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Comment by kalleboo | Hacker News Reader

How Imgur Became a Photo-Sharing Hit: They didn't rate limit or show ads to referers from reddit.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.

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For context, they are showing ads to referers from social media websites (Facebook/Twitter/G+). (Wrote a blog post about it here: http://minimaxir.com/2014/02/moved-temporarily/ )

If they did that in Reddit, hilarity would ensue.

They do, to a degree. When you view an imgur gallery in the Alien Blue reddit app, it now redirects you to the imgur mobile view which is clumsy to use and has ads.

Imageshack was used widely in reddit.

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.

I'm pretty sure it wasn't that popular even back then (5-7 years ago). I recall users being chided for not using flickr because of how badly imageshack sucked. Imageshack was great for images you wanted to share on small/mid sized internet forums, but flickr was probably the biggest/best until imgur dethroned them. Yahoo! buying flickr probably didn't help much either. Though that's only anecdotal, I never used flickr enough to notice.

The main problem at its core was that ImageShack was made for profit - while Imgur was bootstrapping as much as it could. Its not like those free services cant exist bootstrapping - its that founders need to do really good job saving money everywhere they can, avoiding profit and having some money in the bank account so whatever happens they wont panic. Sometimes when you see today start-up culture it seems like some people are not serious. Spending loadz of money on some unimportant services, parties, meetings, hotels etc. Its not like servers these days are crazy expensive - any startup could easily grown on Amazon/Softlayer with backup server from OVH. It wont ruin your budget as long as you commit yourself to spend money on what's important for 1-2 years until you get some funding or ads going on.

ImageShack had a problem with people directly linking images, since that doesn't allow them to show ads, so they changed things around and SA didn't like it, then they blocked each other, the SA admins attempted to make a local copy of any image that was hosted there, to preserve Photoshop Phriday and other threads...

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.

Was Imageshack the one that was hosted on several different volunteers' servers? I remember back in the day being a part of a goon-run image hosting service and I can't remember which one it was. In the one I'm remembering when you'd go to e.g. imageshack.us/image it'd send you to e.g. kalleboo.imageshack.us/image for the real hosting of that image.

I think that was waffleimages.

No that was WaffleImages. It was built after Macbeth tried to monetize by spamming SA.

Fast, useful and easy to use.

nope. several others did that. imgurl just got integrated in reddit. nothing else at all.

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.

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