[HN Gopher] Imgur Acquired by Medialab
___________________________________________________________________
Imgur Acquired by Medialab
Author : mburst
Score : 242 points
Date : 2021-09-27 19:19 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (imgur.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (imgur.com)
| beervirus wrote:
| Oof. I hope medialab didn't spend much on this dog.
| l-albertovich wrote:
| Huh, a few days ago I listened to the darknet diaries on kik, I
| guess imgur is about to become a child porn den...
|
| Sarcasm aside, it'd be cool if they got their shit together.
| srjek wrote:
| https://blog.imgur.com/2021/09/27/celebrating-imgurs-next-ch...
| may be a better url. At least on mobile, the gallery link fails
| to load. Any scrolling then redirects and rewrites history to a
| random post.
| soylentgraham wrote:
| Well, why change a formula that leads to an exit.
| lindseymysse wrote:
| I've been doing stuff on neocities.org lately. It reminds me what
| I love about making the internet.
|
| I pay the monthly $5 fee for 50gb, and I have no complaints yet.
| And if I ever have a product idea -- their website is open
| source, so I can just fork their project and make my own
| business.
| quickthrower2 wrote:
| Hosting companies selling 3 years for $150 of traditional PHP
| shared hosting are still around. I love how skills I learned 15
| years ago still work on these and it feels closer to the older
| web. Probably can run Perl on them! Also a PHP file on one of
| these is close to "serverless" - it's a lot simpler doesn't
| change its UI and API every 5 minutes like Azure
| sergiotapia wrote:
| An image hosting site seems like one of those applications that
| are easier than ever to build but impossible to monetize.
|
| Most people who use imgur just hotlink - what's the incentive for
| a company to buy or start a new imgur?
| balozi wrote:
| Congratulations to Medialab for their newly-acquired gigantic
| pile of porno content. Sir, please invite us over when you get
| settled in. XOXO
| MauranKilom wrote:
| Hm. My bet would be that you can now count the number of years
| until imgur links go dead on one hand.
|
| This prompted me to check whether there were any backup efforts
| already, and how much data that would involve. Indeed,
| archiveteam has some good info:
| https://wiki.archiveteam.org/index.php/Imgur
|
| > Imgur serves a _massive_ amount of traffic. In 2012 alone, 42
| petabytes of data were transferred. Fortunately, the amount of
| images uploaded is much less, albeit still a lot. In 2012, around
| 300,000,000 images were uploaded; assuming an average size of
| 120KB, that 's 36TB in one year. As of 2014, there were 650
| million images with 1.5 million being added each day according to
| one source. An analysis in 2015 based on extrapolation from a
| sample of random image IDs estimated about 2 billion images with
| a total raw full-resolution image size of 376 TiB.
|
| Also makes me think about whether/how much I currently link to
| imgur in various places on the internet, and whether there's
| anything that I should prepare to replace. Do people have
| suggestions how to best approach this?
| catillac wrote:
| I would change any links you have pointing to Imgur. But as for
| storing the contents, wasn't it just a site for memes? I can't
| recall a single time over many years seeing anything worth
| preserving that wasn't essentially throwaway content.
| vitalychernobyl wrote:
| This is a tough one to make sense of - are they just getting
| killed by reddit on one side and tiktok on the other and cashing
| out? Anyone have any insight? (also anyone know the purchase
| price? just for fun)
| sieabah wrote:
| They stopped being just an image host and attempted to branch
| out. Except the content creators just post the garbage to
| reddit and tiktok directly because the reach is much greater
| than linking to imgur from the various platforms.
| didntknowya wrote:
| it use to be my fav time waster app rather than the selfies on
| IG or silly politics on FB. but yea rarely use it now so I
| guess engagement is dropping
| monkeybutton wrote:
| There is definitely a dedicated subculture there with their
| own rules (e.g. selfies being mercilessly down voted in
| usersub). Also the demographic was relatable for me as it
| skewed more towards older millennials.
| bubblehack3r wrote:
| Isn't this the company that aquired Kik and completely abandoned
| it? Pretty sure this is it. There goes Imagur...
|
| https://www.distractify.com/p/what-happened-to-kik
|
| Edit: fixed spelling mistake
| bozhark wrote:
| abandoned*
| solarkraft wrote:
| Oh no. Imgur was already close to being overloaded with ads. I
| have no doubt this will get much worse.
