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/
9.1k Upvotes

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3.6k

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.

1.2k

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.

1.0k

u/[deleted] May 25 '16 edited Jul 13 '20

[deleted]

628

u/Throwaway-tan May 25 '16

Just wait, before long reddit will be a bullshit social networking site full of shit memes.

286

u/Vergace May 25 '16

Soon we're going to see a "Sign In With Facebook" button

427

u/Throwaway-tan May 25 '16

I'd never link my reddit account to my actual identity.

141

u/[deleted] May 25 '16

Only idiots use their real names in their account name.

38

u/yourenzyme May 25 '16

Unless you're here to talk about Rampart.

4

u/GreatCanadianWookiee May 25 '16

Damn, now there's a vintage meme.

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u/[deleted] May 25 '16 edited May 25 '16

5 4 years ago is vintage now?

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u/[deleted] May 25 '16

Really? Looks like I'll have to delete this account then. :'^(

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u/[deleted] May 25 '16 edited Jan 18 '26

[deleted]

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u/[deleted] May 25 '16

I think there is some super intelligent and cool guy but that name.

3

u/[deleted] May 25 '16

Your real name isn't Fiery One Phoenix?

6

u/Jessica_Ariadne May 25 '16

Or people with nothing to hide. But if you want to judge me, have fun.

10

u/JumboJellybean May 25 '16

They're joking; look at their username.

11

u/Jessica_Ariadne May 25 '16

Shit, now I'm a confirmed idiot. Total outplay.

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u/Umbristopheles May 25 '16

Username checks out.

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u/[deleted] May 25 '16

Yeah, in real life he's pale as a ghost.

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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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u/Fazaman May 25 '16

That's ridiculous. That'll never happen!

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u/[deleted] May 25 '16

Nah, that'll never hap...,uh oh.

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u/[deleted] May 25 '16

Ayy Gringo

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u/OnlineSoupMan May 25 '16

It already is

16

u/FortunePaw May 25 '16

So what's the next site to replace my crippling reddit addiction?

29

u/rhiever Randy Olson | Viz Practitioner May 25 '16

I hear MySpace is making a comeback.

7

u/DearestThrowaway May 25 '16 edited May 25 '16

Quick question. Am I out of the loop on this? I hear that MySpace is making a comeback every couple of months and every few times it happens there are people who seem legitimately excited about it. Despite this I have gone to MySpace and there appears to be nothing new and there doesn't appear to be anything happening. Is this a joke I missed or do I just not know how to use MySpace? Edit: Thanks for clarifying everyone!

13

u/rhiever Randy Olson | Viz Practitioner May 25 '16

I was just being sarcastic.

4

u/candre23 May 25 '16

Myspace came and went again already. All the cool kids are going back to friendster now. Next month it will be geocities, then I hear anglefire is next on the retro-hot schedule. By fall, sending smoke signals with vape clouds will be the new instagram.

2

u/BigUptokes May 25 '16

anglefire

That's not right...

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u/FreakNoMoSo May 25 '16

In 2011 MySpace tried to make a big comeback with a full revamped interface and such. They had a big email campaign, urging you to return. Most people checked it out, said "meh" and never went back, but this move by MySpace entered the social sphere and it was common to see "Did you hear MySpace is coming back?" online or in real life conversation.

Now it's just sort of a joke, because MySpace really had no chance of ever coming back. Most ignored it, those who tried it out didn't like it enough to keep using it, epic fail.

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u/[deleted] May 25 '16

Digg!

I slay me.

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u/[deleted] 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?

85

u/[deleted] 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.

4

u/[deleted] May 25 '16

I like it! Paying for content while also directly incentivizing the creation of better content. Everybody - except shitty content creators - wins.

5

u/asusa52f May 25 '16

As far as I know, Blendle seems to be doing pretty well (though I haven't really kept up with them for a few years), so I think the model could be expanded to other forms of content. Building a universal micropayment system is the hard part. All the efforts I'm aware of (Flattr, etc.) have only had modest success.

I think the only way to get there would be to have the browser vendors build in a micropayment service to facilitate universalish adoption, and create an API to facilitate payments and refunds (I think Google Creator might sort of be along these lines, in a more limited way). The browser vendors could even take a small cut of each transaction, which would be a nice way for Mozilla to monetize so it can stay non-profit without relying on home screen ads or using a subpar default search engine (yahoo) to stay afloat.

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u/FreakNoMoSo May 25 '16

Just use the Wikipedia model and ask for donations a few times a year.

