IMGZ – Paid image sharing | Hacker News Reader

IMGZ – Paid image sharing

imgz.org

359 pointsvyrotek390 comments

I thought the comments to this were well above average on the entertaining scale. Pretty embarrassing, though, that probably the majority of comments seemed to take it seriously, even reprimanding the creator for not being serious enough, not taking his Business seriously enough. It seems to create dissonance among many that such a thing even exists. People seem deeply confused it's not full speed ahead, like every other commercial site, trying to grab money from users. We on HN constantly complain that the internet was taken over by smooth, malevolent, lying mega-corporations, with 1GB ToS's and thousands of employees..and here's something completely different and people entitledly shit on it.

It's a joke, people! From HN's own Stavros. Or, who knows what it is. Something Stavros did for fun and uses himself. A thing. Can't things just be allowed to be what they are? It's like people can't tolerate the existence of unique things, and have to see them as just really bad versions of a known category of things. "This round thing is bad because I can't force it into this square hole." And I guess when someone posts something to HN it gets judged as if submitted by the author and designed, badly, for the person now reading it. Ugly font! Bad colours! Unprofessional tone! Bad marketing! etc. ..Wasn't the internet 100% like that in the good old days?

This is how I feel too, it was surprising (and educational) to see some commenters having trouble accepting that someone might have just made a thing for fun. I think it's the fact that you can buy it that trips them up.

I imagine Cards Against Humanity got a lot of the same comments.

A Man that steps aside from the World, and hath leisure to observe it without Interest or Design, thinks all Mankind as mad as they think him. – Halifax (1633-95)

That's a great quote.

The world needs more people like you.

This site is a brilliant joke because it plays to so many of the tropes that HN commenters claim to want: Paid service, no ads, cheap prices, CLI interface, Rust for safety, and a company attitude that clearly caters to the programmers who work on the site instead of the customer.

It’s like the culmination of everything HN commenters say they want out of a software company, but those who don’t get the joke absolutely hate it.

People are even complaining about the trivial $1/month or $5/year price point as being too expensive. That’s a great reminder that nearly every time someone claims “I would pay for an alternative service that isn’t ad-supported” is not actually true 95% of the time. People love free services too much.

I'm always serious when I make jokes. Your silly joke got way to much attention not to make it into a professional joke by adding additional puns to it.

The biggest discovery imho is that people accept your style as a refreshing alternative to the plastic people. We wish you were real. We all have a behavioral picture of an entrepreneur but now we see its all bullshit. Just do what you like and be yourself.

Maybe one should put a fixed position css door on the website with the word EXIT on it and have that nice promt to close the page if one clicks on it.

> Wasn't the internet 100% like that in the good old days?

Maybe I was too harsh and you are describing my comments, but I was reading on this very site image hosting is not a funny joke business, it's a serious endeavor that deals with content abuse and CSAM content infringements quite often. There's maybe truth to your statement, but once a piece of work's defense is its a joke, does it really shield you from the law? Would that work in court? I'm not sure where stavros resides.

> but I was reading on this very site image hosting is not a funny joke business, it's a serious endeavor that deals with content abuse and CSAM content infringements quite often.

one major difference: this is not free unlimited image hosting but paid limited hosting. That reduces "sustainable" abuse vectors quite a bit.

I honestly love this copy. It's fantastically refreshing! I wish I got to see it more often... This was my favourite bit:

> Listen, this is half service, half art project. I made it in two days because I needed one and Imgur is an embarrassing husk of its former self, and I had nothing better to do. If you're expecting professionalism, call Oracle and ask for a quote of Oracle Advanced Image Sharing for Hadoop or whatever crap they sell, IMGZ is awesome but what you see is what you get.

I've been hoping for an Imgur replacement for simple, hosted image sharing.

I'm happy to pay $1/mo, but when I tried to upload https://camo.githubusercontent.com/9ec8d13de2878c899fda0bd43... I got this, which doesn't look like what I uploaded: https://cln.sh/4coS9T / https://imgz.org/i5qphFzd.gif

Well that's extremely odd, I will look into that right now.

EDIT: This is very odd, I'm not really doing any processing on the uploaded files, so it should definitely return the originals. I will have this fixed soon though.

EDIT2: Unfortunately, the saved image in the DB itself is corrupt, so you will need to reupload after I solve this.

EDIT3: Alright this should be fixed! Now I can start submitting animated GIFs there.

EDIT4: Ironically, now ONLY animated GIFs work, because 2am is when I do some of my best work. Stand by...

Same for me. I tried uploading this test image - https://bhi61nm2cr3mkdgk1dtaov18-wpengine.netdna-ssl.com/wp-... (dont ask, lol)

and the uploaded image was a negative of it.

That one worked for me: https://imgz.org/i4mdbiQL.jpg

Sorry I may have been dishonest there. I downloaded it from the google search results directly, perhaps this link- https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcTFsEM5...

it resulted in https://imgz.org/i5Q2gzwB.png

Hm, very odd that the type wasn't detected properly. The animated GIF issue is because of EXIF stripping ruining the image, though. I'm fixing that now.

It seems like you're still dealing with some pretty rudimentary issues here.

He threw it together in 2 days according to what's written on the website.

It literally has no semblance of trying to be a long term long running replacement to imgur. Just a dead simple image upload service that works from the CLI.

I did throw it together in two days, two years ago! I don't know why this image failed, when I tried it it worked. Animated GIFs were failing because I don't use them so I'd never tested on them. It's fixed now, though.

You said, no support. Why do you even care? F*k this guy. Delete his account. /s

Hey, I use this thing, it has to work.

It only has to work for you! Did/do you need/use animated gifs?

yea fk tht guy

Don't tell me what to do! I want to fix animated gifs and I'll fix animated gifs!

Per the edits on your previous posts, I read this more as "and I'll pivot to only supporting animated gifs!"

I can't say I didn't consider it...

Any picture can be an animated gif with one frame and a duration of 50 years which should do for this civilization.

Fast support.

> saved image in the DB

Whoa now... you're putting images in the database?

Yes, it's a database. That's where you're meant to put DATA.

How about filesystem or object storage? That where you meant to put a FILE which is what the user uploaded.

If IMGZ was a file sharing service it would be called FILZ or something. Obviously this is not that.

And if it were a hotel it could just be called ZZZ.

>Yes, it's a database. That's where you're meant to put DATA.

Most (all?) large-scale high-volume image storage architectures I'm aware of do not store billions of images as blobs in a database. Instead, they typically store the images as files. The database only holding metadata info and a pointer to the image filename location (or url if using AWS S3 or CDN).

E.g. Facebook is one of the largest MySQL sites (if not the largest) and they don't store photos directly in MySQL.

I'm joking, but the volume for IMGZ is way too low (and always will be) for data storage to matter.

Still low even after HN surge?

Let me check...

TWO more images were added today! At this rate, I'm going to need to buy a whole datacenter by next week.

https://imgz.org/blog/2020/12/23/haha-suckers/

Don't knock exponential growth!

I like you (and I like storing images in the database).

EDIT: I uploaded an image into your database https://imgz.org/i3joC5jC/

Majestic Taco.

That is an excellent image, worthy of gracing my database.

BTW, https://imgz.org/i9xyk2H2.png is broken and included prominently in https://imgz.org/blog/2020/12/23/haha-suckers/

Not sure is it some intentional irony or an actual bug.

https://imgz.org/i9xyk2H2/

Ill take the job.

I understand that postgres is pretty decent at storing large binary data though?

I've been meaning to investigate trying storing images in postgres on a hobby web project where it could be convenient; I'd still want to make sure I was streaming bytes from postgres to the client, not loading the whole image into memory and only once fully loaded sending it to the client. Looking at the pg API's for my language/platform of choice, it looked at least plausible to do this with a BLOB.

Postgres is indeed good at that. I know from experience.

If you want to commit ten things every second all week, don't transfer so much data in a single transaction that you hold any important locks for half a minute. And if you use replication, test while replicating.

If the blobs you store are small enough to not disturb your commit rate, then pg's drawbacks are IMO smaller than those of the alternatives, particularly if you want some sort of commit that returns when both image data and something else have been committed.