|
| Any suggestions for alternative no bullshit image hosting
| services?
| mpd wrote:
| I'm currently using https://postimages.org/ for the odd
| occasion I want to upload something.
| stavros wrote:
| I made one: https://imgz.org/
| jamescun wrote:
| Interesting, I hadn't heard of MediaLab until just a few days ago
| when I listened to a Darknet Diaries episode[1] about Kik and
| some "content problems" that MediaLab are leaving unresolved.
|
| [1] https://darknetdiaries.com/episode/93/
| Belphemur wrote:
| I thought exactly the same.
|
| It doesn't bode well for Imgur future. They don't care about
| their acquisition. It's to wonder why are they doing it in the
| first place.
|
| The company doesn't have any public information either. All I
| can find is a LONG list of job openings:
| https://jobs.lever.co/medialab
|
| Weird list if they are just "investors".
| oneplane wrote:
| That exactly the first thought that came to my mind as well.
| RIP Imgur? It doesn't seem like medialab is anything more than
| the 'internet brand' version of a patent troll.
| madrox wrote:
| Congrats to Imgur on its exit, I suppose.
|
| Honestly, this is probably the best outcome they could hope for.
| I suspect their growth has stagnated and are losing mindshare in
| the meme economy to Reddit and Discord. Imgur was started in a
| very different world from today and they didn't evolve enough.
|
| Regardless, I'm grateful to them. Imgur will always have a soft
| spot in my heart.
| ChrisArchitect wrote:
| Imgur, great service, lasted this long, amazing. But I always
| wondered how any of these random image hosts afforded bandwidth
| (reminds of the other various ones like TwitPic who was saved
| from being taken offline by Twitter). I mean, I have a gallery of
| images in there, privately stored, directly linked to here and
| there around the net, without paying for anything for years. I
| think at one point I can't even remember now I did _pay them_ a
| small fee and then they removed that option to go it alone with
| ads and refused to 'take my money'. Which seemed crazy and still
| does. Does the small imgur community (Which exists as a bizarre
| also-ran of Reddit) sustain them enough on ad views?
| mkr-hn wrote:
| I emailed one of them 12 years and 4 months ago to ask how they
| paid for everything. This was back in 2009 when the internet
| was still small enough that companies would respond to random
| emails. They responded to say they had funding covered. They
| shut down a few years later.
|
| The domain is there, but it just says "ImageHost.org is closed"
| with a Google Analytics tag.
| [deleted]
| BiteCode_dev wrote:
| My guess is PR.
|
| Regularly, on imgur, you see a pic in interest for a celebrity,
| a rich person, a movie. It looks organic, but if you look
| closely, there are plenty of weird things about it. Then it
| disappears as suddenly as it arrived.
|
| I believe that they sell the front page to PR firms that need
| to promote something in a way the people think themself came up
| with the hype.
|
| It's probably the same for a lot of communities with a strong
| influence on trends, like popular sub reddits or hacker news.
|
| There is no better ads than the one you don't see. There is no
| better slogan than the one you repeat to your friends as a
| catchphrase. And there is no better propaganda than the one
| based on ideas you thought you had by yourself.
| djhn wrote:
| But who are these companies that successfully provide this
| service?
| BiteCode_dev wrote:
| It's just an educated guess, so I don't know.
|
| Besides, such company would do its best to stay discrete,
| by design.
| robertoandred wrote:
| Yeah but who goes to the front page of imgur?
| corobo wrote:
| The exact opposite personality type to people that browse
| HN I'd wager
| JadeNB wrote:
| I, and apparently Swizec
| (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28676558), do both,
| and I doubt we're the only ones.
| everdrive wrote:
| Yes, there might be dozens of you.
| BoorishBears wrote:
| No there's plenty, HN just has the kind of people who
| need to loudly proclaim they don't engage with <insert
| popular thing>
|
| That wrongly creates the impression that there are only a
| few HN users engaging with it.
| Swizec wrote:
| Who doesn't? It's the best source of almost everything.
| Perfect mix of culturally important twitter and news
| screenshots and entertaining gifs.
| dTal wrote:
| Absolutely this. imgur.com is the only reason I can
| pretend to be "down with the kids".
