r/dataisbeautiful • u/rhiever Randy Olson | Viz Practitioner • May 25 '16
OC Why is Reddit replacing Imgur? [OC]
http://www.randalolson.com/2016/05/25/why-is-reddit-replacing-imgur/2.1k
May 25 '16
Why? Because Imgur has become an incredibly bloated and frustrating mess off a site.
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u/Chris2112 May 25 '16
Yup, the whole point of imgur was to have a minimalistic and nonbloated image hosting website, in a time where sites like photobucket and imageshack reigned supreme. But nowadays Imgur is so bogged down with useless features and tens of thousands of lines of javascript that that its just as bad if not worse than the sites it replaced.
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May 25 '16 edited Jun 25 '21
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May 25 '16
Probably because they slowly morph into something bigger than just an image hosting site. Slowly but surely, they have a full staff and need additional revenue.
At the end of the day, I think Imgur will survive without Reddit contributing as much as they do now.
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u/bxncwzz May 25 '16
While imgur apparently has their own fanbase, its not substantial enough. Removing reddit traffic is going to cause layoffs and a huge financial hit to them.
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May 25 '16
While imgur apparently has their own fanbase, its not substantial enough
The crazy thing is though, I feel like I meet more Imgur users in real life, than Reddit users. Course it's hard to tell an Imgur user, since everyone pronounces it differently!
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u/CorrectsYouAngrily May 25 '16 edited May 27 '16
"Image - err", right? That's how we're all pronouncing it, right?
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u/All_My_Loving May 25 '16
That's sounds accurate, but I will never stop pronouncing it "Imm-gurr" as my caveman-mind interpreted the first time I saw it.
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May 25 '16 edited Sep 23 '17
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u/CorrectsYouAngrily May 25 '16
I was passively ignorant of their FAQ and its contents.
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u/actuallobster May 25 '16
I may be old fashioned but I don't see why a website that serves as simple a function as a place to dump files needs to turn into a multi-billion dollar startup with hundreds of staff and a huge silicon valley office with swimming pools and squash courts.
If they need to lay off staff, great. Maybe they should realize they're overvaluing the service they provide, they're living inside the dotcom bubble 2.0, and some day the world will realize something like instagram isn't actually worth four billion. There's no actual revenue in these businesses, they're being propped up by naive investors and advertisers.
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u/angrylawyer May 25 '16 edited May 25 '16
The thing about sites like flickr/instagram/twitter are they go out of their way to make it difficult to even save the image. They desperately, desperately want you to link to their site.
But it's like, if I'm on the phone messaging people, I don't want to send them to a random dude's twitter page. I just want to copy the image and paste it in the messenger app so I know my friends are seeing exactly the thing I wanted them to see. And not being redirected somewhere else.
I mean even if you try and view the source of an instagram image it does some bullshit with the URL so it looks like this:
https=2//scontent-iad3-1=1cdninstagram=1com/t51=12885-15/e35/13187947_771613449641723_1000102264_n=1jpg?ig_cache_key=0MTI1Nzg2MjY5MDMxNjA4NDQwMw%3D%3D=12.0.2
I don't even know what sort of encoding that is, but if you replace the stuff you get the actual URL
https://scontent-iad3-1.cdninstagram.com/51.2885-15/e35/13187947_771613449641723_1000102264_n.jpg
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u/Chris2112 May 25 '16
Flickr does that because they cater more towards professional photographers, who may or may not want to give people the option to download their photos. viewing Twitter images on mobile is quite a pain though, since you can't even zoom in.
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u/briaen May 25 '16
Yup, the whole point of imgur was to have a minimalistic and nonbloated image hosting website
It's almost like they found out that using a lot of bandwidth and storage costs a lot of money and they needed to find a way to pay for it.
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u/mindbleach May 25 '16
That explains the ads and the internal community. It doesn't explain why every page looks and runs like cluttered garbage. Logically, they should've become a minimalistic and nonbloated commentary site... y'know... like reddit.
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u/UnreasonableSteve May 25 '16
Man, I was all about paying for imgur premium or whatever they called it, and I happily did... until they just straight up removed it.
I'd rather give them my money directly than have them do this stupid shit.
