[1] https://mediacru.sh [2] https://blog.mediacru.sh/2013/07/19/MediaCrush-for-nerds.htm...
One of the nice things about imgur, though, is that once you've uploaded an image it gives you a nice handy preview page where you can do things like add a heading above the image or a caption below it, and gives you sample HTML and bbcode to copy and paste to embed the image on your own site. If you could do that, especially if the HTML code used <video> with the GIF in an <img> as fallback, I imagine that would be pretty sweet.
I agree that redditors on the whole are pretty supportive of imgur, but a good part of that is because Imgur is very trusted: it got an initial burst of trust by being (a) from reddit and (b) better than the alternatives, and it's continued to repay that trust with interest in the intervening years. That's not to say that other sites can't or won't be better, just that (as I'm sure you've found) other sites will have an awfully steep hill to climb unless they're mind-blowingly better, or Imgur somehow shoots itself in the foot (by disabling hot-linking, or requiring Facebook authentication to upload images, etc.)
Albums are coming in the somewhat near future, and you'll be able to caption them. Also, the developer docs [1] document the easy-to-use embedding tool for putting them in your own websites, but maybe we should make that more visible.
Also, I was talking about MediaCrush with a friend just now, and he pointed out that nowhere in MediaCrush's ToS does it mention anything about deleting images other than by legal pressure. Imgur says they'll delete images after three months without a hit; MediaCrush doesn't say that, but it doesn't not say it either.
> The only thing we store about you is your hashed IP address when you upload a gif. It's impossible for us to get your original IP address from this.
What algorithm do you use? It's not that hard to brute force all 2^32 IPv4 addresses with SHA2 -- (even less if you exclude improbable ones)
Do you trust this service or not? Don't trifle around with stupid shit like this.
EDIT: Or you can run a self-hosted instance of MediaCrush, it's open source: https://github.com/MediaCrush/MediaCrush
And then you have to trust the endpoint: you.
And frankly, I get sick of the undue and infinity-about paranoia. It gets tiring hearing again and again.
I'm an idiot, bcrypt generates and appends it's own salt to break rainbow tables, but I'll leave the above.
While I won't argue that they're supportive of imgur, do you have any evidence of them being hostile towards your service?
I just went to your page, and I was in the midst of critiquing your design when it occurred to me that the elements I had the largest problem with....were actually ads[1]. Ads that were inserted in such a way that I had no idea they were ads... IMO this is a terrible thing. Not only does it make your landing page trashy, it can (as I'm evidence of) easily confuse even the most seasoned of users. There is zero contextual information to signal that it was an ad, and only after clicking one of the 'buttons' did it occur to me that it wasn't a part of your site. So I almost get the feeling of being deceived into clicking an ad, and that puts a very bad taste in my mouth. I don't think that was your intention, to trick people into clicking ads, but when that's what happens I'm going to blame the site for allowing it to happen. Do note that imgur doesn't have any ads on imgur.com.
Some of the other reasons why I prefer imgur over your site:
* shorter URL
* dark background
All else being equal (feature parity for my needs), those 2 things will keep me on imgur. I hate white backgrounds (superficial I know, but preferences are preferences), and shorter urls are simply better for practically every use.
While I applaud your drive, the site looks like a imgur-copycat making a money-grab (due to the prominent & intrusive ads) in a fresh market.
>Do note that imgur doesn't have any ads on imgur.com.
...yes they do.
Can you show me the visual demarcation on your page between the ad and your content?
> > Do note that imgur doesn't have any ads on imgur.com.
> ...yes they do.
My mistake, one of my extensions blocked it.
However, a few things to note about their ad vs. yours, which contributes to my perception of your page being confusioning (and making it look less reputable):
* imgur's ad is below-the-fold, while yours is not. That inherently makes theirs more of a 2nd-class citizen, while for yours the ad is a 1st-class citizen.
* imgur's is in it's own, well-defined UI element; a bounded box clearly separated from all other content on the page. As hinted above, yours allows the ad to flow into the rest of the page, and it even borrows the main color (blue) that your page uses. Any demarcation is only virtual, as there is no visual distinction, and I'm not sure if you could blend the ad into the page any better if you tried...
* imgur's even says "advertisement" underneath, so as to remove practically any chance of confusion. Yours has "click here to disable ads", but that alone doesn't explicitly call out the content as being an ad.
Please don't take my criticisms personally.
And for the record, we have a button that makes ads go away forever. I think that nullifies anything about ads being 1st class citezens.
Overall though, the rest of my experience was solid. It's really cool that you can disable ads, and that it's open-source to boot. Best of luck and good weekend!
By the way, I pushed some updates today, including one that makes ads more obviously ads. Tell me what you think, and a good weekend to you, too!
- try to contact honestbleeps from the RES subreddit [1] and see if he can add MediaCrush support in RES to expand images from posts
- add file extension to the URL, it may help with some extension like HoverZoom or script [2].
[1] http://www.reddit.com/r/Enhancement/
[2] http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/109262
edit: nvm, it works if I add the extension myself, but it would be great to add that to the URL when you upload a file.
As for HoverZoom, we don't really want to be involved with them [1]. We considered it, but decided against seeking their support.
[1] http://www.reddit.com/r/MediaCrush/comments/1k1sb7/announcin...
Also the branding seems kinda outdated - two-word phrase with an inner capital letter, meh. And the URLs feel kinda long, even with the clever "putting part of your name into the tld" thing.
Between that kind of minor quibbles and my expectation that imgur is probably going to stay around for longer than your service is, I'm afraid I'm going to stick to imgur for my cat-related labeling-and-distribution needs.
I'm more interested in getting people to share short bits of video as small video files instead of huge gif files, but I don't think cartoons are a good showcase for that, even with the dramatic file size reduction. Compression artifacts are pretty visible with all the line art and fairly flat colors. (edit: and of course you're going against the flow of all the social websites, going back to web forums all the way to tumblr, where embedding gifs is trivial but videos are a big deal/require youtube/their own posts.)
Good luck, though!
I had almost already forgotten about the existence of your service.
Perhaps "click to upload" or something like that would be better.
Good luck!
(I wasn't trying to be snarky by using imgur - it's just that you guys don't allow paste from clipboard yet and I'm on linux)