Thanks for info!

So you've stored images in the db in production and had it work out fine?

I don't want to commit ten things a second. It would be a pretty read-heavy write-light load. Sounds like that would avoid one path of riskiness at least.

Yes, exactly.

Many people answer a question like this: "How good is postgres at storing big blobs, relative to small things?" Postgres is indeed worse at storing large things. However, I think the most interesting question is something along these lines: "What's best, storing everything in Postgres and accepting that inefficiency for the big blobs, or implementing transactions, replication and/or backup with a part of the data in Postgres and the big blobs elsewhere?"

I'm awfully fond of having working backups, and postgres' performance problems with the blobs haven't been big enough that I've really noticed.

Does it still require a backup/restore cycle for upgrades? That could be an issue.

Yeah, that hasn't changed. You can also use the pg_upgrade script instead of a full backup/restore, or use logical replication if you want to upgrade the db server with zero downtime, but upgrading PostgreSQL is still somewhat annoying.

> I understand that postgres is pretty decent at storing large binary data though?

Storing large files in PostgreSQL is possible, but I would advise against it.

PostgreSQL uses a technique called TOAST to store large objects. If you store something in a bytea column, it'll first be compressed (either deflate or a new algorithm that I forgot the name). Then it will be split into 8KB chunks (page size) and stored together with all the other data.

Since most image formats are already compressed, this just wastes a lot of CPU cycles.

Also, the way storage is allocated in PostgreSQL may bite you in the ass. By default, storage is not returned to the OS. If you delete all images, the data will stay on disk and marked as reusable. Only if you do a full rewrite of the table will the free space be made available again.

Also, backups will become a pain. The easiest way to backup PostgreSQL servers is to just do a pg_dump. It works great up to a few gigabytes of data. If you have images or other large objects in the database, then pg_dump will quickly become unfeasible and you will have to find another way to do backups. Not a deal breaker, but something you should be aware.

Also, for best performance, the database should be on fast storage (eg. NVME SSD), whereas the image data typically doesn't need fast storage.

## A Practical Example:

One project I work on is an image database with 50k images. The high resolution previews are around 20GB. The PostgreSQL database with all the metadata is around 20MB.

It takes 10 seconds to do a full backup of the database. Everytime I change something in the application, I first create a dump of the database (which is just a few MB compressed). Then I do my changes, and if I make a mistake I always have a backup that I could restore in 10 seconds.

If the images were stored in the PostgreSQL database, a full backup would take much longer and would require a fast internet connection. And it would be much harder to work with.

My recommendation: Use the filesystem for storing files.

Thanks for info! What about binary large objects instead of bytea?

Size/speed of backups is a good point to consider.

I've never used PostgreSQLs large objects. You have to use this awkward API to use them, they aren't stored efficiently either, and as far as I can tell it's just a legacy feature that nobody has bothered to deprecate yet.

In my opinion the only neat thing about large objects is that you can edit files with a posix-like API in a database transaction, but I can't think of a scenario where that would actually be useful.

I too do that, in a different context, and it's fine. Databases have problems with big items, but images aren't big in that sense nowadays.

The problems relate mostly to backups/copies/reloads, that kind of thing, and copying an image doesn't cause anything to hiccup. A transaction that transferred 1MB over a modem line was a problem, that could block other commits for a long time, on today's networks 1MB doesn't take long.

... depending on the type of data.

Binary data in databases is usually not a great idea, but tolerable in low amounts.

I can't imagine storing images in a database, you're probably better off with a document store.

Relational Databases (well, the ones that I know the internals of) tend to have soft limits on row sizes, in PostgreSQL this is 8kb (which is very small for an image); to overcome this limitation Postgres uses what they call a TOAST table, which forces compression by default, which absolutely crumbles on binary data.

https://www.postgresql.org/docs/13/storage-toast.html

But, if it works, I'm not complaining- and I'm very certain that other such sites have worse architectural flaws in the beginning- this one is pretty easy to overcome if it becomes an issue and can be alleviated with aggressive caching of CDNs/varnish to buy you time if there's immediate issues. :)

If you were to go with PostgreSQL, wouldn't you store this in a large object, which is effectively stored outside of the actual table row? So, if you can store enough rows of meta data AND you provision enough storage, why wouldn't the database be able to do this. I don't imagine you want to put a primary key on the actual image data column (not possible with large objects, since the column just contains an "oid"). I'm not arguing for storing images in the database, I've seen it done either way, and done it myself either way, but I believe that it's an ongoing source of heated debate between proponents and opponents. I.e. not settled out of hand.

Large objects are _mostly_ an access method, the underlying implementation is staggeringly similar to TOAST.

> The large object implementation breaks large objects up into “chunks” and stores the chunks in rows in the database. A B-tree index guarantees fast searches for the correct chunk number when doing random access reads and writes.

You might try Foreign Data Wrapping.

In which case I still wouldn't because the database is going to be spending more time in doing round trips, better my application server does that, there's usually more of them.

This entire comment is accurate. I chose the DB for ease of backups more than anything.

Advice these days is to rely on the database to do the right thing with your uploaded files. I think they all handle this rather well.

That sounds right. But even if it works great, it's gonna be the most expensive place to put your data. Those image blobs would be fine on spinning rust.

But yes, there's probably time for that optimization later, if the service takes off.

say hello to my friend BLOB

Doesn't iCloud use FoundationDB for storage of files?

Nightmare fuel

This is hereby declared a feature.

>I've been hoping for an Imgur replacement for simple, hosted image sharing.

If you are willing to pay for things, then any good old web host + FTP are your friends.

That sounds like a lot of work. Why not just push my screenshots to good ol' NNTP?

Because downloading a tiny GIF in 20 parts, is always fun. /s

And it’s only accessible for paying users for about a year, slightly more or less according to how much they pay and how much is uploaded by the rest of the internet…

That sounds really out-dated. Why not put the screenshots on a blockchain?

Or ipfs if your machine is often online

Again, straight up running an FTP server on your machine is still the easiest way to transfer large files.

Also faster than uploading to the cloud, and then having the other party download it.

Bug? Or feature?

Mint that NFT RIGHT NOW

IMGZ created this, IMGZ owns the copyright. IMGZ has a will of its own.

There is ImgBB. You need to create an account, but it is free.

https://imgbb.com/

I hope their architecture handles the HN front page load well. :)

https://imgz.org/i9hxfgRu.png

Funniest pricing page. Make sure to read the disclaimer at the bottom:

https://imgz.org/money/

May be more a TOS problem than a load problem, though maybe they are on the big paid plan at CF.

  server: cloudflare
  cf-cache-status: HIT

I am definitely on something.

I want to know what tool was used to create that image. It's fantastic and I have many uses for it.

Looks like https://www.cloudcraft.co/

Yep, exactly!

I'm on my second year subscription, even if the owner's a total cunt who actually responds to justifiable emails.

Owner sounds a bit full of themselves for sure. Any horror stories?

Nope.

It's a few bucks a year silly image hosting account. I mean, I'm a grumpy, cheap fucker, but even I would struggle to find fault.

- ed

in fact, to clarify - I have twice written to Stavros, and both times he's been upmost helpful. Proving what a liar he is and how he fails to live up to his marketing.

Owner has humor and talks to his customers like they're adults (adults with a sense of humor)

>Any horror stories?

One time I made a joke on HN that feel flat, and he posted a sarcastic comment! He also bought an oscilloscope from me and made sure I marked the package correctly so it didn't get caught up in (corrupt) Greek customs, causing a tiny amount of extra work at my end!

True sociopathic behaviour!

Holy shit I LOVE the Labrador, it's the most useful thing I have. Guys, if you're into electronics at all, buy one right now (https://github.com/EspoTek/Labrador/), it's amazing and only $30.

Also I'd say I'm sorry about the comment but that would imply I've changed but I'm still a sarcastic asshole. I'm working on it though.

>I'm still a sarcastic asshole.

Beats being a boring asshole like me! :P

(And thank you for the kind plug)

I purchased one based on this exchange alone. I'm an impressionable sod!