| Swizec wrote:
| Oh yes also all the good/important tiktoks end up on
| there. I don't even have tiktok and am conversant in all
| the memes.
|
| 7/7 would recommend
| hbn wrote:
| I recall being in high school (around 2013, 2014) and some
| of my classmates would browse imgur while slacking off from
| work. Not sure how big it is these days, but I think some
| people use it the same way you'd browse r/funny on reddit,
| or iFunny. Except there isn't really a topic, it's just
| images of whatever people think is interesting.
| dh4h45b4 wrote:
| Anecdotal and I can't substantiate any of this. About 5 years
| ago my old boss's wife worked for imgur and it did not sound
| great. They had constant churn. She was an upper manager of
| some sort and even she left after a short time. From what I
| understood, the company was not profitable and like many other
| tech companies relied heavily on investor.
|
| I seriously doubt their community can sustain the costs of the
| service. In fact, the quality of imgur's service has declined
| in an effort to make profit. For instance, all images are
| compressed now. That used to not be true.
|
| Most platforms you are using today cannot survive without ad's,
| because their business model is not one that can make a profit
| without a monopoly first.
| intricatedetail wrote:
| Bandwidth is pretty cheap if you look beyond cloud. There are
| providers that offer magnitudes cheaper bandwidth than e.g. AWS
| but you have to set servers yourself.
| wasmitnetzen wrote:
| If I request one of the images in the post, I end up on a
| Fastly IP, and their public pricing[1] is pretty much the
| same price per GB as AWS[2]. They probably get a discount
| there, but that's probably about the same deal if you're a
| big AWS customer.
|
| [1]: https://www.fastly.com/pricing/ [2]:
| https://aws.amazon.com/s3/pricing/?nc1=h_ls
| smnrchrds wrote:
| At their scale, nothing is cheap. Some things are cheaper
| than others, but even the cheapest option must be costing a
| fortune each month.
| ChrisArchitect wrote:
| Right, it's the scale and seemingly limitless ceiling....
| seems crazy. Obviously there's a lot of low res tiny images
| on there etc but there's also not -- and for years and
| years?
| mcny wrote:
| I remember back around 2009(?) ish I had a chance to talk
| to some folks at Justin.tv (now twitch) and they said one
| ad on the stream every few hours more than covers all the
| costs. What changed?
|
| I guess the videos are much more high resolution now than
| the webcam size 320x240 videos back then but has cost
| gone up that much?
| icelancer wrote:
| Ads are worth a magnitude less today than they were in
| 2009.
| bserge wrote:
| What? They're crazy competitive these days. Every popular
| ad space online has been bought by the highest bidder.
| AdWords, Facebook, Imgur, Reddit, companies are dumping
| cash like mad. The market grew by billions over the past
| decade.
| sha90 wrote:
| But you need to consider that so have hosting costs--
| proportionately too. Hosting data was incredibly
| expensive 10 years ago. If the math was working then, it
| should at least be pretty close to working now.
| evanmoran wrote:
| Where have you had success with hosting outside the usual
| aws/gap/etc? It seems like digital ocean has a bit cheaper
| bandwidth, but curious if you have a better recommendation!
| missedthecue wrote:
| DataPacket has a lot of locations globally (compared to
| Hetzner), though you're going to need to spend more than a
| few dollars to get started.
| Aeolun wrote:
| Not only to get started. What costs me EUR20 on hetzner
| costs me $800 on DataPacket.
|
| That's quite a difference.
| nickstinemates wrote:
| Buy a server or 10, host in equinix, buy bulk bandwidth.
| Amortize cost.
| bserge wrote:
| Anywhere you rent bare metal. Cloud hosting providers
| always had the worst bandwidth prices, I'm not joking.
