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Comment by sizzle | Hacker News Reader

I mean the site is ad infested and slow as hell to load, such a fall from their former grace when they were seen as an internet darling next to photobucket type sites when options for uploading and hotlinking were limited due to bandwidth constraints.

I think Reddit started hosting their own content or whatever the redgif site is seems to have taken over Imgur for a while now and the images/vids load lightning fast in comparison to Imgur with my ad blocker lighting up like a Christmas tree every time I visit an Imgur link. I would be happy to never visit that site again.

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the site is ad infested and slow as hell to load, such a fall from their former grace when they were seen as an internet darling

This is the cycle of a lot of ad-driven businesses. They start out sleek and quick to load because they’re ad-free. They grow insanely fast and burn runway. Then they begin loading the site down with ads to monetize the users. This leads to a gradual exodus and eventual death (or death in the star-like sense of eternal irrelevance).

It seems to be an unstable equilibrium. If you want to stay on top in terms of users and actually make money you’ve got to have a lean and highly optimized site with non-intrusive ads. On the other hand, if you give in to the temptation to take any ad who wants you then you doom the site in exchange for a short term profit.

I wonder: if you know this, and expect it will happen, is that kind of company still a good investment?

It could be that Imgur has already more than paid back its acquisition price to MediaLab[0] and now they are willing to risk killing it in order to not have the NSFW hassle with their banks.

Or not, but it seems like this happens enough that the money people should understand it by now.

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28674883

Enshittification [0]

[0] https://www.wired.com/story/tiktok-platforms-cory-doctorow/

Some like Facebook still manage to claw their way back into a happy mediocrity.

Instagram is victim to this trying to follow every trend and turning themselves into another WeChat that has every feature ever.

I'm not sure if Facebook is in a state of happy mediocrity. Nobody I know who uses Facebook does so because they like Facebook even because there aren't better alternatives in terms of functionality.

People use Facebook because its network effects are effectively impossible for alternatives to overcome.

How much did you founders profit from Imgur? never saw a figure anywhere.

> whatever the redgif site is

People were uploading lots of porn to gfycat, so the gfycat people basically cloned themselves and split the adult content off onto another domain in order to keep it separate.

This strikes me as the obvious solution to me.

>the images/vids load lightning fast in comparison to Imgur

You must be joking.

I have been a user of imgur since it was create by mr. grimm ... I have had a paid account for ~10 years...

v.reddit and i.reddit are absolute garbage by comparison.

Now, that is to say, I use imgur very specifically - I have my own albums (and the album management system on imgur is trash and almost unusable) -- but the ability to just use something like greenshot where I do a snippet with PRTSC key and have it auto-upload to my imgur, and then copy the imgur url immediately to my clipboard is dope... but the album management UX on imgur does suck.

This trend has been previously described as "enshittification": https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/

HN thread on the above article: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34480479

Being the image host for Reddit has to be a lot less lucrative when Reddit is their own image host now.

Tale as old as time.

1. "We need a better image host!"

2. Makes new image host.

3. Uh oh, hosting costs money.

4. Ads.

5. Lawsuits because illegal stuff. Uh oh, lawyers cost money.

6. "We need a better image host!"

You'd think that all the recent technological advancements (compression, cheaper hosting etc) would make a difference here.

To me it seems like it's not necessarily budgeting issue but natural greed kicking in. I'm sure imgur people are not tightening their belts over this.

You can't host something like Imgur for free. No technological advancement can get over the fact that even electricity still costs money. And at their volume, they have nontrivial expenses. I have no idea how or where they're hosted, but my hobbyist hosting budget tops out around $20 a month. Beyond that, either pay me or leave.

Take google for example. I think they got big at first for 2 big reasons. 1 their landing page was tiny I think the whole thing was maybe 20-50k on first load and 1k on second. It was fast to load. Then on top of that their search results were better. But that tiny front page made the thing look amazing. Remember this was at a time when their nearest competitors had ad laden bloated home pages that took a minute to render. That also helped them keep their costs wildly low at first. As network/hosts/drives/people costs money. They threw all of that out later on though as they took over the ad network. Starting off with 'fast loading ads'.

I wonder if there's enough demand for a good, free image host that someone could make one that ran completely on community donations. There are plenty of podcasts on Patreon that pull in tens of thousands of dollars per month just from like $5-$20 monthly pledges. That should be enough to not only cover costs but pay devs. Could even give some perks to backers if it was some incentive.

That's a pretty simple solution: if some service inevitably deteriorates in quality when run for a profit, then run it as a non-profit! I mean, isn't that how imgur actually started? The Reddit team wanted a decent image hosting so they made it and just accepted that running it would cost them money so they'll have to finance it from the profits of their main business. But then apparently profit-optimization kicked in...

There are quite a lot of examples in the past (all the way to the Roman empire) of rich people spending their money on community projects just because they wanted some things to exist, not to make even more money.

Rich people and companies will typically stop doing that once the costs explode and eat all their income. Unlike governments, they can't exactly print money...

There is a huge graveyard of image hosts - it's not for lack of trying. There are all the pomf.se clones that are community supported (like catbox.moe) which don't even break even from patreon.

The problem I see is that once you get even to the scale of a 10th of size of imgur your hosting bills (storage + bandwidth) will cross into the 10s of thousands per month, which would require you to be in the top 1% of Patreon users. I don't think you'd find people lining up to donate for such a service, especially given there are so many copycats.

Well I was going off what the above parent comment was saying, that recent advances in compression + cheaper hosting should make it more viable. I don't know much about what any of those costs cause I've never run anything that needs a lot of serving costs at scale. So I'm guessing even with that it's still too expensive?

On the other hand, I think Imgur also pushed way more traffic upon itself by trying to make itself into another social media site. Like, if it just stayed an image host it probably could have stayed more niche and wouldn't have had thousands of casual internet users scrolling through images all day at work.

As a pure image hoster, you don't earn much money, and if you're any good and fast, your traffic will go up and eventually eat up any amount of donations that content creators can muster. Content creators won't chip in more as your bills rise, because all those views don't necessarily translate to sales, and eventually something will give. And if you start to charge, and your price exceeds the cost of self-hosting, content creators will leave.

Just staying niche doesn't really solve the problem? That just means any "niche" host that finds itself growing will be forced to shutdown, not much better than what is happening to imgur here.

Patreon isn't the most reliable income source either. They suspend accounts all the time because someone reports that they were able to find incest, gore, or similar content from the creator. Credit card processors won't give you time of day either. There is a concerted effort from activists to shut down all forms of payment for immoral industries, and they have been very effective at influencing credit card companies.

I think Imgur tried to become a social network in its own right. It seems like the owners had ambitions beyond just serving advertisements.

I think that was more because places like Reddit just linking directly to the image meant they couldn't serve ads to pay for it. So they needed to make an incentive for people to directly visit the site, and the most obvious way was to just cut out Reddit as a necessary component to a user discovering more images.

The image hosting part is half the story, "having a community that was predominantly fun" was the other half. But they've gone out of their way to make sure the site's a hellscape shithole without adblocking with every possible action getting gamified. So ironically the only thing that's left of the original pretty great website is the image hosting part. EULA notwithstanding (because as much as people yell, NSFW makes up barely any of the front page content, so clearly the site's own community doesn't care whether it's there or not)

> because as much as people yell, NSFW makes up barely any of the front page content

This is a really important point. From what I can see, Imgur doesn't have a porn community, it just has a lot of porn because it's used as an image host by outside communities. Porn is probably a net drain on profit for them, since they make their revenue off of people who use Imgur itself, not from servicing direct image links posted on Reddit.

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