Imgur launched 10 years ago on Reddit | Hacker News Reader

Imgur launched 10 years ago on Reddit

reddit.com

37 pointsfelix199613 comments

Funnily enough, it was made because all image host did suck, and now it's grown to suck as much as those it replaced.

It was a good run. Whose turn is it now?

That was always ironic to me; it was designed to be "Reddit's image host" but slowly became some weird mashup of Reddit and Pinterest.

I'm a little surprised Reddit didn't buy them after the former started picking up traction and investor money; IMO introducing their own image host years earlier would have been a home run.

> I'm a little surprised Reddit didn't buy them

I expect due to the influx of VC money into Imgur their asking price was too much. And setting up image hosting in your own backend (which will all be proxied from S3 anyways) isn't the hardest thing to do.

Image hosting is a waste of money unless you redirect to html pages full of ads.

I think they transitioned to being a community pretty smoothly. I haven't looked around much but I guess it's a worse version of Reddit.

Redirecting to a page full of ads is different from having a horrible javascript bloated page that takes 20 seconds to load on mobile.

It's what I always told everyone who jumped from ImageShack to Imgur. It was clean and lean back then, but it was obvious that one day it would turn into the next ImageShack. It happens with every. single. free. service. Or it just shuts down before it happens.

How do you pay for bandwidth if your main objective is letting people link to .jpg/.pngs directly? Either you force people to make accounts and pay once their images exceed some threshold (photobucket/imageshack) or try to force them into ad-included html pages (imgur).. I don't see any other way around it.

Of course. That's why no one should be surprised when it eventually goes downhill. I'm gladly hosting my images myself but I know this is not an option for everyone. But sadly many people are riding on the free wave who wouldn't have to, and those are then the ones who are usually the loudest when the quality drops.

Always fearful of sharing my images on Imgur as I never thought the business model would cover for the hosting costs of so many images. I can't imagine many people paying for Imgur Premium or getting any value from their ads. In any way, thankful that it does appear to be working, nearly all my public images are shared via Imgur.

Is there a listing of all reddit-origin sites and startups?

Imgur is pretty much the only popular one AFAIK.

There's an adult-oriented image hosting site that started on Reddit called redgifs

That's just gfycat's adult-only bantustan.

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