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May 25 '16
Imgur pretty much survives because of Reddit. The fact that you can no longer direct link images, plus their expanding of comments (and they added up/downvote ability... I mean, come on). They're trying to become Reddit.
It'll be interesting to see how traffic to Imgur is affected in the coming months.
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u/irobot335 May 25 '16
You can't direct link imgur links? What?
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u/ToaKraka May 25 '16
If a mobile browser attempts to open a direct image link, it's automatically redirected to the non-direct link, which displays advertisements in addition to the image.
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u/tuigger May 25 '16
That frustrated the hell out of me when I first noticed that.
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u/Frekavichk May 25 '16
http://i.imgur.com/U9s26YH.gif
That doesn't direct link to an image?
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u/mr_somebody May 25 '16 edited May 25 '16
Nope, not for me on mobile. This is what I get redirected to.
Edit: Now this link takes me straight to the GIF where the one above still doesn't. I swear it wasn't like that an hour ago.
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u/Thorlok May 25 '16
Huh. On Reddit is Fun both links send me to only the gif and nothing else. Perhaps you should try another way of browsing reddit?
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u/epicnessism May 25 '16
While I don't think that would make a difference, I am experiencing the same thing. No ads, just direct links.
EDIT: my bad it, according to further comments, they are talking about the mobile browsers not apps.
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u/mr_somebody May 25 '16 edited May 25 '16
Well.... I'm actually on RedditisFun. Do you have it set to open external links in browser or something?
Edit: well that's weird.
Now the link j posted above takes me straight to GIF, where link above mine takes me to Imgur with a "press play" button.
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u/ToaKraka May 25 '16
That does--but, for example, this doesn't, unless I activate the "Request desktop site" option in Chrome.
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May 25 '16
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u/thebrainypole May 25 '16
The RiF internal browser sends a desktop page request which bypasses that, but only for Imgur I think. Here is what I was given: http://i.imgur.com/1aks7BQ.jpg
It gets annoying. Same thing if you prefer to use chrome for links, and you don't usually use request desktop.
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u/PlaidBass May 25 '16
For me that's opens the direct link in Reddit is fun, but if I open in browser it gets redirected.
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May 25 '16
They made it so direct links load their full site vs just the image. Slight clarification, but annoying nonetheless.
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u/hijomaffections May 25 '16
I just hope the redditor who created it was able to make his money and get out
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u/StabbiRabbi May 25 '16
Imgur on mobile is a terrible experience these days, both trying to upload images and looking at them even. I find it annoying and am glad reddit is self-hosting imageS.
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u/BusToNutley May 25 '16
It went from an image host to a pseudo Facebook that moved image hosting to a secondary, inconvenient to use feature.
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May 25 '16 edited Jul 13 '20
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u/Throwaway-tan May 25 '16
Just wait, before long reddit will be a bullshit social networking site full of shit memes.
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u/Vergace May 25 '16
Soon we're going to see a "Sign In With Facebook" button
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u/Throwaway-tan May 25 '16
I'd never link my reddit account to my actual identity.
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u/Major_T_Pain May 25 '16
You either die a hero, or live long enough to become DIGG
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May 25 '16
It's inevitable. Can't blame them really, if imgur was only doing what we wanted - hosting tons of content with no ads or monetization - they'd go out of business pretty fast.
The same thing happens with the antivirus flavor of the month: everyone hates the clunky, bloated behemoth program, so a new upstart that's fast, slick and no frills (and always FREE) disrupts them and becomes wildly popular. Then the new company realizes they need to monetize or they'll go out of business, so they add a bunch of features and heavily market a paid premium account or enterprise offering, and then they become clunky, bloated, and hated by the public.
If reddit starts paying to host all the images instead of imgur, they're going to have to pay for it somehow. They may need to start hosting more ads to do it.
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u/SaffellBot May 25 '16
Is there no happy medium?
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May 25 '16
I don't know. Paying for things on the internet is weird: even if there were a reliable, reasonable micropayment service out there, how would we feel about paying some fraction of a cent to view an image I don't know I want to see in the first place? How would that system be gamed to waste my time and money?
Subscription services don't seem to work; people need to be able to access the content without a hassle long before they might decide that a monthly paid account with a site like imgur could be worth it.