You and two others, apparently. I'll save that stat for next time my wife says I "waste my time" on HN!

You're going to love it.

I think AussieWog just made more of this post than stavros did.

He did :(

Same. You can say I'm easily influenced, I don't care :-)

I was so confused by the absence of a login form, below "Already have an account? No you don't. Try to log in below if you think you do anyway."

Turns out uBlock was hiding the form; possibly one of my 'social' blocklists. Just in case anybody else runs into that problem!

Actually I have the exact same problem. I should fix that...

EDIT: Fixed, thanks!

Oh wow, quick response & fix haha. Thank you! You might've just convinced me to pay for the service. Looks good.

Ahaha you fell right into my trap!

Now to seduce you further into expanding my 2GB/month limit. ;)

Nah, in all seriousness - looks like a good service. Happy to be aboard!

Honestly I feel like you're being very dishonest about your commitment to providing no support, you've provided all kinds of support already.

Ah but I didn't commit to providing no support, I didn't commit to provide support. Support is provided at-will!

Ahhh how there's nothing sacred in the world no more! One can't even trust people to provide no support! Those Internat services will doom us!

It's cats and dogs living together!

Do you think this fear of commitment comes from your early family life? Feel free to lie back on the couch if you'd be more comfortable.

> With this in mind, we found the perfect balance of the "early startup employee" compensation package: 50% stock, 50% equity, 0% salary[0].

I'm IN! Congrats :D

0: https://imgz.org/blog/

Fantastic! I will send you the contracts to sign.

I didn't relaunch though, I just wrote a comment about it and someone posted it and now I have to fix my EXIF stripping breaking animated GIFs at 2 am :( Ah well, no better time than the present.

Hah, Greek time zone eh?

Yes :( There are worse timezones, there's this school in England whose timezone is like 12 minutes away from the rest of the country.

What timezone is that? I don’t see it in the tz database.

My favorite may be Lord Howe Island in Australia (Australia/Lord_Howe), which uses +10:30 in the winter and +11:00 in the summer.

Hm, I thought I read about that here[1] but I can't find it now, so my brain may have made it up. Nepal is 45 minutes off, though, apparently!

[1]: https://www.zainrizvi.io/blog/falsehoods-programmers-believe...

If you don't mind using AWS you can just set up an S3 bucket and a point a CloudFront distro to it (takes <5mins) and then just do

    upload() {
      aws s3 cp ${@:2} $1 s3://$BUCKET_NAME
      echo https://$CLOUDFRONT_DOMAIN/$1 | pbcopy
    }

I do mind.

The Dude minds!

Honestly, so many things could go wrong here. I’m a programmer and I’d have to google how to “do” the above.

If anything, this makes me want to sign up for IMGZ. Maybe the above comment should be on IMGZ landing page.

Dropbox flashbacks anyone, "Why would anyone use dropbox when I can just rsync over"

Done!

I am not fine with AWS as there is no way to avoid suprise 30 000 $ payments caused by some bug.

I see a lot of comments about the $5 a year quote. I see $12 on front page - I wonder if it's just changed in last hour or am I getting a Canadian special :-)

(It changed in the last hour https://gitlab.com/stavros/imgz/-/commit/7bdac35c8bc397bf829...)

Unfortunate. 5$ is a perfect no brainer price, but I pay 1€/mo for my e-mail hosting and definitely get more value out of that ...

Flawless demand adjustment, though.

Out of curiosity, what do you use for email? I'm currently on Office365 but it's way overkill...

I use FastMail and it's around $2-$3/mo if you prepay. I love it, recommended.

Tutanota. They’re a cooler company than Proton but due to the lack of a bright I can’t unconditionally recommend the service - you’re confined to the (web) app.

Bridge. I meant bridge.

Posteo is also €1/month

Yeah but $5/yr is less than 1€/mo.

Hit the front page of HN so it’s time to raise the prices.

Imgz's pricing page made me wonder - if someone stops paying their dues for their imgz account, is it legal to auction off their photos 'as-is'?

I feel this would be similar to all those "storage wars" type shows where people buy a storage unit on auction after a preliminary look-see.

@stavros - if legal, put this in your ToS. "Clear your dues or else..."

Hahah, that's a great idea! Maybe I should start auctioning off sealed accounts, and you see what photos are in there when you buy it.

Love it! Maybe show a small percentage of the photos picked at random in the sealed account to bidders...

YES! Excellent.

Wait! You’ve gotta get NFT in that pipeline somehow.

Oh yes, how could I forget? I will raise it to the board and get back to you.

You could also convert them to a lower resolution, just to keep the suspense alive.

"Is that just a bent knee or am I looking at something far more titillating?"

Turn their photos into a social network with likes, "friends", comments and re-imgz

I can call it Imgzur.

$34

500 GB

You're just showing off

More images

The server doesn't have that much space don't get this

LMAO

from the FAQ:

>Does bandwidth cost extra?

>No. I don't know. It's not a problem yet. If it becomes a problem, I'll make it your problem, but I think we're gonna be okay.

Those are some pretty terrible prices. You can share images (or anything else) publicly from Dropbox/Box/GDrive/OneDrive for a lot cheaper. Or just cut out the middleman and set up a S3 bucket for a few cents.

This is like $12 a year.

I also have a dropbox account, which I hate. I also have various web storage accounts.

For sharing silly daft images that have little connection to me, I use my imgz.org account all the time.

$12/year for 2GB.

Free plans: Dropbox 2GB, OneDrive 5GB, Box 10GB, GDrive 15GB. They all let you generate public read-only links which aren't connected back to your account.

You know what, I literally couldn't give a fuck.

I have multiple hosted web storage, google storage, paid-for dropbox etc accounts, as well as reddit and imgur accounts - and the one I use to share stupid images is this one.

This was posted here a couple of years back, I liked the pitch, i paid for it.

I also enjoy avocado liberally smashed on shit.

Make sure you use https://pypi.org/project/imgz_cli/, I love it:

    02:07:53 $ imgz uruav-dji-fpv-porturuav-dji-fpv-port02.jpg 
    Page URL: https://imgz.org/i32hJdL8/
    Image URL: https://imgz.org/i32hJdL8.jpg

So nice.

Is there ShareX code?

No but there's an API and (I assume, I don't use Windows) you can easily add support for it.

> I also enjoy avocado liberally smashed on shit.

good luck buying a house being so financially irresponsible

Damn Gen Z, with their avocado toast and IMGZ subscriptions.

Oh! Would it were that I were Gen Z :)

There is "FU money", and _then_ there is "avocado money".

Dropbox and GDrive both shut down the public links feature years ago (dunno about OD or Box). Is there some workaround for that that I'm not aware of?

> Dropbox and GDrive both shut down the public links feature years ago

What? I routinely use those public read-only links on Dropbox to give [access to] a file to someone or e.g. take a presentation to another computer without logging in to anything, I did it just yesterday.

GP is talking about direct links - the kind you could curl/wget to get the file, or e.g. put in src attribute of img tag (if the link points to an image). Dropbox shut that down a long time ago.

Really? It doesn't get much cheaper than $1/mo. Yes, I know that's only 2GB, but how many images do you need to share anonymously with the internet?

iCloud has a 50GB plan for $1/mo. OneDrive does 100GB for $2/mo, GDrive for $1.67/mo.

Yeah but then you’re supporting Apple and google and also certainly being spied on and putting yourself at risk of being flagged as a pedophile.

imgz will flag you to NCMEC too ;)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28676746

Yes! Definitely don't upload any child porn.

Yes! Definitely don’t upload any pictures of your young daughter taking a bath or of your own body if you are a teenager. Those are evil and hurt people.

That's not porn though, is it? It's just child. I do agree with you though about posting photos of your child/self.

it's a philosophical question that you might think is an interesting one to discuss with federal law enforcement, but I've heard not so much.

If the picture of your young daughter taking a bath is in the NCMEC database you have much bigger issues than hosting images

yeah, every image hosting service will.

The issue was never that iCloud was scanned, it was that your phone is scanning your photos and that the list was opaque- it's a whole other thing if it's your own device which is supposed to be _yours_ that is spying on you. Potentially for big brother.

