The bit of community that exists solely within imgur can't be enough to subsidize the bandwidth costs of everyone else, can it?
Thus far every image hosting site has gone the cycle of initially good, annoying attempts at monetizing, then shutting down. Which, of course, leaves a trail of forum posts, comments, etc, with broken images and links.
I wish some entity with deep pockets would just offer it as a public service / loss leader so we could stop the cycle. Google, Amazon, etc.
I get that I come off as a total asshole - "why don't they hate the world, as I do?!" But honestly, they seem like the most gullible bunch of back-patters on the internet.
The culture is…hard to understand if you’re not a part of it, which I think is probably true of any sizable social site. And different users probably have different attitudes about it.
Yeah, there’s a lot of memetic trash, because the culture definitely rewards repetition, and I guess the only unifying factor of everyone on Imgur is that we like to look at pictures. But that’s also an advantage in that the community seems to be more diverse than on any given subreddit, or even HN. (Although it definitely skews young, male, white, and progressive.)
It’s kind of nice to be part of a community that’s unabashedly earnest, even if it means getting taken for a ride sometimes. I don’t think there’s no self-awareness, it just doesn’t seem like it from the outside.
For example, take Lassannn. He’s a user who makes up stories for points, and is completely honest about that fact. Some people hate him for that, believing that if you’re posting a story in the first person, it ought to be true. So they started saying “Fuck you, Lassannn” on all of his posts. But now there’s also a sizable cohort of people who love him because he’s a good guy and produces good content, so they post “Fuck you, Lassannn” ironically to make fun of the people who actually hate him. And crucially, you can’t tell the difference if you aren’t aware of the whole story, which has taken place over years. And there are countless stories like this.
For me, Imgur has all those aspects that I loved while growing up on forums in the early 2000s. It also rewards clever puns, remixing, ironic shitposting, even intelligent discussion if you look for it. I’ve learned countless things from people with completely different backgrounds, been exposed to world news I would never have seen otherwise, and been able to reach loads of people with my bad jokes, shitposts, and encyclopedic knowledge of linguistics and trivia. It’s fun, and that’s all that matters.
Imgur and the like are just recreating the "hanging around" concept, online, within a certain community. It's not rocket science.
Usually rants once a week about not needing more than vi
Not even vim, but vi
Perl is the only language the world needs
He is very serious about these things. Shuts PR's that challenge his world view in anyway
He's barely 40
Little sympathy for him and his back problems lately. It means he's working at home and not around the rest of us.
objectively, and putting aside the kneejerk reaction against being fooled, i cannot see a single thing wrong with this. no one is asking for money or trying to con the audience out of anything tangible; either they're telling the truth about the cancer (in which case they'll be happy for the upvotes) or they're trying to game the imgur community for upvotes (in which case they'll be happy for the upvotes). you might argue that that's cheapening the upvote, but the sole value of an upvote is what you, personally assign to it. you want upvotes that are worth something to you, post in a community where they are rare enough for you to feel they are worth something.
as for the rest of it, if the backpatting keeps them happy, what's wrong with it? it seems infinitely better than e.g. the cringe-oriented communities who get their social bonding and dopamine hits from making fun of the more earnest sections of the internet.
i hate to use the term 'normies', but...
They were fine before that. They were making enough money to stay afloat, but the founder wanted to expand. So he took VC money... and then the VCs began making demands of him. And then Imgur started sucking.
I remember one of the first changes that the VCs forced on them: Imgur debuted a new API, and if you want to access albums through the API, you have to pay a huge amount of money. There were some allowances for small, limited usage for free, but any app published on a major app store would blow past that limit easily. The cost might be fine for a big company, but it screws over one-man operations like...well, like most Reddit apps. The developer of Sync got hit pretty hard by it.
"Imgur was created as a response to the usability problems encountered in similar services. Designed to be a gift to the online community of Reddit, it took off almost instantly, jumping from a thousand hits per day to a million total page views in the first five months."
I cant stand the new i.reddit img service, but that could be me just being an off-my-lawn-er...
but I am wary of reddits motivations, as I dont trust the admins all that much given the fact that they are a huge social manipulation tool - and if you don't toe the corporate line in the US, they shut you down.