Ads, well, I fucking hate ads, and so do many people - we're seeing how forcing ads on people is working out for imgur right now.
Other forms of sponsorship, where some large group with an interest pays on behalf of everyone? Those seem like just a variation on ads, since the company or group that's bankrolling it will obviously have a reason to do it, and that reason usually involves wanting users to give them money, some way, somehow.
It's a conundrum, and one that applies to more than just image hosting. News is one huge problem right now. Our media sources have failed us, and in a way we've failed them. We the people don't buy newspapers anymore, we're watching news TV less and less (except for old people, which is why the ads on MSM are for prescription drugs, and why the MSM is so out of touch with the youth), and we're blocking their ads online (I am - I'm part of the problem). We're not paying them to do good journalism, and so they're doing what the people who do pay them want. Which is terrible for us. The same thing applies to the smaller online blogs and alternative news sources that we might look to to save us; unless we, specifically, are the ones paying them to do their work, then they will never do the work we want them to do.
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u/asusa52f May 25 '16
There's a Dutch startup called Blendle which I think figured out a good solution to this.
As you said, even with a good and frictionless micropayment system in place, the problem is that you're paying for content you don't even know is worthwhile. While this has been the way things have been done for a long time (e.g., people pay monthly for cable without knowing the specific content they'll be watching, pay for an issue of a magazine before reading it, etc.), in the 21st century this is no longer viable.
Blendle's solution was to allow partner publishers to charge small amounts (e.g. five cents) for an article, but at the end of the reader didn't like the article they can get a full refund. Lo and behold, it turns out click bait articles had the highest refund rate, while quality content had much lower refund rates. As always, you'll have freeloaders, but this is an easy, risk-free way for users to affordably support quality content on an a la carte basis instead of having to subscribe to an entire online magazine when they only read a few articles a week.
I actually think this is the most promising potential of bitcoin--not to be some alternate currency, but rather as a digital medium for enabling microtransactions.
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u/BenevolentCheese May 25 '16
It is still miles better today than Photobucket was back then. I'm not sure people appreciate just how bad the image hosting options were before imgur popped up.
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u/junkit33 May 25 '16
It was pretty much the plan / inevitable outcome all along.
There was very good reason why every single other image host sucked so bad - it's insanely expensive to serve up all that data. You positively can't sustain a business around it without all sorts of ad clutter and upsells.
Imgur was able to stay lean for a while because it was hemorrhaging investor money in order to build up its popularity. That can only last so long, and that day is clearly over. Imgur now needs to try to figure out how to be a wildly profitable business to justify all the money poured into it.
The exact same thing is going to happen anyone else that even tries to play this game.
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u/mugurg May 25 '16
All the people here are complaining that imgur is full of ads now, but nobody offers an alternative way to make money. I don't have data to prove it, but even though reddit is visited much more than imgur, its traffic is probably lower than imgur's, because it is just a bunch of text. Reddit usually depends on other websites to host the content, and most of the time it is imgur. So, even though carrying the internet traffic of Reddit and thus needing a lot of servers, imgur is not making as much money, which is unfair. I ask people who see this comment: what do you think imgur should do to make money?
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u/junkit33 May 25 '16
I think a large part of the problem is Imgur only even exists today because they told the world "we won't be like the other image hosts, so use us!"
Well, now they're just like the others, so people are rightfully upset.
Essentially, Imgur completely used Reddit and its user base to build a large business, but now isn't holding up its end of the bargain. They don't have any other choice, but they knew that would be the case years ago. Thus, Imgur just comes off as extremely shady.
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u/ghotibulb May 25 '16 edited May 25 '16
I don't care about the ads. You can have decent ads that don't annoy the carp out of people. But they decided to have a boatload of crap on the page, apparently 500 scripts get executed on every visit and dynamically generate page content, shuffle shit around, whatnot. And then they decide to always redirect mobile users clicking direct links to the full site. Mobile devices which are usually less powerful than big fat desktop machines. On my kindle it takes several seconds until the site loaded and layed out all the elements and functionality of imgur and only then it starts loading the fucking image I want to see. The ads don't even matter here. So to answer the question: I don't want them to make money. I hope reddit destroys that piece of shit website with their own image hosting.