All of which disable sharing for a file if bandwidth usage is too high.

That leads to the question. How much bandwidth does imgz stand up to? It says it's "included" so no charges, but quota is not clear.

- edit -

>No. I don't know. It's not a problem yet. If it becomes a problem, I'll make it your problem, but I think we're gonna be okay.

Looks like there's no quota for now.

The bandwidth limit for the aforementioned services is probably higher than when stavros will make it your problem?

You'd think so, but have you ever tried to share a file from one of these services to a popular forum or subreddit?

They don't list their per file bandwidth quotas because they are incredibly low, suitable for cloud storage, not for file sharing, especially not mass sharing.

The quota is "whenever CloudFlare decides I've used too much of their caching", I think. Hetzner is pretty great about bandwidth, I think they'll let me use as much as will saturate the connection to the DC.

Might be worth looking at pulling with a Worker if that's ever an issue. They don't care if you do it that way :)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20791660

E: lol you were in that thread, you probably know about it

I was but I'd forgotten, thanks for reminding me! Also, Cloudflare now have a very nice image resizing product which I'd probably use if IMGZ didn't need to resize ten images per year.

I'm not sure they're ready for my kind of volume yet.

larger cloud providers are free/cheaper

https://catbox.moe/ et al are free and no account needed

B2 and similar with a little effort is half a cent per gig

I don't know why you would use this unless you like OP's attitude and want to simply support him.

Definitely the best part of IMGZ for me is the cli utility:

https://pypi.org/project/imgz_cli/

> set up a S3 bucket

Based on my experience as a boring nerdy-nerd who also happens to know how to host a Minecraft server, I hope I never get asked for that...

Man, if Gimlet Media hadn't gotten flushed down the Spotify crapper, this thread would've made for the most sublime episode of Reply All.

> You are a guest here. You can use IMGZ, and it'll always be great, because I'm great

> It's simple, what do you want

No bullshit, you say?

I like tongue in cheek stuff, jokes and all, but that tone sounds more like “fuck you” than a solid, reliable business relationship with adequate respect where the customer is not the product.

Besides that: Props for so quickly capitalizing on the (probably still brewing) imgur controversy!

> I like tongue in cheek stuff, jokes and all, but that tone sounds more like “fuck you” than a solid, reliable business relationship with adequate respect where the customer is not the product.

I kind of talk about that here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28677501

Basically, it's a bit funny that people complain that it sounds more like a "fuck you" when that's the entire point, and the site is completely explicit about it. We don't trust services to not want our money, even when they're telling us they don't. We just think it's a ploy.

> Besides that: Props for so quickly capitalizing on the (probably still brewing) imgur controversy!

Thanks! I made the site and bam!, two years later, Imgur imploded and I made $12!

I think I've seen the "where do I put my image files?" in the database or not for about two decades now with no definitive answer. I can't believe someone hasn't come out with a custom database specifically for storing images.

Actually, that'd be great, especially if it could resize/add logos/etc and cache variants.

Very neat.

The thing that scares me about doing any type of personal project for image sharing/hosting (especially with a free tier/trial) is that very quickly it will become a magnet for some very awful stuff. What are your plans for dealing with that?

CloudFlare has a thing where it automatically reports bad stuff to me and the authorities, and I turned it on, so hopefully all the abusers will be discouraged by that. Also I have their credit card info.

A "privacy" paragraph would be appreciated on the Terms page: https://imgz.org/help/terms/

Personally I would want to know if my uploads were going through some scanning engine from one of the tier-1 Internet gatekeepers who I would have to trust to not keep/forward a copy.

Hm, the site uses CloudFlare (and that's about it), is that what you mean?

Yes :)

I can mention that on the privacy page, yep!

Did not know about that Cloudflare service. Thanks for sharing. I learned something.

The paid-only model makes the host a lot less attractive for this. The free trial accounts will likely become a problem at some point, but there's still a verified e-mail address, so the next step would be banning throwaway mail hosters, and/or limiting the lifetime of uploads by trial accounts.

Is it $5/year (says on home), or $1/month (says on pricing page)?

From the pricing page (fine print):

    * All prices paid per year but shown per month because if I get another person telling me that "$5 A MoNth Is toO ExPeNSiVe FoR 1 GB" I'm going to lose it. Small print may be too small to read. Service comes with no guarantee, not even guarantee of service. Do not email us for support you do not get any. Paying us money doesn't entitle you to anything except owning less money. Disclaimer may make less sense as you read on, this is not the disclaimer's fault and is by design.

Well, I might pay $5/yr for an image service that sometimes works, with a side of comedy. It's better than some of the free options...

I still don't understand. $1 month is $12/year? Where does $5/year come from?

The pricing was updated today: https://gitlab.com/stavros/imgz/-/commit/7bdac35c8bc397bf829...

It used to be $5/yr but everyone complained that $5/mo was too high, so I changed it to "$1/mo billed annually", which amazingly has solved the complaints without reducing subscriptions at all (they were already at zero).

It was just updated: https://gitlab.com/stavros/imgz/-/commit/7bdac35c8bc397bf829...

A Stavros product.

https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=stavros

Show HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21627714

The switch from 'StavrosK really confused me and seemed fake at first...

Oh yes, sorry! I legally changed my username, apparently you can do this and dang was very accommodating.

It's fine! I understand now, and it's nice this was possible.

I changed mine a while back[1], (I was Jaruzel), although I don't think dang would be that happy if we all started asking.

Stavros, now that I'm in your comment replies... can I hijack this comment branch to ask what payment provider you are using and what the integration process was like ?

---

[1] I did it during a peak of self-loathing, I kinda regret it now, but ho-hum.

I'm using Stripe, they're great! I love them.

Cheers!

Excuse me stavros, this is brilliant. I have no real intention of using the service but I got a subscription because this really cracked me up. I love every little bit of it. Great work!

Or maybe I will use it as I have an account now. We shall see.

You should definitely use it for excellence.

Stavros. You need to detach a little bit, get a 10,000m view. You've got something, you can be successful. But your approach is "out of whack" and people aren't going to support you. Conform to influence.

Conform to influence. OBEY.

I was going to upload a nice screencap from a 1988 movie They Live to IMGZ and link it here, but it turns out my trial expired so no link for you.

Well guess what just UNEXPIRED

Why thank you. I thought I actually had a paid account, but it turns out I misremembered. Got to fix that.

EDIT now the site disagrees and tells me I already paid. That's one growth hack.

The joke has expired so still no meme image for the parent poster. I appreciate the explanation, though.

> EDIT now the site disagrees and tells me I already paid. That's one growth hack.

That's because I upgraded you, so you look upgraded to it.

The nerve!

Obey propaganda :D

actually, conform to influence doesn't mean that. It means, to influence a group you need to be part of the group. To be part of the group, you need to first conform to the group.

Ah I see, I read "influence" as a noun when you meant it as a verb. Very ambiguous though.

It's actually a very pithy phrase, because it's exactly the "message" of the product as art, reversed.

Stavros would prefer not to conform, and doesn't care if that means he doesn't influence.

Although... ironically he is probably one of the more influential HN posters. Now, profitable, I dunno, do you really mean "conform [in order] to profit", does "influence" just mean "exploit" [in the economic sense. mostly] now?

Can we conceive of someone who would rather not conform and in fact would rather not exploit?

I can confirm I have influenced zero people, which is probably for the best.

Is it not ok to make a "little bit" (you can be wealthy beyond your wildest dreams from a small business) of money from a opinionated business (akin to a restauraunt, perhaps) rather than conform and become just one more ycombinator-esque startup in the hope you'll make even more money if you make it big.

Or zero money, even!

But definitely not lose money, that would be a blasphemy!

Oh no, I lost money on this by accident :(

Investors investors investors?

Please buy the site.

Unless you lose a LOT of money.

> ashamed of what Imgur has become?

Can anyone explain what's the problem with Imgur?

