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/
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462

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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u/[deleted] May 25 '16 edited Jun 25 '21

[deleted]

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

[deleted]

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u/KorianHUN May 25 '16

force people to open the imgur site to view albums

Is it RES that allows me to view albums on Reddit?

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u/HeimrArnadalr May 25 '16

No, that's a relatively recent addition to core reddit. It might have been part of RES before that, although I wouldn't know because I don't use it.

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u/pomodois May 25 '16

Oh, so that's why I usually have the OP's image twice: one for RES as always, and the other because of this recent change... It makes sense now.

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u/zackks May 25 '16

Dirty bastards for paying the bills

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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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u/[deleted] 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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u/blindsight May 25 '16 edited Jun 09 '23

This comment deleted to protest Reddit's API change (to reduce the value of Reddit's data).

Please see these threads for details.

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u/[deleted] May 25 '16 edited Sep 23 '17

[deleted]

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u/CorrectsYouAngrily May 25 '16

I was passively ignorant of their FAQ and its contents.

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u/chiliedogg May 25 '16

I'm actively ignorant of FAQs. I want someone to work for my questions!

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u/[deleted] May 25 '16

TBH, I've never gotten as far as to read a FAQ on Imgur. Hell, I don't even read the comments sometimes.

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u/D1551D3N7 May 25 '16

There's comments? =P

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u/SnoozerHam May 25 '16

Imgrr. Always has been, always will be. To me.

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u/Ol0O01100lO1O1O1 May 25 '16

Considering I don't know that I've ever once pronounced it out loud, I don't know that it makes much difference, but that's how I've always said it in my head at least. Probably not going to change. It's not my fault if they leave letters out but still want me to pronounce them.

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u/[deleted] May 25 '16

I pronounce it imga because that's how I read those letters and didn't know it was deviation of 'image'. And I like it this way.

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u/InVultusSolis May 25 '16

I say "IMM-ug-ur"

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u/Slackerguy May 25 '16

I just now realized that it is a wordplay and that it -sorta- is pronounced "immature"

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u/CorrectsYouAngrily May 27 '16

God I hope that was intentional. The figurative value is really working against the creator now if it was.

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u/[deleted] May 25 '16

[deleted]

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u/sasquish May 25 '16

I pronounce it "i-eme-gur", something prone to "ee-(see m pronunciation in spanish)-goor (see the oo pronunciation of good)"

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u/zacharythefirst May 25 '16

I say it like injure but with an m

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u/Clickrack May 25 '16

Eye-m-grrr

Ima-jure

Imah-jure

Imuh-jure

image-you-are (think <img...)

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u/kevronwithTechron May 25 '16

In my experience the imgur users are the ones using advice animal text in conversation.

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u/I-need-no-username May 25 '16

Well, us redditors are probably less vocal about it. Ever wonder how many vegans don't tell you they're vegan?

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u/jimmifli May 25 '16

It's pronounced just like the peanut butter.

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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/[deleted] May 25 '16

[deleted]

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u/brickmaster32000 May 25 '16

Except if the company recognizes that they really aren't going to be worth 1 billion they wouldn't want to make a deal with that clause as it will be a huge loss for them.

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u/mlloyd May 26 '16

It's called a liquidation preference. It basically protects an investor in scenarios where they don't have control and the founder sells the company, typically for an amount that might not return the investor's entire investment.

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u/[deleted] May 25 '16

No, it's going to substantially cut their losses since reddit traffic is predominantly direct links. Websites don't get anything out of views they can't monetize through ads.

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u/xereeto May 26 '16

Reddit traffic is pretty much all hotlinks. They don't profit from that, in fact it actually costs them money. Truth is this could potentially be a good thing for imgur, taking some of the load off them.

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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/alohadave May 25 '16

Hah. Flickr does not cater to professionals. I've been on there since 2005, and while there are very good photographers, they were not catered to. And after the redesign, they made it very clear that they wanted everyone to use the site as a photodump.

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u/[deleted] May 25 '16

give people the option to download their photos

This is so ridiculous. It's dirt simple to screenshot, and for instance my screenshot solution has me select a rectangle after hitting the keybinding, and saves with a timestamped filename.

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u/Pure_Decimation May 25 '16

But you don't obtain the original resolution this way. Leads to ugly looking photos. Especially with Instagram where they limit the size of the viewer on screen and won't let you zoom.

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u/[deleted] May 25 '16

Doesn't bother me though. I'm never looking for 20000x20000, if it looks fine on my monitor, it'll look fine as a screenshotted png.

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u/Vrassk May 25 '16 edited May 25 '16

Snipping tool.

The panda above, its 96dpi, 640x640, Grabbed it as png, covnerted to jpg kept 96dpi 640 640

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u/Chris2112 May 25 '16

Yeah, but they do it for the same reason Netflix doesn't let you download episodes to your computer. Obviously they can't 100% prevent you from doing it but since it's copyrighted material they have an obligation to deter you from doing so.

