Imgur recently started doing something really annoying on their mobile site. If you keep scrolling past the picture you were linked to, it shows a bunch of other pictures that were not posted by the person who posted the first picture. These extra pictures seem to be generally in the same category as the picture that was meant to be linked to, so if the original picture is a slightly risque photo, the photos that follow might be straight up porn. It's very annoying to me.
Reddit killed the model that allows them to be financially viable and "not annoying". I suspect the alternative is to shut down.
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 want to talk about that community, because it genuinely boggles my mind. Their culture is as if they were crafted by /r/circlejerk as some sort of cosmic joke. They repeat the same memes ad nauseam, in every post, seemingly completely unaware. They lack any measure of what I consider healthy internet cynicism - if you post a picture of your face and say "I beat cancer!", you're getting upvotes, and there won't be a single comment in the thread along the lines of "this is a picture of a face." I mean, it's easy to bot upvotes on reddit, but it's trivial on imgur, because of the total lack of self-awareness of the community.
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.
I guess I’m an Imgurian, since I’ve been on Imgur for a few years, and hell, I even met my partner at Camp Imgur in 2015—basically a 3-day summer camp for (mainly) young adults.
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.
If you listen to most conversations in the street between persons hanging around, you'll notice the same patterns. People conversations are quite dumb, and it's ok, it's human.
Imgur and the like are just recreating the "hanging around" concept, online, within a certain community. It's not rocket science.
Its no more dumb than arguing about editors, or tabs vs spaces, or metal versus opengl. You can introduce dressing to make them seem deep, or re-cast the conversations as being super critical, but all those conversations are about typing shit that goes into a file.
Neckbeard here raged hard yesterday about adding netcat to systems for troubleshooting. Keep it lean. Hates Docker and this container "fad" though. Guess that's "too lean"?
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.
almost never, but i've seen a lot of debates about the relative merits of vim (a text editor, for the uninitiated) and whatever it is people use to painstakingly insert glyphs into a file.
> if you post a picture of your face and say "I beat cancer!", you're getting upvotes, and there won't be a single comment in the thread along the lines of "this is a picture of a face.
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.
The meme problem I see on Reddit and Twitter too - so many sites developing their own meme dialect that's completely incoherent if you're not up to your elbows in it.
I tend to see this as personally beneficial. Once the patois diverges enough, I stop wasting time attempting to decode it, unless I'm bored enough to treat it as anthropology.
A big part of what makes the comments so poor on imgur is that they have an arbitrary character limit of 140. When you limit people to a single sentence, memes and jokes are all they can post. This comment, for example, can't be posted there.
Is your quote ("why don't they hate the world, as I do?!") just off the cuff or a mockery of something or a repeating of something already out there to be sourced? If there's a source please share.
Off the cuff comment to indicate that my observation isn't a serious proposition, but just me sharing my general feelings, and acknowledging that my feelings should be considered fairly cynical.
Sounded like it may have been drawn from a good piece of satire critical of something like PC/free speech or climate change or some controversial thing. I was imagining a funny characterization of a crowd berating some perceived antisocial individual who doesn't truly hate the world but just won't conform to ideas he does not agree with or is not convinced by whatever they may be. Either way works as great quote for a dissenting opiner to play.
i think it's just what happens when the unifying identity of the people in your 'community' is "i need to upload pictures somewhere." well, that and "i have no prior attachments to more specific internet communities," or "reddit is too niche for me."
Imgur's big act of hubris was accepting VC money so they could expand.
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.
As far as I know, Imgur actually started off as a bit of a public service. From Wikipedia:
"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."
it was created by /u/mrgrim as a programming side project because all the other img hosts were shitty, and as it was born of reddit, essentially for reddit, it blew up.
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.
For me it's quite the opposite. I like browsing the web in the evening on a 5 year old tablet. Ever since imgur started redirecting mobile clients to the full site for all direct image links the experience gets worse and worse. They keep adding more scripts and shit over time so currently when opening an imgur link the tablet freezes for about 4 seconds until it starts showing the loading spinner and then it takes another couple seconds depending on image size until I can finally see a plain old jpeg. Every fucking time.
I mean I don't understand the decision to redirect mobile but not desktop at all. Desktops are faster (cpu and connection) and got more screen space to show ads. Why not the other way round?
Me too. That awful gifv has never worked on my older Samsung tablet. I don't understand why not and I gave up trying to diagnose the problem.
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.
