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Comment by PaulHoule | Hacker News Reader

Gotta say that (1) images greatly improve engagement on things like Mastodon and Bluesky and (2) I have the most fun on those platforms sharing photos that I took.

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Yeah, this reminds me of old Reddit where people resorted to imgur and other image hosts before they introduced their own photo upload feature.

Is that bad? Resorting to a dedicated party for rich content? I enjoyed reddit more when it was like that honestly. Business wise it is the wrong decision though.

It's bad in that the media is completely disconnected from the posts. If the media provider you chose goes down, nobody will be able to see the stuff you've posted anymore. If that subreply server you're using gets taken down, you'll have lots of orphaned stuff on that media upload website.

> If the media provider you chose goes down, nobody will be able to see the stuff you've posted anymore.

Imgur was started because the founder was annoyed at sites like ImageShack and Photobucket killing viral images and/or preventing hot linking. It was Reddit's official-unofficial image host until Reddit started hosting images themselves.

Imgur also rugpulled in the end, think it was adult content at first but didn't they recently delete a ton of old content and content not tied to accounts.

Ultimately you can never trust the parasite image upload service because eventually they'll try and supplant you like how imgur is now a reddit-like/ifunny-like type site instead of just a "dumb" image host.

I think you're right that Imgur went on a binge of deleting content not tied to registered accounts in the recent past. It's amusing Imgur went full circle, starting because they disliked inaccessible content and then making content inaccessible.

It's hopefully a lesson people learn that were too young to experience ImageShack/Photobucket's issues.

For discussions among technical people, it might not be bad! It works well on HN. Unfortunately, interfaces that developers love are often not appealing— maybe not even useable in some cases— for other users.

That you enjoyed it more when it didn't have a "native" image integration is probably unrelated to that fact but just that the site changed in a lot of other ways. How does the hostname where the image gets loaded from matter?

It matters when external images were not embedded into the page, but internal ones are. This leads to at least one (probably two, to go back) extra clicks per image.

I still love old Reddit

https://old.reddit.com/

It's what I use. Normal reddit is atrocious.

If someone from reddit is reading this:

If reddit can't admit to making a mistake with the redseign, just rename Old Reddit into...

Retro Reddit

... and spin that as a good thing.

Before Facebook bought Instagram, the later was the main way people posted images on Twitter, since it was text-only at the time.

I've never used Mastodon of Bluesky and I hate Twitter. I do feel pretty engaged with HN, and it is text-only. I'm not sure what makes "social media" different from a discussion board though, so I don't know whether HN counts. I do remember that github used to call itself social coding, which was one factor making me want to stay away from it.

HN has (or is missing, depending on your point of view) a number of features integral to (other?) social networks. Being text-only is one, but not having notifications for replies is a big one. Also no “boosts”, “reshares”, “follows”, “blocks”, …

Yeah for Usenet I use gnus, which keeps track of which posts I have already seen. It doesn't have notifications and I don't miss them, as long as I can see right away where the new posts are. I don't know what reshares are. Gnus does have a way to ignore specific posters or topics and I do use that. Every time I mull the idea of writing another forum poster, I come back to the realization that Usenet already does everything needed (at least on the backend), and has done so since the 1980s. A better NNTP to web gateway is all it could really use, for those who want to read with browsers.

For reply notifications, I use HN user ‘dangrossman’s HN Replies:

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

Show HN: HN Replies – Get notified of replies to your comments - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11080539 - February 11 2016 (124 comments)

https://www.hnreplies.com/

But there are no images here

... hence the comment

I've been keeping a list of features to build into a HN browser extension for years now and this is one of the top items on my list. One of these days I'll get around to it.

I wasn't complaining. I love that HN is text only.

... and what I post to Mastodon/Bluesky is different from what I post to HN

https://mastodon.social/@UP8

For instance, I post links to phys.org a lot more and I'm less likely to post a link to the paper because (1) Mastodon can't extract images out of the latter and (2) I get more replies like "this is over my head" from Mastodonsters whereas I think most of you might think you'd look stupid if you said something like that. On the other hand I rarely post links to The Guardian to Mastodon because it can't extract images from Guardian articles.

Bonus: if you look right now you'll see the user interface that I use to post to HN! [1]

[1] permalink that documents the mysterious YOShInOn: https://mastodon.social/@UP8/114887102728039235

> I get more replies like "this is over my head" from Mastodonsters whereas I think most of you might think you'd look stupid if you said something like that.

Not sure that’s the reason. Or at least all of it. HN tends to value substantive posts and someone just saying “I don’t understand this” doesn’t add to the discussion and would likely be downvoted. On the other hand, I have seen people here say they don’t understand specific bits of a post. Those are actionable and advance the discussion, and tend to be upvoted and get replies.

Can you tell me more about your three sided cards?

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