Basically the issue I had with it is that they seem to make the site less and less usable as an image host. They used to have (or at least allow) a way to upload images from the command line, but mine stopped working at some point, I couldn't find the page with all my images, they started putting comments on stuff I posted, things like that.

It had turned into a social network when I just wanted a place to send a screenshot to a friend, which I was very dissatisfied about.

He says there's a $5/year option, but if you go to pay, there isn't one.

https://imgz.org/money/

Update: I don't say that any more.

Can you tell us how many people have tried logging in as you?

Five so far!

Could you actually "sell" a company, where the price is "$1M/year for the rest of my life"?

If imgz becomes the next FAANG, then that'd be quite cheap.

Only one way to find out!

I gave up and just put a file-upload CGI program (I'd say "script" but it's in C) on my own web page.

I got so much joy out of the FAQ I nearly paid just as a thank you for putting a smile on my face.

> I got so much joy out of the FAQ I nearly paid just as a thank you for putting a smile on my face.

> I got so much joy out of the FAQ I nearly paid

> I nearly paid

> nearly paid

> nearly

Sorry, service provider satisfaction not guaranteed! Also, the customer may have had a great journey with the website.

Spoiler alert: Image hosting is a little bit more complicated. Good luck with it.

Thanks, I'm hoping that having credit card numbers will keep most of the miscreants away, though I know that stolen card numbers exist.

Somebody suggested me cubeupload some time ago. Is there anything wrong with it?

Is it free? Free image hosting always eventually shuts down or monetizes with redirects to an html page with your image and bunch of ads. Bandwidth isn't cheap enough for free image hosting to survive.

It is free. It has ads and accept donations. No compression. Online since 2006.

Right. But they seem to be "on the edge" quite a lot. Like this:

https://twitter.com/CubeUpload/status/1169580329683828736

https://twitter.com/cubeupload/status/1169299066242682880

https://twitter.com/CubeUpload/status/1024951808484102144

is your service profitable? what tier of service does average user go for?

I made it for my use, so yes! Anything over $0 would be profitable.

Two out of three users use the "cheapass" plan. The other guy has the "person" plan.

I used to be a subscriber (until my subscription lapsed, but I would have renewed if there was a reminder email!), I went for the cheapest plan. (also if you pay with bitcoin you get a fun message after subscribing)

This is ~17x more expensive than B2 served through Cloudflare.

Other people's servers, other people's liability.

Business idea, under cut this guy by serving B2 via Cloudflare as a service

I can do this myself for much cheaper by buying a used computer from eBay, waiting 3 weeks for it to ship with missing parts, trading my old bike for more RAM from Craiglist, setting up Arch on it, compiling my own drivers, writing a webserver and firewall from scratch, connecting it to the internet and then using it twice before my ISP cuts my service for breaking TOS by running hosting on a consumer plan. I could have even just gotten a DigitalOcean VPS for $5 a month and conned friends into paying my costs for me in return for creating them a username and password to a half-working FTP server where they can upload their images in sixteen easy steps.

Can you do it cheaper?

Yes.

But can you do it better?

Also yes.

You forgot mounting via curlftps and using SVN or CVS on it.

Just commenting because I want to save this post

There's a "save" button, damn.

No BS is fine, but there are different variations on that :)

Stochastic Technologies 5th Floor, Genesis Building, Genesis Close George Town, Grand Cayman Cayman Islands, KY1-1106

i like to use https://picc.io image sharing

The pricing page is perfect

Call me back once they have a plan to deal with abusive content.

For $1/mo/user, it's still profitable to spend 2 minutes reviewing an abuse complaint and banning a user. :-)

I'm not sure that meets US legal standards for moderation of sexual images, particularly ones involving children. Of course the last thing the host of IMGZ wants is child porn. But it's going to happen anyway and preventing it is a major barrier to hosting images in this way.

Unfortunately, Stavros has some issues keeping his services up. I was a user of his https://historio.us long-time ago, a paying one, and he just killed the service and lost all my data. Some time later, he restarted the service and gave my username to somebody else. Don't put anything meaningful and valuable into his services!

  Hello,
  I'm afraid I couldn't find your backup file :/ It looks like your account may have been one of the older ones to be reclaimed, when we hadn't added the backup functionality yet. I'm sorry about that :/
  
  Thanks,
  Stavros

That's a bit of a liberal retelling. You had a free account, the system sends you one (or two, I forget) emails if your free account is inactive, and if you don't log in for a few months it deletes the data to make room for others.

There was a period where I didn't keep backups of the data on free accounts, but people complained, so I added that.

I think it's a bit unfair to expect me to keep account data around forever for free, even after notifications that the account is inactive and will be deleted. Also, wasn't this more than half a decade ago?

EDIT: Also, your account isn't even deleted, only the pages are, so your username should still be there, no?

EDIT2: Also also, paid users don't get deleted, so something must have happened there. Maybe your payment method failed when renewing, or you didn't have a paid account? What's the username?

EDIT3: I found the thread:

You: Why did all my bookmarks disappear from my account?

Me: We only delete the links of unpaid accounts, as they take up too much space. We do have a backup export of your links I can send you, though.

You: Can you please? I will upgrade to a paid account if you restore my links.

Me: Sure, but it will have to be tomorrow, as I'm not at the computer right now.

And then what you posted above.

So it wasn't a paid account, this was seven years ago, your username wasn't given to someone else, and I didn't kill the service or lose your data.

It seems like there's a dispute of fact, whether this person was paying you or not: you say "You had a free account," and they say they were a paying customer.

I don't think "half a decade ago" is a reasonable time horizon after which to consider accusations of outright fraud irrelevant. If this person is telling the truth, then not only did you defraud them a few years ago, but you're lying about it now; this seems like an important thing for potential users of your new service to know about you. (Presumably your character has not changed much in the last five years, whether it was good or bad before.) If you're telling the truth, they're lying, presumably in order to hurt you.

I found and posted the email thread where he admitted to not having a paid account. He also managed to get into his account fine (that's how he saw that the data wasn't there), so the stuff about the username isn't accurate either. I can look at payment records, but I've literally never had a single complaint of paid users' data being deleted by accident.

I don't think he wants to hurt me (who cares about me or my service anyway?), I just think he's misremembering stuff from seven years ago.

> I don't think he wants to hurt me

in their HN profile they wrote about themselves: Provocateur extraordinaire. So malicious intent cannot be ruled out

Eh I'd rather assume the best, he seems like a nice guy.

I just paid for one year of Historious. I did like the service - that's why I was using it back in July 2010! I hope you have time to keep it up.

Next time you get years of data deleted without any warning, let's see how you're gonna react to it!

I mean, it's not "without any warning" when you didn't see the warning. It was there.

Well, maybe you don't follow as many startups as I do, but we, who are early technology adopters, get thousands of emails a day from all kinds of services we've tried out. So, if you care about us, busy technology professionals, the essence of your email should be in the subject line, especially when you expect time-sensitive actions from them or destruction could follow if they skip your email! Absolutely every other service puts that sense of urgency in the subject line! Instead of defending your position, learn from my experience as it's really huge!

Publicly accusing you of fraud is at the very least malicious disregard for the truth if it's a false accusation. This is supposed to be Hacker News, not Character Assassination News. (That's Twitter.)

Agreed. Nikolay appears to be trying to sicc a mob on Stavros.

Just a friendly warning, as his new "pricing" page reminded me of this accident!

Never said it was fraud; it was a huge disrespect to my data, as if it was deliberately deleted and not data loss, it only worsens the situation - I did not get any warning; I did not get any offer to upgrade to keep my data! I will search for the payment. I could be wrong, my hundreds if not thousands of stored links, and hours were lost due to this disrespect. Look at the pricing page for this "new" service - it screams the same attitude!

You didn't say use the word "fraud," but the scenario you described—where Stavros accepted your money for a service and then chose not to provide it—would amount to him defrauding you.

From your perspective the difference may not be significant: your links are just as lost either way, and the money you might or might have not paid for the service is tiny compared to the time you had invested in creating the links. The difference, from my perspective, is that setting up a free bookmarking service and then shutting it down without enough warning is not a very rewarding activity, so it tends to be a self-limiting problem; by contrast, selling a paid service you then don't bother to provide can be extremely lucrative, like spamming, so it's the kind of problem that tends to grow rapidly without countermeasures.