Imgur has a ton of flaws, my gripe with reddit is the admins; as a mod of a controversial /r/ - I just don't trust their ability to be for free speech...
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.
> 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.
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.
I see what you mean, but Google seems to manage this problem in YouTube via end user flagging and machine learning. Similar for Facebook, etc. I see why it might take Amazon out of the running to provide it.
I think the parent's point is that they ultimately remove this content. Imgur basically removes things that are illegal in the USA, and pretty much nothing else.
That's a feature, but it's not a feature most conglomerates want to provide.
I'm surprised none of the big companies have done this, and used the fact that images are tagged and commented on to improve their search results in some way. They could really harvest a lot of data from it.
Not only that, but they already have cloud environments that allow them to get all of that data anyway. Android phones come pre-configured to automatically upload every photo you've ever taken to the cloud, Amazon offers unlimited personal photo storage, and Google and Amazon offer the two largest enterprise cloud computing environments available, so they can likely just analyze imgur's logs.
Yes, I 100% believe they analyze cloud photo backups and use the data for their own purposes, and I would be surprised if they don't explicitly allow this within their privacy policies and Terms of Use. That's the motivation for them to offer unlimited free storage. I would guess that they probably have a human look at a random image, identify the objects, and then use that to train their CV pipelines.
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
> Which, of course, leaves a trail of forum posts, comments, etc, with broken images and links.
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...
Imgur has developed a very active community and they have a MINIMUM of $20,000 per "promoted post" (ad). Considering how often I see new ads on there (at least once a month), I'd say they've finally figured out how to actually monetize an img hosting site. Whether they can avoid throwing away all that money on inefficiency and poor management is another story though. If anyone here knows how to scale an imgur clone properly, and can do it as a one or two person team, you'd probably have an amazing startup right there.
Yes, but it currently depends on them being annoying.
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.
As an advertiser, if I see a site with placements that are only available via direct buys, and the advertisers cycle through there quickly without staying around for a while, that's often a sign of a poor performing placement that they tested and moved on from.
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.
I remember when “image hosing” meant copying the file into your machine’s public_html directory and sending out a link. Now somehow we need a third party to do this.
Sending out a link to what? I mean... maybe I'm too young to know what you're referring to, but if I have my local computer, sitting behind a NAT, sitting behind a firewall, sitting behind a personal router, on another NAT, and you're on the other side of the country, what am I sending you a link to? Did every machine have a domain name? Was your local DNS somehow broadcast publicly?
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.
Simpler times. Public facing IP address, web server running on my machine and serving from /var/httpd/public_html or some similar directory. People go with 3rd parties nowadays for the slick web interface and that they do the "hard" work of setting up bandwidth caps and security for you.
> People go with 3rd parties nowadays for the slick web interface
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.
In the times the gp was talking about, you'd set up a cron job to download a 1.7mb file overnight, and be happy if it finished by morning. So yeah, apples and oranges (of the gp).
Errr maybe also because not everyone has their own webserver in their home ? Most people don't let their computers run 24/7 just to host a picture of their cat.
Back in the day, the bulk of Internet users were on university networks, and they gave everyone access to Unix systems where anything you put in public_html goes up on the university's website under your username.
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.
(FYI, at UTD, everyone's username was their initials followed by a six-digit number where usually only the second and third were nonzero... I ##'d that part out because I don't feel like giving out the exact username I had back then... especially since my initials were different)
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).
Huh. TIL. I didn't think I was that modern having gotten Internet access in the mid 90s, but I wasn't at a university, and by the time I got to university everyone was on a NAT and was behind firewalls.
What the GP describes is still more that possible. I happen to have some physical hosts in a data center, but you can have the same effect with a Linode VM.
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.
Everyone used to have a public IP back before the days of NAT. Your modem would dial in, and your computer would be assigned a publicly accessible IP address.
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>
I took a picture of my thesis which somehow got viral. In a matter of hours the total data used for that image was ~500GB or so. Not viable sharing from my own computer or even my own server.
Similar to the issues with the advertising model (and content creation), it again boils down to people want value on the internet but unlike everywhere else in the world, here they don't want to pay for it.
If we want to keep nice things, we need to make an ecosystem where we can pay small amounts for useful things.
Reddit's builtin images always seem very slow compared to imgur's. They would have done better to integrate imgur instead of rolling their own, I think.
Absolutely agreed. I don't see why Reddit would not just attempt to purchase Imgur outright in this case. They could thereby avoid link rot in the case that Imgur ever were to die, and also integrate Imgur's tech. Does reddit just think Imgur's tech is worthless?