Other imaging hosts that serve up .mp4's as substitutes for .gif like giphy work just fine. It's just Imgur that couldn't figure out how to make this work properly.
It's effectively a tracking "pixel" for what you click, even if you block their javascript/redirect.
It also keeps that data in house which they can sell (if they need to) rather than give all that data away to imgur for free. Though I wonder if the bandwidth costs will break even.
They can also use it in order to craft personalised suggestions.
Doesn't work because the usual deep-pocket entities are trying to stay as far away from "nasty" stuff as possible... with "nasty" ranging from harmless stuff like nipples over porn to straight out gore (like Liveleak).
There are always some puritan but loud "activist parents" trying to f..k up stuff for everyone else.
That's a feature, but it's not a feature most conglomerates want to provide.
And that Amazon and GCP analyze customer info (off the disks? off unencrypted HTTP?)?
They do some types of automatic analysis/processing which you can see when the Google Photos app delivers an automatically composed album, panorama, or movie to you, and you can also go into Google Photos and sort your photos by the objects and/or people that Google recognizes within them.
They do this for all speech-to-text run through official Android/Google search applications. You can go to a Voice History page within your Google Account and download recordings of every "OK Google" you've performed, and I've heard that they have human transcribers who spend all day listening to random voice searches and transcribing them to provide the corpus to compare against the computerized transcription.
As for EC2/GCP, I am sure they analyze whatever data they can. I doubt they go into the disks, but they would necessarily see the endpoints of the conversations, the volume of the average transmission, and other such details. The datacenter has a lot of knowledge from metadata without having to actually introspect the bits that you're sending over the pipe or storing on disk.
Disclaimer: I am not involved with Amazon or Google in any direct way and this is mostly hearsay.
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EDIT: On re-reading, I realize that I flubbed in the original post (now past its edit expiration). I was in a hurry and didn't realize how flippantly my statement came off.
I don't mean to imply that Amazon/Google casually spy on the information of specific users for competitive intelligence, just that interesting metadata is available to the platform host without requiring them to look at anything that they wouldn't normally have access to, and that they already have a vast abundance of the types of images that people are uploading to public hosts like imgur.
They're already using metadata from users devices to supply traffic map data. Thought that was way cool, then discovered how it worked; Google Maps app actively reports your location behind the scenes.
Was creeped out, but I still use it all the time, despite never remembering giving explicit consent.
Be trivial for them to scrape EXIF data but not actually "peak" into the image data
I remember this from long long ago, when I was a student and helped running a vBulletin on the side for fun. When I noticed this trend while browsing older posts that had the a lot of imageshack embeds (they apparently deleted old files which weren't accessed that often, also the url format might have changed once) I cobbled together a plugin that would save all posted images locally and then serve those instead. This lead to some protest however by people who had those fancy dynamic images in their signature that would show the currently playing song or similar, so those had to be excluded...
They would lose a lot of eyeballs if a new, non-annoying imgur like service popped up. Similar to how they initially killed off some existing image hosts.
I'm not clear on the specifics of their inventory, but some of their placements are available on the Google Display Network, and presumably exchanges as well. So I'm not sure if the inventory with the $20k min. buy overlaps at all with that to reach this sort of conclusion.
Did you just send a link for "C:\documents\public_html\picture.jpg" (or /home/ryan/public_html) and somehow it worked? I'm in need of a history lesson because I cannot fathom how that would have worked.
No, they go with 3rd parties nowadays because most home users don't have bandwidth to host their own images.
One of the current top posts on reddit/r/funny has had over 1 million views after being posted to imgur 8 hours ago. The image file is 1.7 megabytes. That means imgur has transferred 1.7 TERAbytes in 8 hours of just that one image. That's an average of about 59 megabytes PER SECOND of bandwidth, or nearly half a gigabit per second.
Less than 1% of home users have that kind of bandwidth, and that's only to host a single image.
If you REALLY think "Oh, people only use image hosts because of the interface", you're not living in reality.
For example, I went to UTD from 2003 to 2007. This was long after the days of "the bulk of Internet users were on university networks" were over, but the infrastructure was still there. All students had ssh access to a handful of machines, the main one being apache.utdallas.edu.