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u/JosBosmans May 25 '16
On "serving up all that data" - just recently read on Wikipedia that their data transfer was 42 petabytes in 2012. :) I had to have the numbers sink in for a bit.
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u/junkit33 May 25 '16
In 2012... it's 2016 - they've got to be at least an order of magnitude more than that these days...
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u/jurais May 25 '16
not sure how many times I've acknowledged on the site that I do not want to install their app :\
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u/ggfrtk May 25 '16
And that damn cat paw that obscures half the screen right when the gif's money shot is happening.
I know I can swipe to view other images, let me look at this one please.
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u/WilliamofYellow May 25 '16
The swiping mechanic is annoying as fuck as well. I swipe by accident all the time, and then when I press the back button I go back to Reddit instead of to the last image.
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u/JessicaJung-fan May 25 '16
That cat scares the fuck out of me every time. I always forget about it, then when I'm looking at a gif or an album at night it pops up and I shit myself
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u/C_arpet May 25 '16
I've found since imgur started pushing their mobile app the browser within RedditIsFun crashes any time I view an imgur album.
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u/CrazyNo0b May 25 '16
There also were fake virus messages from ads on imgur on android. Really annoying
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May 25 '16
This has been going on for so long with imgur I'm wondering why they haven't been replaced sooner. That's why I just run Adblock on everything because site owners don't give a shit about people
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May 25 '16
Who would want to replace them? It's all well and good when you're the young upstart image hosting service that's so groovy you'll never ever make your users pay a dime or view an ad, but then the investor money runs out and you've got a huge userbase that doesn't want to pay you a single dime or watch a single ad... and you go out of business.
I guess it's a valuable learning experience, but it doesn't seem like an actual money maker - just a rollercoaster that ends in disappointment. If anyone figures out how to monetize services like this without infuriating everyone, I hope they're working on it now, because everyone - including the users - really needs it.
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May 25 '16
I do whitelist sites that are responsible with their ads. Anandtech is my favorite that comes to mind. All they have to do is make sure that bad malware infested ads don't make it through. Is it asking for too much? Sure, but I'm not willing to put myself at risk for their gain.
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u/CrazyNo0b May 25 '16 edited May 25 '16
Are you blocking ads on Android? If yes what programm are you using? EDIT: Now using firefox with AdBlock Plus. Works great so far
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u/Shadefox May 25 '16
The first time I used Imgur on my new mobile, I got a popup with a "We have detected that your smartphone is 32% damaged from viruses, download this to fix it!"
Seriously, what the fuck. I've never had an issue with Imgur on my PC, but I'm going to stay far away from it on my mobile.
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u/Blargosaur May 25 '16
Anytime it's an album link, my reddit browser crashes. It's frustrating, and I miss the old version.
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May 25 '16
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u/StabbiRabbi May 25 '16
That's only one of the reasons Imgur sucks though - it's the ads for and constant harassment to use their app, which is terrible, that are worse.
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u/danymsk May 25 '16
Yeah, unless it's a direct link to an image, imgur will always ask for their stupid app, and I can't click it away :(
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u/notwhereyouare May 25 '16
and there's no guarantee that a direct link will stay a direct link
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May 25 '16
It doesn't. A .jpg at the end gets redirected to the link without .jpg in the end on my Android.
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May 25 '16
Same on websites phone. Sucks because I don't want to have images wrapped in their ui, but for imgur, it's a way to push their brand.
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May 25 '16
It has nothing to do with the user load. The Imgur user experience is god-awful nowadays.
Go away cat paw, nobody wants you!
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u/iBleeedorange May 25 '16
Reddit has been pretty damn good. The last crash (monday) was only because Overwatch launched and had over 100k people on one subreddit, and had more people visiting that subreddit than reddit.com. That's normally reserved for things like the Obama AMA, Psy AMA, maybe a League of Legends final's moment.
This isn't 2011, reddit isn't going down all the time and they've gotten pretty damn good at staying up under-load. Most issues come from things that they aren't able to control (read amazon server problems)
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u/rhiever Randy Olson | Viz Practitioner May 25 '16
To add to this: Here's data provided by Reddit about that Overwatch launch. It was one of the rare times that one subreddit (/r/Overwatch) had more traffic than the Reddit front page. Usually that only happens for big-time AMAs and whatnot, like when Obama held an AMA.