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| Hetzner or OVH.
| danbtl wrote:
| Try OVH
| a2tech wrote:
| My preferred server provider would set you up with a linux
| machine with SSD with 20TB of transfer on a gigabit port
| for $130/month and another 100TB on a gigabit port for
| $79/month
| ma2rten wrote:
| I don't think it's a big mystery. Bandwidth and ad revenue
| scale together. Sometimes the image will be embedded, hot
| clicked or the request is otherwise not monetizable, but you
| can assume that those are a fixed fraction. Every image clicked
| on otherwise will generate some ad revenue which is multiples
| of the bandwidth cost of serving it.
| dapatil wrote:
| You can shop around for bandwidth even if you're a small shop.
| I run https://filepost.io. It lets you share large files and
| images. It is profitable with ads alone.
| adventured wrote:
| > But I always wondered how any of these random image hosts
| afforded bandwidth ... reminds of the other various ones like
| TwitPic who was saved from being taken offline by Twitter
|
| Image hosting is relatively cheap, so you can have good margins
| if you can get a lot of use and fill the ad inventory. The way
| you do it, is by running as thin of an operation as possible.
|
| When the first wave of one-click image hosts were popping up
| back in 2004-2005 roughly, I noticed one called ImageVenue. The
| founder, Vlad, was out of Eastern Europe somewhere. I emailed
| him and bought advertising, the price was right and he had a
| lot of impressions to fill. Back then he was just buying tons
| of $40/month dedicated servers from one specific host, using a
| img7.imagevenue.com scheme for each machine, and filling up the
| boxes. You can still use ImageVenue.com 17 years later, even
| though the traffic for the service has never been what it was
| during the early peak years (tons of image hosting competition
| swamped the market).
|
| And regarding TwitPic, circa 2010: "TwitPic is generating $1.5
| to $2 million in ad sales on an annual basis, with 70% profit
| margins, says its founder Noah Everett"
|
| https://mixergy.com/interviews/twitpic-noah-everett/
| stavros wrote:
| It seemed crazy to me, and I didn't want to be the product, so
| I made https://imgz.org/. Maybe you'll like it.
| tomcam wrote:
| Your pricing page is a delight
|
| https://imgz.org/money/
| stavros wrote:
| Haha, thank you!
|
| Now pay.
| going_ham wrote:
| You sir, gave me a good laugh. Kudos.
| keyle wrote:
| Even the terms are great.
|
| "Where was I"
|
| https://imgz.org/help/terms/
|
| Maybe charge $1/month for MVP sarcasm.
| riquito wrote:
| > Paying us money doesn't entitle you to anything except
| owning less money
|
| Brilliant
| silisili wrote:
| Agreed. It's delightfully funny without going overboard, or
| being too cheesy like most bigger companies who try to be
| cheeky.
|
| I'm signing up.
| stavros wrote:
| The trick is to actually not care about whether people
| buy your stuff! Hard to pull off when you're trying to
| make money, but easy for me.
| version_five wrote:
| This website is great, I have no use for an image sharing
| site but in tempted to sign up just to help see it become
| successful. And behind all the humor there is actually a very
| sensible concept: pay a reasonable amount of money to get an
| actual service and not some ad infested crap. Also I love
|
| > If you're expecting professionalism, call Oracle and ask
| for a quote of Oracle Advanced Image Sharing for Hadoop or
| whatever crap they sell
| emptysongglass wrote:
| This is one of the greatest pieces of website comedy I have
| ever seen.
| stavros wrote:
| Thanks! Check out the blog, we're innovating.
| jdmichal wrote:
| Your architecture page is an inspiration to me.
| tppiotrowski wrote:
| I think there's a cost to taking money from thousands of people
| vs taking the money from an investor or advertiser.
|
| First off there is tax compliance, if you want to be global it
| will cost a lot for accountants and lawyers that understand how
| this should work "anywhere" in the world.
|
| Second, I know some people that will just cancel credit cards
| because they don't want to make the next recurring payment for
| a service. Coming after these people is not worth the effort
| but hurts the bottom line.
|
| Third, you need to hire employees to look after customer
| accounts and billing if there are any questions.
|
| I think there's other reasons and I know payment processors
| like Stripe and Square are attempting to make this seamless,
| but I'm guessing a single source of funding is still desirable.
| reilly3000 wrote:
| As a side note I find it amusing how the HN community
| simultaneously obsesses over startups, equity, funding rounds,
| etc but gets grumpy when a company actually does sell. The
| cognitive dissonance is sublime.
| jacquesm wrote:
| HN contains enough people of different vintage and background
| that it would be rather more surprising if there was any
| subject that we all agreed on. This has nothing to do with
| cognitive dissonance, which is something unique to an
| individual, at best you could conclude that HN is able to cater
| to people on opposing sides of some spectra without turning
| into a hate fest.