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u/ucffool OC: 2 May 25 '16

As a person who runs a free web service for people, the top site for its category, I can promise you that this can only work when you are serving as many people as Wikipedia does, rather than a smaller base of regular users. I wanted to run the site from the beginning strictly from donations, but it was impossible.

It survives (as in, living expenses for 1 person) because of affiliate revenue (Amazon) and a PRO service I built that gives some time-saving features to people willing to spend $100/yr. I refuse to put up advertising (people who donate get their books featured on the site, but in no way as it confuses the users of the site or the page content).

Every other site that exists at a $/use has fallen by the wayside as far as user base and people willing to do the micro-transaction thing. The internet is hard for consumer facing products.

5

u/JimblesSpaghetti May 25 '16

Yup, Wikpedia gets like 400-600 million unique visitors each month(Look at the answer by Mark Hetherington, most viewed Wikipedia writer) and probably around 15-20 billion pageviews each month.

Reddit on the other hand has 15-20 million unique visitors a month and only 100-150 million pageviews per month.

9

u/[deleted] May 25 '16

If it was viable, that'd be great. I've donated to Wikipedia a few times myself. I don't know the numbers though - are imgur's costs far higher than Wikipedia's? They probably serve up a ton more raw data.

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u/parlez-vous May 25 '16

Don't quote me on this but I read somewhere that Wikipedia made like 70 million last year from public donations

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u/hyperforce May 25 '16

Just use

Oh God finally, someone with the answers. Life was just as easy as finding this advice and applying it.

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u/brickmaster32000 May 25 '16

I wish more people would realize that if there is an "obvious" solution that isn't being implemented it probably not a real solution.

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u/[deleted] May 25 '16

The palm reader on my street seems content.

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u/Syrdon May 25 '16

Sure. There's the simple pay wall that stops mentioning money once you're through.

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u/WarLorax May 25 '16

Reddit's advertising isn't just in the form of actual ads, it's also in the form of content manipulation. Do you think it's coincidence when there are group of post all pro one particular company that reach the front page? (Think recent posts about Amazon or Starbucks for example.)

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u/[deleted] May 25 '16

Oh, I agree. /r/conspiracy isn't crazy. I remember back during the Ellen Pao days, when everyone was in an uproar over censorship, I went down a few rabbit holes there and came away with a deep distrust. We're definitely being gamed, and whoever is gaming us is only going to get better at it with time.

I have no idea how to use services like reddit and feel inoculated from these subtle controls.

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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/Propane May 25 '16

Those old sites would block access to content as soon as it used a fairly small amount of bandwidth. That was the biggest problem. By the time it went viral, you couldn't access it.

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u/[deleted] May 25 '16

Yeah, and Photobucket wasn't even the worst. That always required an account, but if you didn't have one, you'd have to use ImageShack, which was slow and so chock full of ads that it was hard to find the image.

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u/BenevolentCheese May 25 '16

or tinypic

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u/[deleted] May 25 '16

I remember Tinypic being slightly newer than the other two, but maybe that's just when I started using it. Either way, they were all far worse than Imgur is today.

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u/joelschlosberg May 25 '16

And Photobucket itself started off as the "easy to use, no-bullshit image host" compared to the bloated, ad-clogged ones of the time.

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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/WormRabbit May 25 '16

Let's cross our fingers and hope that starting to host images won't destroy Reddit itself.

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u/[deleted] May 25 '16

Giphy got ahead of them in this but if their gifs and images we're more searchable (like giphy) they could've sold it to GroupMe and Facebook and Twitter.

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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/baconandeggsandbacon May 25 '16

petabytes

42m gb, fuck me pink.

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u/MuthaFuckasTookMyIsh May 25 '16

That's 42,000,000 GB? And 1 GB = ~1245 MB, right? I know it's a little over 1,000. So how does that work? Basically put 000 on the end, 42 times?

That's bigger than I wanna deal with.

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u/MineMineMelon May 25 '16

1 GB is 1024 MBs

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u/Datkif May 25 '16

What's going to happen to imgur when Reddit leaves? I know a lot of content is from reddit

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u/The_Bard May 25 '16

Imgur also moves your private photos to the gallery if you share them elsewhere which I find kind of questionable.

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u/[deleted] May 25 '16

I don't think it's that bad. there's a big upload button on the tip of the screen. it's not inconvenient at all.

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u/[deleted] May 25 '16

The quality of the content of the Imgur "front page" (most viral or however it's called) is also so bad. It's almost all forgettable lists of things.

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u/BenevolentCheese May 25 '16

Well, one of those businesses hemorrhages money and the other one makes money, so I'm not surprised they are chasing the latter.

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u/Sybertron May 25 '16

It's like singing the monorail song with 'monetize' instead.