I was paying for it, then they removed that option and went 'free' for everyone....with ads. Never understood why really....and always always wondered about the bandwidth etc
The problem is that it requires everyone to pay for it. Any one individual will get no noticeable benefit by paying for an image hosting site, since all the rest of the content they view will be from free sites. As a result, no-one pays for these sites. It's a vicious circle.
That doesn't make sense to me. You could do this now with S3 (although you might need to write the slick interface); scaling shouldn't break anything, though pricing might need to correspond to how much you upload.
The S3 model means content creator pays for bandwidth, content consumer pays nothing. For the use cases that imgur and similar image hosts provide, that wouldn't work. And as you mention, that's high friction for the uploader.
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.
That is still better than the giant animated cat paw they had a year ago. It was active just before reddit went live with their image service and I imagine it was a desperate grab for some last minute conversions.
That was really surprising to me. Recently saw some picture with a woman in it (very SFW picture, nothing risky about it at all) then scrolled down and BAM immediately very NSFW. I thought I did something wrong but I think it was imgur who screwed up now.
Fortunately this is an easy thing for Imgur to solve in 2017 if they really want to with machine learning. Enough is available online that almost anyone could do it at this point.
There is a Mature filter on imgur already that's human-determined. The problem is that people posting pictures will mark things mature unnecessarily, and there have been trolls who put up hardcore pornography without marking the image as mature. The problem is, as always, trusting humans to do the right thing without massive consequence for doing the wrong thing.
I agree that should be the default but getting the data to do it automatically is hard if you're going to ask users to mark things NSFW on their own accord.
> What is really annoying is that it makes you think you're watching an album but as the image is not related it's confusing.
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.
That was my biggest wtf when I saw that, along with how they managed to grind a macbookpro to a halt just showing an album of a dozen or so pictures on the page.
Mine is that imgur simply doesn't work much of the time with JavaScript disabled. They serve images. Inline images have been working with HTML for over twenty years now, and somehow imgur breaks them. It's madness!
It's funny because they've quintupled the team of engineers to make changes that most people are criticizing. The strategy of Youtube to offer similar content and hold the user for a longer time on the site works because they are very good at understanding the average user's taste. But Imgur is very weak, totally dependent on the information the uploader provides, not from the viewer. They could have grown in markets where Reddit is weak like South America, Asia and Africa as a totally independent and mobile-focused product. But they make little effort in that direction.
Is there an equivalent to "every program expands to read email" for web services? Because just about every image hosting service seems to go down this feature creep route.
It's because image hosting is a nothing business. It's basically one step up from serving text in the list of bread-and-butter internet functions.
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.
I'm really not sure what point you're making. It's not surprising that Reddit rolled their own image hosting. In general, most major websites have done that, because it's easy to do. If your business relies upon image hosting, why would you trust others to do it?
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.
I read the OP as pointing out that image hosting, like email, is an awful business to be in, but is something on which tons of other services depend.
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.
Imgur picked a good business model, they were profitable years before Reddit came close. It also managed to stay good as the best image hosting on the Internet for a decade.
It didn't last forever, but Imgur was great for a long time.
No independent image hosting service can scale because of pricing. It gets too expensive and users will never pay for it so they rely on ads + annoying ways to get ad revenue.
I use imgapp for imgur. It's not perfect but it's better! What I'd love would be images to be marked as seen so I don't have to scroll past again, and I'd like it to be a meme social network so I can share the lolz with my friends without inundating group chats or Facebook/Instagram.
This isn't just annoying, its a dark pattern to get people to scroll their listings instead of going back to reddit. Its one of the more dishonest interfaces I've used.
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.
Would it be possible and good to use desktop users' browsers as WebTorrent hosts for images? This would make the users pay for their browsing, allowing for the experience to be without ads.
I don't know about freenet, but definitely not tor. Tor uses a kinda-p2p net to mask the destination of your traffic, but doesn't reduce your bandwidth hosting bill.
also if you accidentally hit the left or right arrow (which i have an unfortunate habit of doing when on a website, it's sorta part of my idle animation).
They do it even on normal website. Iv seen a couple of cases of twitch streamers showing viewer submitted fanart (pre screened), and the MOST VIRAL IMAGES sidebar had some almost pron 'click to look at tits' suggestions :/
The most offensive feature is how it tricks novice or unsuspecting users into "sharing" their just uploaded image to the "Imgur community". It's a big green button after the upload.
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".