| filmgirlcw wrote:
| They should have sold to Reddit when that option was on the
| table. The founders didn't want to because they thought they had
| options beyond Reddit, but that was never really true.
|
| Congrats on any exit, but this one has to be a letdown and I'm
| sure it didn't work out for any of the non-founders with options
| that are now assuredly worthless, but congrats on an exit
| nonetheless.
| efnx wrote:
| Does anybody know what the acquisition price was? Or what the
| terms were (like how long must the founders remain on the team,
| etc)?
| ChrisArchitect wrote:
| Medialab's other things include like, Genius (ok, fair enough,
| sustains itself / useful/ well-used I'm assuming)....and Kik? The
| teen messaging app from like 2010 that no one uses anymore? hm
|
| Had to look a bit harder to even find their website
| (https://www.medialab.la/) - 'a holding company of consumer
| internet brands' heh, sheesh, yeah that's not sketchy.
| jdorfman wrote:
| > Kik? The teen messaging app from like 2010 that no one uses
| anymore?
|
| I use to think the same thing, until I listened to this episode
| of Darknet Diaries:
|
| https://darknetdiaries.com/episode/93/
| xmprt wrote:
| 1/3 American Teenagers use the app according to Kik... I have
| a feeling they're not counting right because that doesn't
| sound right to me.
| toyg wrote:
| After reading this, it's clear everybody knows (multiple
| legal challenges, involvement by MS...) and nobody with
| actual power wants to crack down on it. Safe haven or not,
| when authorities want to destroy a sketchy business, they
| have a number of weapons at their disposal. To me, it all
| suggests Kik (and by extension, possibly, Medialab) might
| well be some sort of law-enforcement front at this point.
| NelsonMinar wrote:
| Kik's the website that had a serious child porn and child
| sexual solicitation problem. I think they've tried to do
| something about that in the last couple of years but from a
| quick Google search it's not clear it's really worked.
| Lammy wrote:
| It's probably worth a lot more as a honeypot than it was
| before.
| Jerry2 wrote:
| > _Had to look a bit harder to even find their website
| (https://www.medialab.la/) - 'a holding company of consumer
| internet brands' heh, sheesh, yeah that's not sketchy._
|
| I find it curious that there's no page about who owns/runs
| MediaLab. Not even a single blurb about their
| executives/management!
| LookAtThatBacon wrote:
| According to their public Statement of Information (https://b
| usinesssearch.sos.ca.gov/Document/RetrievePDF?Id=04...), the
| CEO of MediaLab.AI Inc is Michael Heyward, the co-founder of
| Whisper.
| Lammy wrote:
| To save others looking it up: `.la` is the ccTLD of Laos.
| They're using it here to mean "Los Angeles", of course, but I
| hadn't seen that one before :)
| kyle-rb wrote:
| MediaLab probably got Kik at a pretty big discount. There were
| child grooming issues, and at one point they did an ICO and
| subsequently got fined by the SEC.
|
| They were also indirectly responsible for the whole leftpad
| disaster lol.
| teawrecks wrote:
| Hey, before you judge them, note that their stated goal is: "to
| enrich and empower consumers in their everyday lives...through
| expansion and acquisitions."
|
| All I can think of is that silicon valley tech disrupt bit.
| "We're making the world a better place...through paxos
| algorithms for consensus protocols."
| ChrisArchitect wrote:
| oh the Genius acquisition was also (announced) today?! wow
| someone just went shopping eh?
|
| Edit: Sorry missed that was news from the 16th:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28550527
| cjenkins wrote:
| Just a note, we're getting close to fiscal year end (9/30)
| for a lot of companies. Maybe totally anecdotal but I've
| noticed in the past that I see a lot of these kinds of
| announcements this time of year presumably to get these done
| before the next fiscal year.
| mdoms wrote:
| I have never seen a service decline so quickly from "simple and
| actually pretty useful" to "bloated, slow mess" as Imgur. I don't
| see that trend reversing for them. I suspect much of the slowness
| is because I live in the ass end of the world (NZ), but that's a
| problem that can be solved with money.... money they likely don't
| want to spend.
| seattle_spring wrote:
| > I have never seen a service decline so quickly from "simple
| and actually pretty useful" to "bloated, slow mess" as Imgur
|
| Reddit did a pretty good job of going from simple and
| relatively lightweight to bloated and unusable in a very short
| timeframe.