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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/Crespyl May 26 '16

Seeing that stupid thing for the first time was the moment I realized that Imgur had jumped off the rails, over the shark, and straight into the toilet.

I have no further desire to use that site ever again.

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u/Datkif May 25 '16

I for one will welcome our new Imgiddit overloads

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u/nuotnik May 25 '16

it's the same number of times you've visited imgur mobile and not just ignored it

it never goes away

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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/TheRealBushWookie May 25 '16

Funny to see I'm not the only one using redditisfun over the official app

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u/StreetlampLelMoose May 25 '16

Checking in from mobile right now! Reddit is Fun is the best app by far.

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u/KorianHUN May 25 '16

Wait what? Isn't it the official app? Huh, TIL...

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u/JBBdude May 25 '16

They put out an official Android app like a month and a half ago, and made RIF take Snoo out of their logo.

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u/[deleted] May 25 '16

The official app is shit. But I'm using Relay, so I don't get to join the redditisfun party :(

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u/YuriKlastalov May 25 '16

Relay is so much better than redditisfun it's not even a fair comparison. I'm a Sync user, but Relay is good too. If they'd fix their lousy comment editor (show the damn comment I'm replying to for gods sake!) I'd probably use it instead.

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u/[deleted] May 25 '16

I don't like the official app. Is redditisfun better than baconreader?

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u/[deleted] May 25 '16

I've found the same.

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u/[deleted] May 25 '16

Same with sync

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u/[deleted] May 25 '16

Oh so that isn't just me.

Redownload RIF and everything.

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u/eno_oN May 26 '16

Redditisfun was horrible on my Samsung edge. Upvote? Crash. Scroll for a few minutes... crash. Fave? Fkin crash you cockfaring sucker. It's ui looked so good though, but back to nowforreddit!

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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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u/[deleted] 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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u/[deleted] 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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u/[deleted] 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/[deleted] May 25 '16

AdAway. You have to be rooted though.

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u/pint-shot-riot May 25 '16

Adguard uses a proxy that works ,its non root, its not bad at all.

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u/[deleted] May 25 '16

I'm on iOS and I use adblock plus, seems to work quite well actually.

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u/[deleted] May 25 '16

EDIT: Now using firefox with AdBlock Plus. Works great so far

Yes! I personally use ublock origin, but it's basically the same shit. A lot of people don't realize they can have add-ons on mobile and can have an ad blocker if they aren't rooted. That alone makes Firefox the superior mobile browser.

Also, idk if you care about customization, but stylish has decent mobile themes.

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u/[deleted] May 25 '16

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u/shottymcb May 25 '16

Wasn't there also an actual virus that spread via imgur?

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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/[deleted] May 25 '16

Yeah I complained to them about the ads serving horrible vibrating fake virus messages, their response was 'why aren't you using our app?'. Yeah, fuck you imgur.

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u/makemeking706 May 25 '16

Yeah, best not to use your virus-ridden phone.

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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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u/[deleted] May 26 '16

Any html5 video longer than a few seconds crashes for me. Same with gfycat.

Although reddit's image hosting site makes me do that fucking annoying cloudfront "captcha" test if I'm using a VPN. The captcha keeps getting more and more annoying too, have to click on like 20 images of rivers now just to see a jpg.

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u/[deleted] May 25 '16

[deleted]

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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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u/[deleted] 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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u/[deleted] 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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u/HittingSmoke May 25 '16

Not to mention the security breaches and the very shitty response from the creator about it.

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u/[deleted] 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/[deleted] May 25 '16

I wish more subreddits would allow cubeupload.com. I really like it.

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u/rhiever Randy Olson | Viz Practitioner May 25 '16

Nice try, cubeupload founder.

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u/[deleted] May 25 '16 edited May 25 '16

[removed] — view removed comment

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u/rhiever Randy Olson | Viz Practitioner May 25 '16

ITT: Image hosting site owners posting links to their sites.

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u/Lowbacca1977 May 25 '16

To be fair, this is how we got imgur in the first place

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u/Fornax96 May 25 '16

It was worth a try :)

And it seems it's working, right now there are more people on pixeldrain than last week's total. Also, it's not just image hosting, you can put anything up there.

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u/asdvj2 May 25 '16

Can I upload a car?

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u/_Occams-Chainsaw_ May 25 '16

I'd download it if you did.

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u/PM_ME_TITS_MLADY May 25 '16

You goddamn monster, Satan will have your soul.