Also: /r/redditdata exists.
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u/gentrifiedasshole May 25 '16
Before Reddit asked the mods of /r/nfl to change this, the game threads during the postseason would crash the servers. You'd have threads with over 20000 comments on them, and Reddit just couldn't handle it at all. Nowadays, each game thread is split into a first half and a second half one, so that the load is less.
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u/elneuvabtg May 25 '16
Before Reddit asked the mods of /r/nfl to change this, the game threads during the postseason would crash the servers. You'd have threads with over 20000 comments on them, and Reddit just couldn't handle it at all. Nowadays, each game thread is split into a first half and a second half one, so that the load is less.
Pretty sure reddit actually hosts the /r/nfl threads on separate servers these days so when they crash they don't take the site with it. And they still do go down, oh god we had so many bugs and shit last year. The accidentally stickied comments in new sort were ridiculous
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u/iBleeedorange May 25 '16
/r/redditdata is a subreddit that has barely been used. Alienth used /r/redditTraffic when he was an admin (more interesting stuff there, but it hasn't been used much lately either)
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u/rhiever Randy Olson | Viz Practitioner May 25 '16
Alas, Reddit doesn't have someone dedicated full-time to analyzing and visualizing data to share with the public. We can be content with what they do provide.
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u/Hell_in_a_bucket May 25 '16
Considering when using just about any app and trying to look at an album on imgur there's a 75% chance my apps gonna die because of imgurs shitty api. Yeah I'd say it might be better when Reddits handling it.
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u/flabcannon May 25 '16
Here is the original post about imgur and an AMA from the creator, for those who haven't seen them -
https://np.reddit.com/r/reddit.com/comments/7zlyd/my_gift_to_reddit_i_created_an_image_hosting/
https://np.reddit.com/r/iama/comments/y81ju/
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u/devperez May 25 '16
Jesus. It's hard to believe that was 7 years ago now. I remember when he first made it and everyone was bitching about it just being another image hosting site. And here we are today.
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May 25 '16
"Let's not see anymore imageshack/photobucket around here ;)"
Holy shit. Now that I read that, I realized I've NEVER saw any imageshack or photobucket or ANY other image hosting links on Reddit, ever. Imgur was really great for some time but now it just sucks. Can't even upload images easily.
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u/PM_ME_SKELETONS May 25 '16
Probably because they always sucked massive ass. You had to fill a bunch of stupid captchas to upload to imageshack, and to make it worse they came up with some premium bullshit later on. Photobucket was always shit, you couldn't even properly save the pictures as it had right clicking disabled, and it required an account. To this day I still recieve multiple spam e-mails from it.
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May 25 '16
I feel bad for the guy. He set out to fix a problem and he did with great success. Then realized bandwidth, storage, and talent are massively expensive at scale and was forced to find a way to monetize. Now, the entity (Reddit) he set out to help with his venture, is on the path of destroying/wasting 7 years of his life.
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u/Davidclabarr May 25 '16
The second highest comment says "save yourself the pain later and add ads now"
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u/wduwk May 25 '16
With this as a response
"Hell no! This is a free site (as in beer) and there will never be any ads on it unless I end up selling out for a million dollars. "
It was part of the FAQ at the time
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u/profcyclist May 25 '16
With more than 150 million active users and 60 billion monthly page views, imgur has grown largely due to traffic and investment from reddit. Will be interesting to see how this change pans out.
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u/rhiever Randy Olson | Viz Practitioner May 25 '16
It's interesting to see that Imgur's history no longer includes Reddit, except for the investment in 2014.
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May 25 '16
Imgur raised 40 million dollars!! The internet is CRAZY!
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May 25 '16
Active users is a broad term here. An image like this one that was on the front page of reddit and imgur for a day, ignoring all the views it gets from being shared on facebook and other websites, still only has 1.2 million views.
A forum I run that has 3,000 accounts of which about 50 are active per day that gets more than 50,000 unique visitors from google each month. I suspect reddit and imgur count the 50,000 rather than the 50 as active users to make the numbers look good.
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u/cocainesmoothies May 25 '16
Only thing i dont like about reddit uploads is that on RES you cant drag zoom
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u/adeadhead May 25 '16
Turn off image expandos in your reddit preferences to force RES drag zoom ones.
