What's interesting about imgur, and telling of how times changed, was that it was created mostly to fill the gap in unreliable uploading of images to reddit.
Which begs the question: What the hell was reddit doing that they didn't immediately implement an image hosting feature to keep users on the platform? Imgur rose to fame because it was the darling image host of reddit users, and it wasn't long before imgur needed to pay hosting costs and started sucking users away from reddit and into their own "imgurian" sharing hub.
I guess the internet back then was still in the "Open effort to make the internet awesome for everyone" phase, and hadn't yet gotten to the adversarial "Capture users and never let them leave" phase.
It was interesting seeing all the image hosts in the old days. ImageShack, PhotoBucket, etc
They'd either die because they couldn't afford the server bills or die because they went commercial. Some left gaping holes in forums etc when they changed.
Nothing is free, servers must be paid. On top of that owners want to make money. We can enjoy free services while the investors money last, but in the end every long-term service must find a way to pay the bill.
(And some owners are more greedy than others)
It's the same with AI chatbots/API costs, heavily subsidized now and much more expensive in the future.
I remember when imgur was created as a fast, no login-pushing, non-scummy alternative to ad-ridden clickjacking hosts that censored nsfw and controversial content.
Then it became all of that on steroids except with a comment section and a weird community that didn’t realize they were living in the plumbing of other platforms like Reddit.
Webdevs, why, why o why, do you have to ask me to subscribe to the newsletter before you even let me read the first 5% of the article? Do you really thing people read the first sentence and then go "yes, i definitely want to receive spam from this website! here's my email address!" or what?
Honestly quite surprised Imgur has a thriving on-site community. I thought it was just a solution to Reddit's original inability to upload photos directly.
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.
It's still weird to me that a whole community exists on Imgur that uses it directly (instead of say using reddit threads to comment on the images like its initial use) and somehow sustains the site. I suppose it was always on a slow degradation path for like the last decade.
Can’t say I’ve ever seen it as a stand alone platform with a “community”. To me it was always a utility that goes with Reddit or whatever as image host.
And when they opted to actively break large parts of Reddit by deleting nsfw images I kinda new the party is over even in its very tangential utility role
It fills the niche imgur originally did (i.e. no bullshit image host) but uses a community funding model instead. I'm pitching in $20 every month to keep it from turning into imgur. If you were thinking of putting something on imgur, please just put it on catbox instead and toss a couple bucks their way once in a while so we can continue to have nice things.
Honestly, Imgur’s been falling apart — layoffs, broken stuff, random policy changes, and everyone’s sick of being treated like the product. I just started using https://s3nd.pics
and it feels like what Imgur should’ve been: no ads, no data-selling, no weird algorithm. You control what you see, and the vibe is way more community-first. Worth checking out if you’re tired of the same old “platform milks users until it dies” cycle.
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[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 44.7 ms ] threadThis is a very true statement, but to me the degradation started many years ago.
Which begs the question: What the hell was reddit doing that they didn't immediately implement an image hosting feature to keep users on the platform? Imgur rose to fame because it was the darling image host of reddit users, and it wasn't long before imgur needed to pay hosting costs and started sucking users away from reddit and into their own "imgurian" sharing hub.
I guess the internet back then was still in the "Open effort to make the internet awesome for everyone" phase, and hadn't yet gotten to the adversarial "Capture users and never let them leave" phase.
They'd either die because they couldn't afford the server bills or die because they went commercial. Some left gaping holes in forums etc when they changed.
(And some owners are more greedy than others)
It's the same with AI chatbots/API costs, heavily subsidized now and much more expensive in the future.
Then it became all of that on steroids except with a comment section and a weird community that didn’t realize they were living in the plumbing of other platforms like Reddit.
World Star is run by a bunch of AI bots. That's hilarious. World Star!
It's still weird to me that a whole community exists on Imgur that uses it directly (instead of say using reddit threads to comment on the images like its initial use) and somehow sustains the site. I suppose it was always on a slow degradation path for like the last decade.
And when they opted to actively break large parts of Reddit by deleting nsfw images I kinda new the party is over even in its very tangential utility role
https://www.forbes.com.au/news/innovation/medialab-bought-up...
The company has bought up a bunch of web properties and proceeded to reneg on paying out. Absolutely scum behaviour right there.
It fills the niche imgur originally did (i.e. no bullshit image host) but uses a community funding model instead. I'm pitching in $20 every month to keep it from turning into imgur. If you were thinking of putting something on imgur, please just put it on catbox instead and toss a couple bucks their way once in a while so we can continue to have nice things.
Imgur itself was created due to the previous one, er, imgbucket maybe, being terrible. Which in turn...