changes anything, either.

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