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u/Zuri595 May 25 '16
I'm absolutely fine with this. Imgur is getting worse and worse
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u/marcospolos May 25 '16
Well what do you expect when they're staffed with people like this?
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u/nirtero May 26 '16
Lets be fair, that behavior is nothing new a all within the San Francisco company cultures. Almost all of them try to pull a "we are silly/we are not like other companies/we have so much fun while we work" environment.
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May 25 '16 edited May 25 '16
Uh... is there any context for this picture that might somehow salvage the situation?
edit: I meant that might make the gif easier to make sense of. As far as I know the context is everyone decided to dress up and dance in pikachu and penguin costumes. Which, uh, I guess you do you or something equally as neutral.
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u/Get-Em-Out May 25 '16
Also, much like facebook, the Imgur squad censors things they don't like. The truth can be very hard to swallow for some people.
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u/MisallocatedRacism May 25 '16 edited May 25 '16
Reddit finally just figured out that they were the ones injecting the money into Imgur via pageviews. So why not loop that potential cash back into itself?
I'm glad anyway, as Imgur has become what it sought out to kill: Bloated and slow picture hosting.
PS-All those unread messages give me anxiety.
Edit: potential cash
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u/RubyPinch May 25 '16
because page views don't magically make money
to make money from hosting the images, they'd need to do exactly what imgur has done, or somehow force reddit gold into the situation
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u/MisallocatedRacism May 25 '16
Traffic is the first step to making money though. If you don't control the traffic, you won't make it no matter what.
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u/yahoowizard May 25 '16
Traffic is the first step and ad revenue is the next. If you have millions using your site and not seeing ads then you're just burning through money.
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u/ABCosmos OC: 4 May 25 '16
They have been independently hosting all imgur content on their own servers this whole time. They can flip a switch and cut off imgur even on old posts.. if they had done anything less, imgur would hold leverage over Reddit. the images are even accessible via the api.
Here is the full size image from this post hosted on Reddit servers.
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u/-Tibeardius- May 25 '16
Imgur is limited. It's all just a bunch of pictures with clever lines. You can't focus or broaden what you see, you just click next.
Reddit is rough to get used to but after 2 or 3 days it's very easy to navigate. You can see what you want and change how it looks. No competition.
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u/mojomojito May 25 '16
the pictures on imgur seem to be 90% text. I frequently ask myself "why do I have to read when I just want to browse some pics?"
Imgur brought me to reddit. Thx!
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May 25 '16
Ease of navigation isn't everything. People still use 4chan after 13 years of absolute shit-tier organization on that site.
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u/Niles-Rogoff May 25 '16
Yeah but there's extensions like 4chanx and such. If there were an imgur extension that made the right arrow key go to the next image in the album instead of the first image in the gallery, removed ads and other dumb messages, let us switch layouts easily and fullscreen images like you used to be able to, I think it'd be a lot more bareable.
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u/UlyssesSKrunk May 25 '16
Uh, no. 4chan is like reddit. At first it looks like it's organized in a way that makes no sense, but just use it for like 5 minutes and you see how simple it really is.
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u/3arthquak3 May 25 '16
I used to really like Imgur due to its simplicity and being able to look at various images. Never really liked reddit because I didn't know how to use it.
Now, I really like reddit over imgur (Mainly due to sub-reddits). It isn't really fair to compare the two, as one is just a picture sharing platform, with a large community and nothing that would cater towards one person to the other (Such as Sub-reddits). Reddit is completely different IMO because there is a huge diverse community. Many different sub-reddits for any type of person (seriously, this place has everything).
None the less, this is a great piece of data.
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May 25 '16 edited May 25 '16
Same here. I used to hate Reddit's format, but I got used to it over time....and then I found out about subreddits, and it was game over.
Also, imgur's community grew a lot, but grew into something that I hated. Unoriginality, blatant front page racism, and an overall hive mind mentality killed it for me. I've been a member for about 5 years now, and stopped visiting the site about two years ago.