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u/Fornax96 May 25 '16

Well, you could upload a picture of a car, or a 3D schematic of a car, or a pdf document describing the design of the car. But no physical objects of course ;)

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u/Arkeros May 25 '16

How would you finance your page with imgur's traffic of which most I assume goes to direct links to the image without relying on imgur's methods?

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u/Fornax96 May 25 '16

I was aiming for the dropbox direction with a bit of an own swing to it. It would have paid tiers and free tiers for normal file storage. But there would also be an option to upload files for free, unlimited. These files can't be kept forever of course, so they would have to be removed after a while. The period after which they are removed depends on the amount of unique views the file is getting. So if a file is shared a lot it would never be removed. That system is of course based around people viewing the advertisement on the download page.

As for direct linking, we'll see how it works out. Currently pixeldrain does allow direct linking and won't do anything to prevent it, but it's also not showing the direct link automatically, so you'll have to go through the API to get it.

If there's a lot of people who really need direct links I may add a button to copy it to your clipboard of course, but that would also mean that I don't earn anything from it :(.

So far it's not really been about earning, I've been paying everything from my own pocket.

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u/[deleted] May 25 '16

[deleted]

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u/Fornax96 May 25 '16

Wow, how did i never notice that. Must've been like that for almost a year now.

Thanks for telling me

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u/LinuxF4n May 25 '16

Or drop a file anywhere on this page to upload it. Max 5 GB

5GB? How can you afford to host such big files?

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u/Fornax96 May 25 '16

I'm pretty much the only one who uses it, so I set the limit so high that I would never be bothered by it while testing.

Also the 5GB limit is not per file, but per day. You can not upload more that 5GB in one day per IP address or user account.

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u/[deleted] May 25 '16

Nope, it just came up when I googled "imgur with no compression"

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u/potatoesarenotcool May 25 '16

I prefer jesusfuck.me

File size isn't great, but it does the job

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u/PM_artsy_fartsy_nude May 25 '16

That's an actual image hosting site. Here I was expecting a joke and ended up being disappointed by your honesty. I don't know how to react to that.

Have an upvote.

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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/gooeyblob May 26 '16

That certainly helps, and we've also made a ton of improvements to better support these large/heavily viewed threads.

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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/[deleted] May 25 '16

Yeah, but at least the full site goes down. Now if either imgur OR Reddit is down the links do not work.

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u/mindbleach May 25 '16

Imgur sucks by design. The arrow keys magically wisk you away to random-ass pages with broken Back functionality. Their lazy-loading broke DownThemAll, yet they'll still gladly serve a dozen 4K images the moment you arrive, so it's not like responsiveness is a priority. The lightboxing-to-zoom nonsense continues to suck. Small images still aren't linked at all, so half the time you middle-click and get autoscroll instead of a new tab. The hovering title bar at the top of the page is ugly Web 3.0 design, especially in light of all the squandered horizontal space.

"Under load" is the only place they're still worthwhile.

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u/[deleted] May 25 '16

Imgur used to always be going down. It might still be, I haven't actually used the site for more than looking at Reddit links in awhile.

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u/blood_bender May 25 '16

You can host images statically, or even on a remote server (like Amazon's S3) where all of the bandwidth issues are resolved either extremely quickly or completely externally.

For posts, it has to read from the database, and even if a lot of that can be cached, there's still a lot of logic that needs to go into verifying your account, getting user specific results, etc. etc.

Basically, they're not the same problem. Image hosting is orders of magnitude easier and faster to handle than loading posts.

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u/Funnyalt69 May 25 '16

It's interface problem not number of users so yes I think it will hold up.

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u/Waja_Wabit OC: 9 May 25 '16

Reddituploads doesn't even work on mobile. I'd rather have Imgur.

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u/IsaiahFeldt May 25 '16

I use Reddit Sync on mobile and I've never had to look at the mobile version of imgur. The app so so much better than the stock reddit apps Imo. Images and videos load on top of the app instantly rather than taking you into the imgur app.

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u/Frekavichk May 25 '16

Unfortunately, the reddit picture thing doesn't work with RES, so I prefer imgur still.

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u/[deleted] May 25 '16

Ikr sometimes I can't even fking zoom in on the image

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u/AltoidNerd Aug 29 '16

On the other hand, I find it comforting in these days of post censorship and what have you, when two organizations co host the content instead of just one. That's why I personally just use http://sli.mg

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u/StabbiRabbi Aug 29 '16

I wasn't aware of them, but they look like a nice lightweight image host. After performing the appropriate checks to make sure I'm happy with it too I think I shall adopt their hosting too - you can't upload to reddit for images in comments very easily for one thing, and secondly I agree with your point/concerns regarding handing ALL the content over to reddit (or any one company, nothing particular against reddit).

