How Imgur Became a Photo Sharing Hit
businessweek.com
businessweek.com
Before imgur we had imageshack.us which built it's success on forums.somethingawful.com. ImageShack's attempt at jumping on the Next Big Thing, yfrog.com, was thwarted when twitter added their own image sharing.
If they did that in Reddit, hilarity would ensue.
A couple of people on SA ran WaffleImages for a while, where any user could donate a server to host images, but that didn't last for too long.
nowadays when i click i link to them i just see all the garbage and useless interface load... get tired and leave before the image (last thing to load on the page) shows up.
oh, and this is a paid article.
The problem was it couldn't handle the load and the link would just die. If a link would become semi popular, it would pretty much kill the imageshack source with certainty.
This was the main selling point of imgur. It didn't suck.
Glad to see it has lasted and has a community built around images posted from reddit. :)
I think the other image hoster which is similar is http://minus.com/. (And min.us, unlike imgur, does not downscale images or force convert PNG to JPEG or increases JPEG compression. Although I think you can prevent imgur from doing this with a "premium account".)
edit: Someone also mentioned https://mediacru.sh/ which is open source.
if imageshack could have made the numbers work with a performant CDN back then, they'd have made the cut and we'd probably be talking about something else :)
Like Youtube when I first came across it in 2005. I thought either bandwidth costs or legal claims would kill it within months.
Of course, ultimately it is my fault but my photos are stuck. They are still online in low resolution.
If you're getting the latter, you might want to scan for malware.
I somewhat doubt it's malware on my computer, because it only happens on imgur.
Their ads provider are probably doing this without the consent from imgur, but I doubt they'll change ads provider. After all, the one serving the more shady ads are the one paying more.
Facebook is a tech rollup, and in my opinion, if they keep absorbing the most promising startups (and allow them to run independently), they could be a trillion dollar company with FB the social network making up less than 10% of that market value.