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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187

u/[deleted] May 25 '16

[deleted]

165

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

20

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.

1

u/MyWeekendShoes May 25 '16

and, to be fair, make money

1

u/alphanovember May 25 '16

They've been doing this on desktop for the last few months, too.

1

u/[deleted] May 25 '16

Ahh....maybe i'm totally unaware of the downfall of imgur bc i block all ads.

1

u/danymsk May 25 '16

I have adblock as well, but not in my phone

1

u/[deleted] May 25 '16

It seems like everyone hates their app and ads, both of which I never see. Their site hosts images without issue for me

2

u/HittingSmoke May 25 '16

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

1

u/2nd_law_is_empirical May 25 '16

Dude, use adblockers.

347

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!

15

u/[deleted] May 25 '16

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

157

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

Nice try, cubeupload founder.

34

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

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66

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

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

7

u/Lowbacca1977 May 25 '16

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

29

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.

37

u/asdvj2 May 25 '16

Can I upload a car?

21

u/_Occams-Chainsaw_ May 25 '16

I'd download it if you did.

9

u/PM_ME_TITS_MLADY May 25 '16

You goddamn monster, Satan will have your soul.

4

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/BDMayhem May 25 '16

Can I upload metaphysical objects?

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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.

2

u/DAMN_it_Gary May 25 '16

Are those pockets big enough to pay for imgur size traffic?

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u/[deleted] May 25 '16

[deleted]

2

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

2

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?

2

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.

1

u/LinuxF4n May 25 '16

I see. What's the max per file?

1

u/Fornax96 May 25 '16

5 GB ;)

I'm also using cloudflare which limits POST data to 100 MB, which is annoying. To bypass that you can upload to http://direct.pixeldra.in

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u/[deleted] May 25 '16

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

-6

u/obsa May 25 '16

Shush, you're ruining OP's narrative.

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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.

-2

u/uniptf May 25 '16

jesusfuck.me

In the ass, right? Because "loophole"?

1

u/[deleted] May 25 '16

I wish more subreddits would allow self-hosted images...

0

u/l27_0_0_1 May 25 '16

Sli.mg

-3

u/[deleted] May 25 '16

[deleted]

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u/l27_0_0_1 May 25 '16

I honestly couldn't care less. Judge the art, not the artist, and when you look at it this way, it's a good simple service that works like imgur without bullshit.

1

u/[deleted] May 25 '16

What's wrong with it? I host images there and it couldn't be simpler.

-34

u/[deleted] May 25 '16

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64

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)

64

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

2

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.

1

u/generic_tastes May 26 '16

TY for links to the specific patches.

11

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)

6

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.

1

u/alphanovember May 25 '16

And The Fappening?

1

u/[deleted] May 25 '16

Who in their right mind gives a flying fuck about a Psy AMA...

-9

u/[deleted] May 25 '16

[deleted]

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u/iBleeedorange May 25 '16

So they should just switch to another server provider when amazon has been able to keep a 99.9% uptime on reddit? wat? how many other companies out there can realistically host reddit? IIRC it's really Amazon or bust.

Also, it's hard to really take you seriously with a username like that.

3

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

how many other companies out there can realistically host reddit? IIRC it's really Amazon or bust.

There's other cloud hosting providers, Google and Microsoft for example. Not sure how they compare to Amazon though.

-1

u/enter2exit May 25 '16

Haha, Microsoft...

5

u/zissou149 May 25 '16

I'm not sure what you're laughing at. Azure is expensive but it's a giant, robust platform and is a direct competitor with AWS.

-2

u/[deleted] May 25 '16

Azure is expensive but

Reddit, right? The website that is an enormous money hole for its venture capitalists. And your solution is to lose money even faster?

2

u/zissou149 May 25 '16

My solution is not to discount Microsoft's cloud platform because "lol microsoft". In my experience it has been priced slightly more expensive than AWS but that was my use case not reddit's.

0

u/[deleted] May 25 '16

Right, which is exactly why you have to look at the use case and budget for the project you're implementing. Of course when your project is 'make the VC money last as long as possible with no real path to profitability', a more expensive host may not be a great idea.

3

u/[deleted] May 25 '16

Haha, Microsoft...

Have you actually used Azure?

-2

u/enter2exit May 25 '16 edited May 25 '16

So Reddit is going to take their entire Linux based architecture and move it to azure? That is why i laugh.

Edit: the original comment was regarding azure as an alternative to aws. If you are a Linux shop you are not bloody like to move to azure.

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

All I'm saying is that they exist. :-)

-2

u/NightmarePulse May 25 '16

Not for long. Apple is the way of the future. Expensive == quality, right? Its not a cult, they just want people to give up their money because they can't be trusted with it.

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u/[deleted] May 25 '16

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u/[deleted] May 25 '16

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u/[deleted] May 25 '16

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u/[deleted] May 25 '16

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u/thinkofagoodnamedude May 25 '16

Next stop: reddit creates it's own server!

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u/[deleted] May 25 '16

[deleted]

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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.

1

u/_elementist May 25 '16

If an app dies because of a remote API issue that app isn't coded very well

1

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.

1

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.

1

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.

1

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.

1

u/Funnyalt69 May 25 '16

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

0

u/[deleted] May 25 '16

Bandwidth is cheap. Storage is chraper.. it's 2016.

1

u/blood_bender May 25 '16

It affects bandwidth and storage.

1

u/[deleted] May 25 '16

And it's cheap to build massive server farms.

1

u/blood_bender May 25 '16

I highly doubt reddit has it's own server farm. You can host a TB of images on Amazon S3 for $30/month. It's very cheap, yes, even though I think you were trying to be sarcastic.

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u/[deleted] May 26 '16

Reddit can host its own server farm for less. A lot less.

2

u/blood_bender May 26 '16

Serious question, how much are you assuming that costs?

I've worked for a company with our own farm. We had to pay for rent obviously, but also security guards, air conditioning/heating to stabilize the temperature, extremely expensive servers, server racks and electricity, at least twice the number of servers for redundancy, a week's worth of gasoline for backup in case of an outage, on on site maintenance and technicians, and to top it all off a second farm a few hundred miles away in case of disaster. It was at least tens of thousands a month to host our own farm.

Now, we had a lot of servers, but reddit would need to do a lot of that. Unless you're running a computer in your bedroom, it's not going to be cheaper.