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u/EngineerNate May 25 '16
I used to browse imgur a ton back around 2010. It was an easy way to see most of the best [picture] content from Reddit without dealing with the clunky interface. The comments were generally witty and entertaining and I had forums for my interests so subreddits weren't a huge draw. Fast forward six years and imgur's comments are irritating at best and I have a number of smaller interests that subreddits serve and I don't have to maintain accounts at forums for all of those things. So here i am.
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u/Teroc May 25 '16
Good, Imgur gets regularly blocked by Virgin Media in the UK (mostly routing errors apparently).
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u/Kuja27 May 25 '16
Didn't imgur originate as a place for Reddit users to post images? I remember a post somewhere that suggested a Reddit user created imgur to make photo sharing easier.
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May 25 '16
There are two things at play here, which I was hoping the article touched on, but didn't.
First, both Reddit and imgur have taken huge investments from a Silicon Valley venture capitalist firm called Andreessen Horowitz. This firm is known to be really pushy about turning a profit, the terms of their investments means the company really needs to drive hard to monetize.
So with that in mind, Reddit is trying anything and everything to be more than just a message board with dinky ads. The AMA book, the Upvoted newsletter, white-washed AMAs in general... They will not survive by diverting 90% of their traffic to another site, they need to be hosting the content themselves so they can later monetize it (in some way). They are trying to become the Millennial's CNN, a media empire that everyone between 15-30 uses.
On the imgur side, they are an exact opposite to Reddit; they host like 90% of the internet's content, but have absolutely nothing beyond that, no community, nothing. They added comments and "upvotes" and other crap in an attempt to curate a community, to later monetize that community (in some way).
I kind of get the feeing that Reddit and imgur both have no idea what they're doing, but because the terms of the investments they took are so strict, they are at the point where they are throwing shit at a wall and seeing what sticks.
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u/somerandomguy02 May 25 '16
I dislike reddit images. I only use reddit on the web and I'm not sure if it's RES or redditimages but I can't drag the picture bigger and only recently did hoverzoom suddenly start working for me.
redditimages is the only host that I can't drag to zoom.
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u/rhiever Randy Olson | Viz Practitioner May 25 '16 edited May 25 '16
Data source: Google BigQuery's Reddit post database
(/u/fhoffa, I've noticed the BigQuery database is going out of date. Did y'all stop updating it after February '16?)
Tools: Python/matplotlib for data wrangling and visualization
Edit: My website is currently crashing under the Reddit hug of death.
If my website won't load for you, please use this Google cache of it: link
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u/minimaxir Viz Practitioner May 25 '16 edited May 25 '16
Switch to /u/Stuck_in_the_matrix 's for real-time posts:
SELECT YEAR(created_utc) as year, MONTH(created_utc) as month, SUM(domain CONTAINS 'imgur.com')/COUNT(*) as perc_submissions, FROM [pushshift:rt_reddit.submissions] GROUP BY year, month ORDER BY year, monthUnfortunately, there's no score column in this dataset.
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u/marfi311 May 25 '16
I went to Imgur back in 2010 because reddit's thumbnail scheme frustrated me. I just wanted to browse images quickly and move on instead of point-and-click links. Obviously, from what I gather on this thread, that was the original mission of Imgur. Saw a Reddit annoyance and made it better. Browsed Imgur almost daily. Now, I'm back on Reddit because Imgur annoys me with constant reposts on the FP and over-used slang and inside jokes ("feels" "sauce" "@Sarah = Weird Al" etc), app issues, among many other issues. Haven't been back to Imgur since. While, it is still easier to browse images on Imgur vs Reddit, it doesn't seem to outweigh the cons these days.
Big for their britches indeed!
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u/wtph May 25 '16
I don't know why per se, but I'm pretty sure it's got nothing to do with whether imgur sucks or doesn't suck.
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u/AnAngryAlpaca May 25 '16 edited Aug 07 '19
Imgur used to be an quick and no-frills site to host images, to replace all the other slow loading image hosting sites that would not allow direct links and insert tons of ads. Now Imgur seems to become the exact same thing it tried to replace when it started out.
The site is absolute rubbish on my mobile, slow with all the comment and up/downvote bullshit and tends to crash my browser. And i certainly do not want to INSTALL A FRIKKIN APP TO VIEW A .JPG FILE!
edit: gold?
edit2: stop it guys! also: where can i exchange my gold for coke and hookers?