So I could do this:
$ scp picture.jpg ajb0##[email protected]:./public_html
http://www.utdallas.edu/~ajb0##000/picture.jpg
Edit: And even if you weren't at a university, back in the dialup days it used to be that even with home internet, everyone's computer was directly on the Internet with no NAT or any kind of firewall, so you could just install Apache on your box and serve what you wanted. On paper, most ISPs banned that practice in their TOS, but it was never enforced. The real impediments were that a) dialup connections would usually disconnect if you went idle too long and b) most people had dynamic IP addresses that changed every time you dialed in (for the latter, DynDNS was a godsend). And of course dialup bandwidth was shit, so hosting anything substantial (especially an image!) would slow down your connection (seriously, people would actually buy second phone lines from their telcos and maybe even get a second account with their ISP so as not to tie up their main connection).
Broadband made it easier: even with a NAT router, you could just forward port 80 to your desktop, and you won't have to worry about bandwidth, your connection would stay up 24/7, and even if your IP was technically considered dynamic it would almost never change. What really sunk the concept of hosting your own was a) mobile (good luck running Apache on your phone, and getting port forwarding on a mobile network is impossible) and b) the rise of services like Imgur that let you host shit with no hassle (Facebook killed self-hosted personal home pages for the same reason).
It is massively convenient to run your own server. But you need to know how to maintain it (or be willing to learn). It isn't that hard, depending on what you're doing, but there's some effort and learning if you don't do this for a living.
Well worth it, at least for me.
Remember commercial shell accounts?
In the unix world, iirc, many systems were configured to expose a folder on the user's home directory (www). Which would expose that to something like: www.mit.edu/~<username>
[1] https://m.imgur.com/r/bicycling/b1ImCo8 with 770000 views
If we want to keep nice things, we need to make an ecosystem where we can pay small amounts for useful things.
I don't have a solution to the problem other than big pocket provider offers it as a public service. Somewhat like Let's Encrypt, or Cloudflare.
Edit: I suppose somebody could make a slick interface that uses parasite type storage and redirects...stealing storage from various free services like Google Drive. Offer some kind of karma points for creating and donating new Google Drive, OneDrive, etc, credentials. Would likely get shut down though.
https://www.reddit.com/r/IgnorantImgur/comments/4aqf2r/fuck_...
Just have people opt in for NSFW content on their accounts. Leave them opted out by default (or public).
There is no reason it shouldn't be a human controlled flag.
They even do it with albums, which is unbelievably annoying on mobile devices. If you don't click the "Load X remaining images", and just keep scrolling, instead you see related images from other posts.
More than once, I've clicked through a link, gotten confused why the fourth or fifth image doesn't quite seem to match the original description, and then realized that I never loaded the full album.
I don't know who made that UI decision, or why. I can't think of a single good reason for it, because it doesn't even incentivize you to click through images to see other albums.
They probably intentionally break the site for anyone who doesn't want their script payload.
I doubt they can make any money without it anyway.
Sure, there's some complexity in doing it at scale, but it doesn't actually need to be done at scale to be done easily. 50 different small image hosts is as good as one big one from the perspective of end users.
As a result, it's /really/ hard to get people to pay for it, and you cause exoduses by trying to embed advertising. The only thing you can do is grasp for features to validate your business.
Anyway, Reddit gets paid via ads and gold, so people are paying for it. They just won't pay for it on it's own, because image hosting on it's own is not really worth much. You could make your own perfectly adequate image host on a raspberry pi. Reddit's value is not in it's image hosting. Nor is Wikipedias or 4chans.
Imgur picked a shit business model, the internet will survive their inevitable passing.
Think of it as analogous to sanitation. Being in the garbage hauling business isn't something that really revs that many people up, but civilization literally depends on it.
It didn't last forever, but Imgur was great for a long time.
https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/imgapp-for-imgur/id501416446...
Worse, it just doesn't do this, it purposely collapses galleries that before would auto-expand, so its easy to miss the expand button and keep scrolling onto other galleries and pics.
It's kinda a good system really: investors pay to host our images. So the money is here. The service is here.
Free hosting for your pictures for 1 or 2 years paid by VC is a cool with me.
If you click it, not only is your image now public but you'll be ridiculed by imgurs army of sexist unemployed neckbeards that they refer to as "community".