| andrefuchs wrote:
| There is a great DarknetDiaries episode about the dark side of
| Medialab's Kik-Messenger.
|
| https://darknetdiaries.com/episode/93/
| anonymous344 wrote:
| imgur has long been a political manipulation machine. I'll bet
| after this sell it will only get worse.
|
| ps. Have you noticed how 9 gag shows you violence or racism every
| day in one of the top 5 posts. As tought that "happy site" is
| trying to make you angry...
| Andrew_nenakhov wrote:
| I can't share the love for Imgur: for some reason, all imgur
| posts, including this one, are never displayed on my mobile
| Firefox. Just blank screen, and that's it.
|
| (the only addon I have is uBlock origin, and I'm too lazy to try
| turning it off for some random images)
| BitwiseFool wrote:
| Imgur does this weird thing on mobile where it will always
| redirect you to some page where it can then nag you to download
| their app with grayouts, big buttons, and then a content feed
| they hope you scroll down on.
|
| It also downloads like 6 megabytes worth of local content.
| Doesn't matter if you are going to the imgur page of the image,
| or literally the URI to the image file itself.
| actusual wrote:
| Ah yes, the ol' app interstitial where they hound you to
| download the app by interrupting whatever you were trying to
| do on their site. I hate websites that use these.
| harry8 wrote:
| Imgur sort of claims to be organic and user driven but that just
| seems a stretch.
|
| Before the 2016 election it was full of Pro-trump meme content.
| Now there is absolutely none and it's full of orthodox Democrat
| boosting meme content with any Republican mention advancing the
| idea that the whole party and all its supporters are completely
| beyond redemption being in league with Satan himself.
|
| No way that's not curated, for mine and I think it will backfire.
| calltrak wrote:
| imgur sucks. i prefer https://picc.io
| missedthecue wrote:
| Is this the same Medialab that bought the lyrics website Genius
| for $80 million last week?
| gsich wrote:
| Imgur has gone to shit.
| paxys wrote:
| https://www.medialab.la/ for those wondering.
|
| > medialab is a holding company of consumer internet brands.
| c3534l wrote:
| Ah, this explains why imgur suddenly became unusable.
| jdlyga wrote:
| Imgur was awesome for a bunch of years. Glad they had an exit
| plan.
| EasyTiger_ wrote:
| Wasn't this the company that ostensibly began on reddit? Their
| founder used to post many promises about "not selling out" and
| the rest.
| judge2020 wrote:
| Yes, and they have since cut out all references to Reddit, even
| in their company history section.
|
| https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/y81ju/i_created_imgur...
|
| https://imgurinc.com/about?forcedesktop=1#huge-impact-little...
| xenihn wrote:
| I'm sure there's good reasons for this. but I'd be curious
| for details.
|
| I wonder if Reddit would be what it is today without imgur. I
| started using Reddit shortly before imgur launched, and I can
| still remember the day that it went live. It was by far the
| best image uploading experience I'd ever had, and I'd used
| most (maybe every) major uploader that came before them,
| between 1995 and 2009.
| gjs278 wrote:
| this is a lie MrGrim told reddit. in reality he was promoting
| imgur on digg, SA, anywhere really. he just told reddit that so
| they'd think they were part of some secret new club since
| tinypic, photobucket, and imageshack were all terrible hosts in
| comparison.
| WORMS_EAT_WORMS wrote:
| Ha. I love reading terrible inflaming comments like this.
|
| - What would you have done?
|
| - Do you even know 1% of the effort the founding team put into
| this?
|
| - Do you know the exact details of the digital cold war between
| Reddit and them?
|
| This is just a terrible comment by a terribly grumpy person to
| inflame.
|
| - It's AWESOME the founding team exited
|
| - It's AWESOME someone went heads up with Reddit
|
| Everything they did mattered. Nothing you shared did.
| cmbell715 wrote:
| So many straw men, so little time.
| WORMS_EAT_WORMS wrote:
| My comment was flagged but what the person is complaining
| about was probably 10 years ago... and provides little
| discussion except a quip that doesn't belong on HN.
| Whatever.
| pram wrote:
| My favorite part is that they added 'social' stuff to imgur
| uploads, so your images (probably) have a separate set of
| terrible comments you're not even aware of.