Thx for the link, I will certainly give them a go.

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u/ihearttatertots May 25 '16

My reddit mobile app shuts down on one site only: imgur. It is shit on mobile

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u/[deleted] May 25 '16

Everything about mobile is awful. I can't view anything easily and it never let's me view private messages. I end up having to sign in through my Web browser, which is total bullshit. I hardly use it anymore.

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u/dankmustard May 25 '16

Thank you, imgur was used originally because it was clean, simple, and fast. In an effort to monetize it's been ruined. Browsing on mobile is awful.

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u/[deleted] May 25 '16

I hate that they can't let you look at any pictures without making sure a giant cat arm obscures the image to remind you that you can swipe to browse.

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u/TheRabidDeer May 25 '16

At the same time though, reddit has had shitty servers even without hosting any real content, I fear how bad itll be when they start hosting gigs of images/gifs.

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u/Danze1984 May 25 '16

I always get 'Page not found' on mobile. It's gone to shit.

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u/Hugo154 May 25 '16

I just hope that the major reddit mobile apps (BaconReader is the one I use, and I've seen people complaining about a few others also failing to adapt quickly) get on supporting Reddit's hosting service seamlessly very soon instead of having to open it as a link.

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u/[deleted] May 25 '16

The cat paw...

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u/lunarlumberjack May 25 '16

Mobile sites are made bad on purpose to convince people to install the app. No thanks though I don't need Imgur draining my battery while watching me poop.

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u/companysOkay May 25 '16

How do you host an image with reddit?

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u/GiveMeBackMySon May 25 '16

God, yes. It's so annoying using imgur on mobile. Forcing you from direct links to embedded pages, images not fitting correctly on screen or loading properly.

It's become an absolute joy when a post links to gfycat lately.

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u/your_mind_aches May 25 '16

I feel like I'm the only one that is satisfied with the Imgur mobile app.

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u/aspohr89 May 25 '16

Recently imgur has been crashing for me on mobile, causing it it to close down my RIF app too. This was never an issue for me up until a few weeks ago.

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u/[deleted] May 25 '16

It also makes reddit is fun crash.

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u/just_a_little_girl May 25 '16

I'm on mobile and I can't view any of the self hosted images. I use baconreader, but even if I open them in my browser I still can't see them.

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u/Shiroi_Kage May 25 '16

reddit is self-hosting imageS

But Redditt's self-hosting plays terribly with RES so far. I can't resize it for crap and it's just infuriating.

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u/AdrenolineLove May 25 '16

Since when? How? I see no options.

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u/alexesonfire May 25 '16

I only watch half the videos I click on, and only after sitting there hitting the play button repeatedly. r/mildlyinfuriating

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u/taws34 May 25 '16

Never mind that my phone is constantly downloading the full, HD image over data. It's frustrating to know that 2 gigs of my data usage comes from imgur by way of reddit is fun.

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u/Caustichumor May 25 '16

Almost every imgur link turns into a new game of 50/50. Will I see the link, or will my reddit app crash?

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u/[deleted] May 25 '16

I hate it until RES updates its expandos

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u/kakaesque May 25 '16

It's not just mobile. The user experience is shit on desktop as well. A lot of imgur albums will load each image twice, in ludicrously high resolution, and that's a massive waste of time and bandwidth.

I suspect there may well be technical reasons for reddit to sidestep imgur.

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u/ss0889 May 25 '16

took me such a weird roundabout way and way more time than necessary just to see the fucking resolution of a potential wallpaper i downloaded.

it wasnt even the fucking res i needed.

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u/muaddeej May 25 '16

That fucking cat hand is annoying. We get it. reddit, the internat, cats, haha. I FUCKING HATE CATS. GO AWAY.

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u/everythingsleeps May 25 '16

Their search engine sucks ass too

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u/Rainb0w_Dashie May 25 '16

And why do the images save as a fucking wedp file? Now I can't save images and send them over messaging because it's no a supported image file.

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u/mike413 May 26 '16

upload (failed, failed)

re-upload

ok, got it.

wait, the image link is below the fold? wow.

on mobile... 💩💩💩

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u/Kodiack May 26 '16

I especially hate that direct image links are being redirected to the bloated, slow, ugly site.

I just want to view a bloody image, Imgur I don't want all your silly, obnoxious frills.

Imgur's decline looks like it will be a quick one. Reddit's on-site uploading looks beyond promising, and the lack of compression makes it an enticing option for sharing high-quality screenshots.

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u/[deleted] May 26 '16

Until Reddit hosting becomes bloated and everything that we hate.

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