That makes it a considerably more inflammatory accusation.

The fact that you are putting customer chats in public forum without their consent is just terrible.

Oh man, if you're angry at my posting emails, wait until you see what the other guy posted!

It's absolutely fair game to post customer chats/emails that contradict a false and damaging narrative. Maybe the OP misremembered, maybe the OP has an axe to grind, either way the issue is firmly resolved now.

>It's absolutely fair game to post customer chats/emails that contradict a false and damaging narrative.

Eh, not really. Most half-decent businesses have a privacy policy/TOS that explicitly makes this a no-go, and would be grounds for a lawsuit if a company posted a customer's conversations with said company. It doesn't look like Historious has such a policy, so legally it might be okay, but it's still scummy IMO.

Posting your side of the story is fine, but using communications that are expected to be private usually isn't, and you should be able to correct the story without posting private info (we don't even know if the transcript that Stavros posted is true.. he could have completely made it up for all we know).

With all that said, it made me curious to look at the TOS for IMGZ, and... yikes... https://imgz.org/help/terms/

I see humor in the entire project, and am okay with this. Given Stavros' clear intent to be funny and make it abundantly clear what _isn't_ being promised, it's pretty great.

I mean c'mon - have a little fun.

At any rate it's classic absurdist marketing, and I approve.

Besides, I don't read the TOS of most other services. Why would I start now?

Oh I see the humor in it and I too am entertained, but I think it's a strange attitude to take in a paid product. This seems like more the territory of "optional donations accepted".

Just think, if this were a larger company doing this, they would be absolutely crucified for deceiving customers by hiding critical info in tiny text or TOSes that nobody reads.

And FWIW, I haven't actually tried paying yet, but if IMGZ is handling any actual payments info, a clever TOS that says "we don't make any promises about your privacy" won't protect you from fun legal action if that info is ever breached (though I'd guess and really hope that Stavros is using some payments provider like Stripe or Paypal).

> Just think, if this were a larger company doing this

Just think, they said wistfully, how angry we could be if things weren’t such as they are. What a glorious, outraged life we could be leading.

No, it absolutely is not.

There is a difference between creating a public record and correcting the public record.

It's not the full thread, though. It's been many years ago, but I'm pretty sure I paid for it back in 2014, i.e., 7 years ago. Here's the full thread: https://nikolay.docdroid.com/H4ZYmsS/gmail-password-reset-on...

Do you want me to provide you with the email trail? I remember paying for the account.

EDIT: Did you warn customers that their data (maybe a couple of megabytes) would be deleted? Did you offer me "upgrade to keep your data"? You simply disrespect our data. Also, your service was down for months if not years!

EDIT 2: Yes, you did say free accounts would probably get deleted after just 2 months without logging in.

My email thread [0] starts with me being certain I've paid for the account - that was 7 years ago and my memory back then was outstanding. Your free account had a limit of like 500 links and I had thousands and my account was paid for sure, but I was one of you first users and probably it was deleted by mistake or some flawed data migration.

Please, respect customers' data, it should be sacred - even if they are not paying customers! It didn't cost much to store links, even back in 2010!

[0]: https://nikolay.docdroid.com/H4ZYmsS/gmail-password-reset-on...

> Do you want me to provide you with the email trail? I remember paying for the account.

The question is whether it was a paid account at the time of the deletion. Paying for a year in 2010 obviously still makes the account unpaid in 2014.

> Did you warn customers that their data (maybe a couple of megabytes) would be deleted?

Yes, you get an email that this will happen.

> Did you offer me "upgrade to keep your data"?

Yes, it was in the email, it also tells you you can log in to keep it.

> You simply disrespect our data.

I don't know how many times I need to say that this is incorrect.

> Also, your service was down for months if not years!

When was this? I don't recall this, and I use it pretty regularly (and have monitoring).

Here's the email with the innocent subject of "historious hasn't seen you in a while!":

  Hello!
  We noticed that you haven't logged on historious in a while. Is there anything we can do to help? Please don't hesitate to reply to this email with anything you may need.
  
  To refresh your memory, historious is a new kind of bookmarking service which creates your very own, personalised search engine of things you like.
  
  Just as a reminder, our address is http://historio.us/ and your username, in case you have forgotten, is "nikolay".
  
  Please note that, if you do not log in or historify something for two months, the data in your free account might be removed to ensure that our service always remains fresh. If you are not using historious, you can safely ignore this email.
  
  If you would like to prevent this, just log into historious or historify something in the next month. If you are a subscriber, you don't need to do this, as we will not touch any of your data.
  
  Thanks!
  Team historious

It says "the data might be removed". Typically, you get multiple warnings before your data gets deleted, because people forget, and the warning is alarming. All these emails were unread - we all get a lot of spam and lots of informative emails and many of us just read the subject. If the subject is not suggesting that action should be taken otherwise there will be dire consequences, people might just read the subject and not open it.

> It says "the data might be removed". Typically, you get multiple warnings before your data gets deleted, because people forget, and the warning is alarming.

Sorry, but it's quite explicit. Might be removed means will be removed!

> All these emails were unread - we all get a lot of spam and lots of informative emails and many of us just read the subject.

Is it stavros fault?

> people might just read the subject and not open it.

Your problem!

No exactly. It is his problem, as otherwise I would have paid 14 years times $30, i.e., $420 of lost revenue just from me.

I’m sure we’re all very sorry that you didn’t read an email which, in retrospect, was important. It was careless of you, but we’re all careless sometimes.

I doubt stavros has the ability to force you to read your emails, though. Given that, it’s possible they aren’t at fault for your oversight.

He definitely can by putting a warning on the subject. If I read every email from every online service I've ever signed up for, I would be doing this all day long and be unemployed!

Well in the disclaimer it quite literally states.

> Service comes with no guarantee, not even guarantee of service. Paying us money doesn't entitle you to anything except owning less money.

So if you go into this service paying money expecting images to be hosted you're gonna have a bad time. Still humorous though, finally a payment page that states what every big company wants to state.

Well good news for you, he pretty much explicitly states all of that in IMGZ's terms of service!

https://imgz.org/help/terms/

>This is my project, and I make no promises at all, even though you're paying. I'm not even promising I'll host your images. I don't believe in stealing your money or compromising your privacy, but even those aren't promises either.

TBH, I would avoid this service on the grounds it seems to be run by one person (to what extent its just clever self promotion hinges on charitable interpretation) -- this blurb whilst humorous is on line with the Discord cutesy error messages. It really hammers home this is not in the big leagues (or the minor leagues rather) and if you are using this service, you should be fine with that. However charging customers for it is interesting since that's a sure source of customer pressure via expectation.

I haven't been this entertained for the mere price of $12 in a very long time. I think it's worth the price of admission even if I never even try to upload an image.

Oh no no no, that won't do. Please send your SLA and NDA for me to sign, we can't be spending $12 willy-nilly! We could have almost bought one movie ticket to Cats for that money!

I bought a movie on Amazon Prime just yesterday for $14 and it didn't make me as happy as this comment section.

It's clear: Hollywood needs to option this comment section.

I always wondered if people actually bought movies on Amazon. I guess some people have to pay for the rest of us to enjoy the free stuff.

Look, kudos for having a great sense of humour, but nobody is talking about a SLA or NDA, I was talking about the fact it's almost a guarantee that your service will cause an inordinate amount of pressure on you and that's quite obvious. Though I must congratulate you for making trawling through hckrnews a source of work as evidenced by the corrupt file upload that was brought to your attention.

I doubt that, this is the tenth or so service that I create and run and it's all been fine. You see, my secret power is that I'm terrible at marketing, so I only ever have two active users.

Having a hard time getting your “business advice for people who aren’t trying to run a business” consultancy off the ground?

Giving the advice away for free is a good start, but have you tried targeting people who want advice?

Woah, why so hostile? I am not trying to self advertise anything. The type of business this is in line with -- image uploading where probally data retention matters. There's just one guy runnning this and it's a no brainer you shouldn't use it for anything serious outside memes.