| sbierwagen wrote:
| Imgur comments have the old twitter length limit, 140
| characters.
| ruined wrote:
| even worse!
| bozhark wrote:
| watch they weren't even hosting the files, it just
| backpages to twitter posts
| pfraze wrote:
| To be fair, the Imgur comments are actually pretty funny
| didntknowya wrote:
| everyone sells out eventually. nothing wrong with it. either
| that or they run it into the ground or die.
|
| people move on that's just life. congrats to the imgur team and
| good luck for their next adventures.
| vesinisa wrote:
| You don't need to sell out if you can create a service or
| product that people are willing to pay money for - even
| indirectly. Granted, this is certainly a difficult feat to
| pull on a free image hosting site.
| rapind wrote:
| Not everyone, but it's definitely rare. Feels good to believe
| that everyone sells out though when you're in the process of
| selling out.
| Aeolun wrote:
| Ah, yeah, after the previous host was taken over. We all saw
| that for the lie it was after they took outside investment of
| course.
| BurningFrog wrote:
| "Selling" and "selling out" are not (always) the same thing.
| munk-a wrote:
| My dad worked in M&A for a long time and handled the sale of
| a plastic molding company where the owner was getting quite
| old and couldn't really run the business anymore. The company
| was extremely well established and had a very strong and
| loyal customer base and ran off a single manufacturing
| facility in a small town out in the boonies. The owner
| certainly wanted a fair value for the company but he also
| strongly desired that the plant be kept open and employees
| retain their positions. Adding this sort of a restriction on
| a company you're selling is possible - but it is hellishly
| expensive, generally you're considering adding some sort of
| third party oversight and auditing for all HR actions and
| business decisions. If you buy a company under these terms
| you can end up utterly destroying the company if supply
| chains shift - the local labour pool is unsustainable or a
| plethora of other reasons... And almost certainly this burden
| is mandatorily bundled with the company - so once you've rode
| the company value down a bit and are looking to get out all
| of the buyers will know how much of an impossible situation
| that company is in.
|
| At the end of the day when you sell a company you are
| divorcing yourself from the future direction - you might be
| invited to stay on as an executive - and the new owners might
| listen to you... or they might not - that's entirely up to
| them. Any promises or commitments you've made as an executive
| are only as good as your word - and when you sell your
| company your word stops having any power (because you sold
| that power).
|
| I would never shame someone who wanted to keep an ideal going
| from making an exit they personally need to make - always
| prioritize your health and happiness over any venture - but
| when you sell you're accepting the fact that at any moment
| the buyer may completely reverse the direction of the
| company.
| munchler wrote:
| Can you think of a notable example when they weren't?
| [deleted]
| mtnGoat wrote:
| facebook, zuck took all the investor money but maintained
| all the control.
| popcube wrote:
| stackoverflow? I mean, there still are many people.
| munchler wrote:
| I think it's still too early to judge the SO purchase,
| but I agree that it hasn't been a problem so far.
| missedthecue wrote:
| Anything bought by Microsoft in the past 10 years.
| Minecraft, Github, LinkedIn, all are better products today
| than they were at the time of sale.
| Lammy wrote:
| Sounds like the attention of those properties' users is
| worth more in some other metric than the
| maintenance/improvements cost in engineer time. I wonder
| what.
| slig wrote:
| They began on Reddit because Reddit was incapable of handling
| image uploads.
| kordlessagain wrote:
| Reddit forwards /r/imgur to /r/drugs
| throwaway1777 wrote:
| Fake news.
| SquareWheel wrote:
| No it doesn't. If you mean reddit.com/imgur, that's the ID
| from a random post in /r/Drugs. Reddit automatically
| expands the post ID to the original thread.
| ryder9 wrote:
| bullshit artist
| techrat wrote:
| > They began on Reddit because Reddit was incapable of
| handling image uploads.
|
| I'd argue they largely still are incapable of handling image
| uploads. Their gallery system sucks and the redesign just
| makes it harder to even see what was posted.
| hanniabu wrote:
| And their video player is even worse!
| cptskippy wrote:
| The image uploading fails most of the time for me.
| dpedu wrote:
| IIRC at the time imgur launched, all of the other free image
| sharing websites were pretty bad. Reddit itself didn't start
| allowing uploads until long after imgur.