I'm not talking to stavros initially (but look, he replied so it's reasonable for reading that intent), I'm talking to people like me who want an imgur replacement (a la imgur acquired announcement yesterday at the same time) and host a lot of images, or just people who want a service that will be here for longer than the life of a single person.

But if you want to shut off your brain, go ahead, I had a laugh too. Just make to shut it off when reading my comments too, as it's not serious in that context then, and plus it'll be a no-op for you and it won't warrant implying I'm running a consultancy (where did this fabrication come from, really? I have no links or socials at all but I'm software guy who has a datahoarder hobby) -- please for the love of god, think me atleast smart enough to shit on the produt to try and get some sort of consultancy work.

If you get your socks off at the idea of a paid single developer lead image hosting, then let's hope the guy doesn't lose interest (as there is no obligation not to) or even, not get hit by a bus as the bus factor seems to be one.

> It really hammers home this is not in the big leagues

“This piece of writing, saying A, indicates that the author really does mean A” is a very boring observation.

Lucky for you, I wrote more than that. Trying to nitpick that sentence might as be well deserved from my criticism, I accept that, but I missed the boat this project was meant to be a "Joke" and had to deal with stuff like content abuse (seems like it's not on the CDN's radar from other threads), CSAM, data retention (see other customer thread here where data was corrupted). My biggest complaint really was it's one guy, and what happens when he gets hit by a bus? Or takes a vacation? Or is busy with other life stuff really. Really, shame on me for thinking that stuff matters given the context, and I regret that, but let's be clear, this is not a serious project, my serious criticism, let's just ignore that here (and let new people discover it out for themselves)? Lest I agitate you further let me preemptively call my observations banal -- that's a new word for you to use, it will make you less boring.

Strike while the iron is hot I guess, but not sure why you you are being such an ass in your copy, it's kind of a turn off, even if it is super cheap.

Maybe it's a trend where if something is super cheap people tend to write in that style, but it kind of erodes trust, unless this is supposed to be a joke site, but the fact that I don't know really hurts your chance to actually get users to want to give you their email or money.

Nothing against being edgy or sweary or whatever, I like it normally, but not when you are trying to sell something on the Internet when you don't have some trust anchor that makes me ignore it like a big name brand.

Ah, see, you're assuming the site is not serious and I didn't actually make this because I needed it and it'll be a hassle if other people use it so they need to give me money to offset the hassle.

It's not "free" money. They pay for the service. It's just regular money.

Call me crazy but the funny pricing page and copy is what convinces me to throw some money at this site.

If you upload a video of you throwing money at the screen I will give you a year's subscription.

Join my onlyfans to get that video..

Now we know what keeps busymom0 so busy.

That and writing software, and I'm assuming motherhood too.

And where she gets all that money to literally throw at crappy internet services when she could be using Dropbox|Google|FTP|Fifikno for cheaper.

I see it as a way to contribute to meme culture similar to the WallStreetbets saga.

I'm not sure there's any definite way to erode trust these days, since the most polished and believable sites can (and often do) completely betray the trust they instill or profess to uphold.

Perhaps the creator is truly tired of the BS and guesses that there's an audience who also is. And for $5/yr, it costs virtually nothing to try.

The bigger question is about limits of what can be posted, policing of content, and privacy.

The fact that it's so cheap makes it feel even sketchier, like who am I giving my credit card to if they are making it that cheap and easy to do; is it a trick to get my CC? They don't care how little I give, because the $5 isn't their target, it's something else.

As a developer I know you can build stuff that actually is that cheap, but still, makes some alarm bell go off. Maybe if the site was worded differently, it wouldn't push things over the edge and I would "just try it".

Also, I think if you want just $5 a year, why even ask for anything, unless you justify why it's so cheap and how it will just be enough to cover x costs or something.

The pricing page (after you log in) redirects to Stripe for checkout, as one would expect.

If you are concerned about your card there is a link to pay with bitcoin.

You're actually making a very good case for raising my prices again!

It would be interesting to see what kind of innovative products got made if everyone worried about being tut-tutted by self righteous internet critics for everything they did.

Honestly your comment is a charicature of the kind of internet objections we'd expect to see to a new marketing style.

That style reads like "ego defense."

As in, "if I make sure it looks like I didn't try hard, then it can't hurt when they say..."

The numbers don't lie: 99,9999987% of humans don't use this site and I'm not hurt.

Well played.

This thread reads like "ego offense".

As in, "I have to diagnose someone because it can't just be for fun and light hearted, this guy has to have a problem!"

From the site:

> Looking for a dead-simple way to share some images but are ashamed of what Imgur has become?

I don't even know why I should be ashamed of what imgur has become. I still use it to host images I want to post to social media, be they funny memes, or screen shots of system/programming errors I'm seeking help solving. It works fine. What's the problem with imgur exactly? I imagine I'm not the only imgur user who doesn't notice any issue with it.

> What's the problem with imgur exactly?

Since yesterday, it's owned by the company that runs Genius.com

https://www.medialab.la/

Just wait. The company that brought you Kik and Whisper and Genius is now the proud owner of Imgur and all the fabulous images and data contained within.

Did Medialab actually "bring" us those companies, or just acquire them after their founding teams already had?

They acquired the teams and the product, but they brought the business model. Much as will happen here.

What's wrong with Imgur:

Imgur started as a way to share images on Reddit. Imgur was even a great way browse all the images in a subreddit at once. Eventually Reddit implemented their own image uploading and hosting and added the new layout, which makes images bigger when browsing feeds. Imgur pivoted into being their own social network, and use cases like yours began to be ignored because they generated far more abuse than they do revenue.

Even if you once paid for Imgur, like I did, the non-social features are completely broken. I can't even view my own images using https://statico.imgur.com/all, and I can't get to my old albums of images.

Did anybody else read the copy, then read this comment, then read the copy again and go "what planet is this guy from?"

How did "being such an ass" get defined down to something this mild? People are so easily offended these days.

You can sign up for any image hosting website you want. I mean, you wouldn't go to Chipotle and rant at them for three paragraphs about how their mild salsa is way too spicy for you.

Yeah I was having the same problem. If he posted I host images , people would probably be less likely to join. People just like to complain about nothing

TBH, I find the following from that site as "being a bit of an ass":

> You are a guest here. You can use IMGZ, and it'll always be great, because I'm great. I've even open-sourced it.

(in particular, due to the "because I'm great.")

> It's super cheap. Like, $5/yr. And that includes bandwidth. There's even a free trial because I'm nice.

(same theme: "because I'm nice")

---

past that, the honest talk is nice to see, IMO.

Not to mention:

> Already have an account? No you don't.

> Try to log in below if you think you do anyway.

Yeah, I was confused by the copy. I also thought it wasn't a real service.

On the "Money" page (with title "Buy my shit"):

> That's because we want to avoid having to sell photos of your vagina to shady Russian oligarchs to pay for our servers and cocaine.

I'm not offended by the language. It just doesn't give me a sense that this is a serious business.

> I'm not offended by the language. It just doesn't give me a sense that this is a serious business.

That was very much the intent, as it's not.

This is what I’d expect a bot to write if it was only trained on zlatan ibrahimovic comments.

It’s all about context.

In the context of informal Internet chat, this is mild.

But as a business, in my own personal subjective opinion, it’s a real turn-off. I don’t ever EVER want companies to feign personality. At the moment it seems like this site exists purely because someone’s upset with Imgur. That’s a trrrible business model. I’m not about to rely on this existing in six months.

What I want is the most dead simple version of:

1. What it does

2. What’s in it for you

3. What’s in it for us

Everyone misses 3 but it’s imperative. Tell us why you’re here and how you plan on staying in business. If you don’t I’ll assume the worst.

1. It stores images.

2. I get money.

3. You get stored images.

I thought this was quite clear from the opening blurb, even.

Then go with that. With as few words as you need.

I did, the front page has exactly as many words as I needed.

Preach!

This is a good comment. #3 is important, as it can build trust if it seems genuine or plausible. If not, you have probably done a lot of damage to potential trust.

Stackoverflow only exists because someone was upset with expertsexchange. The business model seemed to work for them.

It this was a normal startup, the tone wouldn't inspire trust or be good PR. Fortunately this is a personal project, so the author can do whatever the heck he wants with its public image.

I was fine with all of it except the domestic violence jokes. Those weren’t funny enough to warrant the topic.

Alright, I'll bite. Which one? Seriously scoured the pages searching trying to be offended, couldn't find a "domestic violence joke".

- edit -

Ah the ToS, the one thing I never read. I thought it was pretty funny FWIW.

Never got the point to being offended by a joke myself or on someone else's behalf. Jokes help you cope and heal, they work wonders for overcoming dark situations.

The trick is to lighten up and learn to recognize an insult from a joke. Noone was insulted or attacked.

https://imgz.org/help/terms/

That's one of my favorite jokes on there, it's meant to draw attention to the excuses abusers use to make it sound like it's the victim's fault. It's not making fun of the victims, it's saying you shouldn't fall for that manipulation.

Honestly I'd rather have this straightforward no-BS talk than the "take this amazing journey with us" all is happy BS that is much easier to be cynical and skeptical about. What about the copy is false? It seems true to me, if it is blunt. I can't say the same for other website content that is much more bland, but also much more false.

I don't know why talk like this gets a reputation as being straightforward and no-BS. It would be more straightforward and have less BS if it just said, "Image sharing made simple. Like imgur, but without he bullshit."

Not a long ramble about being ashamed (why?) about an image board I never even think of.

There's a middle ground that isn't "amazing journey" and isn't "i'm an asshole but i'll let you use my service, I guess"

From my perspective the latter associates itself with volatility which isn't fantastic for any kind of hosting.

We're trying to maintain the puritanical simplicity of the internet, didn't you hear?

On a more serious note, I tend to agree with you and would add one more thing: I have several friends who have explicitly asked for more websites with this paid model. My friends want to pay to not be advertised to or have their data sold. It also happens to be the case that those same people all express their opinions in a very similar style as this website's copy.

This is neither "straightforward" nor "no-BS", there's plenty of BS in there are and pointless posturing.

I am half-hoping a company will buy this so I can write the "amazing journey" post I was born for.

I think the author commented on this view in their FAQ:

Then why would I trust him with my credit card or give him money while there are free alternatives?

Because the customers know that "free" has a cost. That's the reason for this site's creation -- because if you're not the customer, you're the product. Free isn't the alternative that it might seem to be.

That does not answer the question "Then why would I trust him with my credit card"?

For the same reason you'd trust a free service with your data. Especially photos and image data.

I don't know about you, but I consider my credit card details to be a more sensitive piece of data than some meme I wanted to show to some friends.

If your credit card data is stolen, you can reverse the charges and in the worst case get a new card, canceling the old one. You will be made whole very quickly. If your data is stolen, you have very little recourse. Honestly of all the things to be worried about, stolen credit card details is probably one of the least of my concerns. Besides, he's using a payment service where he doesn't even see the credit card details, so you wouldn't be sharing your credit card details, just a token for charging. And if he fraudulently charges the card, you reverse it. Your credit card details are still safe.

My personal data is worth a lot more to me than credit card details.

What personal data are you putting on an image hosting service?

…images.

You surely aren’t this dense, so I assume you don’t think photos of where you’ve been and who you’re with is personal?

I mean, if I put them on an image sharing service, they probably aren't that private.

You don't need too, I highly doubt he's processing payments himself, not to mention there's a bitcoin option.

Because the author isn't hiding who they are (there's literally a link to their personal page in the footer), he's a well-known HNer with some street cred, and he operates in Europe. We happen to have laws here. He's set himself up so that if he screwed with your CC, he'd find himself in jail faster than your bank could process the chargeback.

You know, this is an interesting question. The site makes it, I think, abundantly clear that I don't really care whether you use the site or not, I made it for me and you can use it if you pay for your resources. It's even open source and you can self-host if you want!

Yet people in the comments seem a bit offended at the perceived breaking of the unspoken assumption that a service can't exist without a need for customers. Merely asking the question "why should I trust you?" implies that I want you to trust me, which I don't.

I think it's very interesting how deeply culturally embedded the notion that a service wants customers is. It's so ingrained that we even don't believe that something can just exist without wanting us to use it.

To me, this kind of feels like you coming to my house, asking me whether you have some of my dinner, and when I say "yes but you need to pay me for the materials" you ask "why should I trust you with my money?".

> I think it's very interesting how deeply culturally embedded the notion that a service wants customers is.

By definition, a “service” is to serve. Even if you are the only “customer”, it’s still serving someone. And most people have this notion because most services do, in fact, serve other customers, and that’s their main purpose. Not sure why that’s surprising.

> I don't really care whether you use the site or not, I made it for me and you can use it if you pay for your resources.

Going through the effort to make this a publicly accessible service with copy explaining how to use it and what it costs, implies that you at least care enough to serve other customers to go through the effort to do that much.

That’s just one definition. According to Google and the Oxford dictionary, the first definition of a service is “the action of helping or doing work for someone”.

It does not need to involve customers or even be a business transaction.

Sure, but the OP is implying that this “service” is intended for himself primarily, without regard to anyone else consuming it; that it’s odd for “service” to imply it should be used by multiple consumers. When, in fact, most services exist for the consumption of multiple consumers.

What are you after? The site didn't convince you to pay so don't pay. Sounds easy enough.

Eh, it isn't too far off from the "I created an image hosting service that doesn't suck." language used in the announcement of Imgur on Reddit 12 years ago.

ok arbiter of copywrite, should we call it imgzen instead. kumbaya

There's a difference between being an asshole against a problem or another company and being an asshole to the person you are trying to get to sign up.

Here's what gave me the double-take:

Already have an account? No you don't. Try to log in below if you think you do anyway.

Why are you being a dick to me, I just got here. I didn't care that you want to shit on Imgur, but now I'm not sure what your problem is and don't care to waste any more time on this.

Anyway, you can write your site however you want, but so can anyone share their thoughts.

> to the person you are trying to get to sign up

I am not trying to get you to sign uuuuuup!

> Anyway, you can write your site however you want, but so can anyone share their thoughts.

This is very fair.

Funnily enough, my reaction was the opposite. This is blunt, honest, and makes fun of all the crap marketing and fake sale pitches of other services.

The "no bullshit" is a low key HN meme: https://hn.algolia.com/?q=no+bullshit+guide

The top hits on this query is Ivan Savov's pedagogical branding sparsely spread across the years. The rest are like 0-comment posts.

Goes perfectly well with the spirit of Imgur's style back in 2009. I like the cheeky tone in personal projects like this, it doesn't have to be serious because it's not a startup with investors and neckties, at least not yet.

https://web.archive.org/web/20090226191747/http://imgur.com/...

To me it's charming and funny. I like it. Others will, too.

This is same character "Maddox" plays (if anyone remembers him)

After he imploded later in his comedy career, I kind of wish I didn't remember him

Luckily I left him at the height of his career, so I always remember him as a legend to my 16-year-old self.

I found the copy hilarious, refreshing, and delightful.

It's somewhat more seasoned, yet "how banks work" was an intriguing series of posts: https://theminimilitiaapk.com/mini-militia-god-mod-apk/

It's hilarious, and befitting what appears to be basically a personal project that accepts money and provides services as part of its schtick. Not everything on the internet has to be glossy and professional and trustworthy and inviting. It's ok to have fun.

I think people greatly underestimate this. It was lots and lots of fun to make this, and to see people's reactions when they come across it. It was the most fun of everything I've made, and it made me realize what art is: To me, it's being able to say whatever you want, because that's how you like it, without caring whether others will like it. If they like it, good, if not, still good.

I'd definitely recommend making a silly thing like this to everyone, with their only compass being their personal aesthetic. It's very liberating.

Plus, if you can use the thing to store images, even better.

I think making a super cheap service is the exactly the kind of thing that allows you to be "an ass" in your copy. Kudos, stavros!

I sure do love it when a pricing tier openly dehumanizes me.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com