| badsectoracula wrote:
| IMO all the other free image sharing websites are still
| bad, i've yet to see anything that lets you -e.g.- make
| direct links to the images for use in Discord, Reddit,
| forums (phpbb), etc and not surround them with garbage and
| images tend to stay around for a long time unlike other
| places where they disappear after a while.
|
| The only thing i found annoying with Imgur is the mobile
| site not allowing zooming for some reason (can be bypassed
| by loading the desktop version but it is still an
| annoyance).
|
| Not sure if this will still be the case going forward
| though. I used to like Minus since they allowed all that
| stuff plus had unlimited GIF sizes and didn't reencode PNGs
| to JPGs (not sure if Imgur does that anymore) but after
| Minus was sold it went to hell and then disappeared
| completely.
| quickthrower2 wrote:
| Who's paying if there are no ads?
| minimaxir wrote:
| Here's a data analysis I made years ago on how Reddit
| native image uploads overtook Imgur uploads:
| https://minimaxir.com/2017/06/imgur-decline/
| degenerate wrote:
| Correct. ImageShack was the most widely used host on reddit
| and had recently disabled hotlinking (after nearly a year
| of ad bloat on their main site) so user MrGrim on reddit
| created Imgur and announced it on Reddit 12 years ago:
|
| https://old.reddit.com/r/reddit.com/comments/7zlyd/my_gift_
| t...
|
| He did an AMA 3 years later: https://old.reddit.com//r/IAmA
| /comments/y81ju/i_created_imgu...
| tschwimmer wrote:
| Holy crap, I have not thought about imageshack for a
| decade. It was hot garbage: slow, ad ridden and if I
| recall correctly they would disable your hotlinked images
| if they used too much bandwidth. Imgur was something of a
| godsend at the time. Now it's commodity unfortunately.
| jagger27 wrote:
| I remember when ImageShack was the best of all the bad
| options. TinyPic and PhotoBucket were super slow, and I
| remember popular forums back then either didn't support
| image uploads, or they were even slower to load than
| external hosts. So much internet history has been lost to
| "this image has exceeded its bandwidth limit"
| placeholders from PhotoBucket and TinyPic.
|
| Imgur really did change everything.
| pfraze wrote:
| The disabled hotlink images are the only reason I know
| imageshack exists. How's that for marketing?
| [deleted]
| gsich wrote:
| And now Imgur has disabled hotlinking. Depending on
| device and/or image.
| corobo wrote:
| And has an interstitial ad to wait through before upload.
| I don't think even ImageShack thought of that one
| mrkramer wrote:
| Imgur only exists because Reddit at the time didn't have native
| image host but since they introduced it Imgur is in decline[0].
|
| [0] https://minimaxir.com/2017/06/imgur-decline/
| bluedino wrote:
| And now the race for the next free image host begins...
| darkwizard42 wrote:
| Medialab has now acquired Kik (2019), Imgur (2021), Genius
| (2021)...
|
| Big spree of acquisitions! Anyone have any idea the goal?
| filmgirlcw wrote:
| To buy old, dilapidated tech/media brands that no longer have
| any ability to get pay out investors (who are happy to sell on
| the cheap for a write-off), but still get some level of
| traffic. Bundle all the traffic together to sell ads across a
| network of sites with the hopes of profiting.
|
| It's a strategy as old as time. Sometimes it works (IAC, is
| arguably a good example of a company who has bought or funded
| companies at various stages of distress/hype (and incubated
| some that are very successful in their own right, like Match
| Group) and managed to get goodish CPMs across the sites they
| bundle together), most of the time it doesn't. But the goal is
| to acquire the brand/traffic, cut costs to the bone, and
| attempt to profit off the traffic by selling ads or user data
| or whatever. It's a rollup play and the goal is definitely not
| to invest back into the companies themselves any more than they
| need to run.
| exogeny wrote:
| To be the biggest media company of 2014.
| [deleted]
| taurath wrote:
| Yeah to be an ad network like everything else
| jacquesm wrote:
| To become the next Yahoo.
| DarknessFalls wrote:
| Imgur could have pivoted to becoming like Reddit faster than
| Reddit was able to pivot to incorporate its own image repo.
|
| It's all user-submitted content. One was either a link or a blurb
| of text, the other was imagery.
| Traster wrote:
| By the way, it's pronounced "Imager" for those that don't know.
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