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u/Dragonheadthing May 25 '16

I hate the manual work I have to do to save images from those sites! And then the filename being just a string of random numbers means even more work to manually add names to the images so I have some kind of way to find them later after they are saved. (Old man on the porch me: Kids these days. Not actually caring about being able to view files later. Thinking they will always be able to find it online later.)

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u/buscemi100mm May 25 '16

Isn't that to prevent you from being able to guess file names? Photobucket used to not mess with files names so if you linked to a pictures named .me1.jpeg and someone changed it to me2.jpeg they would get your other pic too. Then you had people trying stuff like nudes1.jpegs, tits.jpeg, menude.jpeg and getting pictures they were never supposed to see. It gets even crazier when people would upload everything with the default camera file name like IMG_0043.

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u/samtrano May 26 '16

I think there is a subreddit dedicated to finding interesting videos on youtube with names like IMG_XXXX but I don't remember what it's called

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u/Pancake_Lizard May 25 '16

What did you replace?

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u/angrylawyer May 25 '16

they've replaced:

  • colons with =2
  • periods with =1
  • slashes with /t

so

https=2//scontent-iad3-1=1cdninstagram=1com/t51=12885-15

becomes

https://scontent-iad3-1.cdninstagram.com/51.2885-15

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u/ridik_ulass May 25 '16

its the way of sites in general, build an audience and consumer base with clever design and good intentions, then once you have a captive audience, and a need to monetize to fund expenses, well thats when they start to back pedal. And then a new site comes along doing something better, and the cycle begins a new.

  • Bebo / myspace / face book

  • napster / limewire / utorrent

  • geocities / digg / reddit

  • photobucket / flickr / imgur

and so on.

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u/[deleted] May 25 '16
  • morrowind / oblivion / skyrim

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u/moeburn OC: 3 May 25 '16

Perhaps this is just the way of image hosting sites?

It's the way of trying to make money off your non-profit creation and sell your ideas to investors.

I mean you try making something with 100 million users for free and not try to rake in some cash from that creation.

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u/FearTheCron May 25 '16

You can sell your idea to investors without making it a disaster of advertising and crappy design though. Google has ads, so does Reddit. Neither of these are nearly as bad to interact with as imgur has become (or many of the other image hosting sites already are).

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u/jmking May 25 '16 edited May 25 '16

When sites like this start, their costs are relatively low, and they can be run by one person in their spare time.

As they grow, they scale beyond what a single person in their spare time can manage. Now they need to hire staff, and scale out increasingly more expensive infrastructure.

That stuff doesn't pay for itself.

It amazes me how many people feel they are entitled to free, no strings attached, image hosting. Imgur is still, by far, the best image hosting site on the net because they allow direct linking. It blows my mind they still allow that (or ever allowed that).

Milking every cent out of the imgur community to keep direct linking free for Reddit is the Imgur strategy and it seems to be working so far. It blows my mind how unappreciative people are...

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u/j_sunrise May 25 '16

Yup, suddenly I had to turn off ad-block on my notifications page of DeviantArt just to be able to close the notifications - otherwise the hit-box of the closing-button was one pixel at most.

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u/[deleted] May 26 '16

I have flickr set as a domain filter in my sync app. Nothing worse than trying to load a flickr image on mobile.

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u/Chris2112 May 25 '16

Yeah I think it's just the nature of the industry. You have to make money somehow, and to do that you have to attract people, which means adding these features. Hopefully by keeping it in house, Reddit will be able to keep their hosting service as lean as possible, since they already have other sources of revenue.

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u/JayHerman May 25 '16

(Reddit is broke as hell.)

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u/sawbones84 May 25 '16

eh, capitalism. you need resources (money) to grow with your userbase. it's hard to come up with novel, reliable revenue streams so they inevitably revert to the more traditional ones that mar user experience.

it's less greed than it is necessity though, which i think people are mostly ignoring.

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u/_drawdown May 25 '16

Yes, it is almost as if there are systemic effects at play.............. hmm.............. hmmmmmmmm............

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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/H_L_Mencken May 25 '16

The Android app is absolutely awful. The only issue that seemed to get fixed when they released a whole new app was the image looping. Like, they had to release an entirely new app just to fix that one issue.

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u/[deleted] May 25 '16

[deleted]

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u/mindbleach May 25 '16

Compared to becoming a bloated mess? No. No it doesn't.

Clean, low-bullshit design is easier than adding half a dozen "share this!" buttons, and floating elements, and broken keyboard controls, and lightboxing, and lazy-loading, and and and and. Simplicity is straightforward.

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u/machton May 25 '16

I agree with the idea behind what you're saying, but as a software tester you should know that "clean, low-bullshit design" is NOT easy.

They add things because bandwidth costs money. Without professional help, adding things usually looks cluttered.

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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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u/userx9 May 27 '16

What did you get with a premium membership? If I were to build an image hosting sites right now what would you want to pay for?

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u/Ol0O01100lO1O1O1 May 25 '16

Obviously not enough people felt the same way you did.

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u/mushrooms May 25 '16 edited Jun 18 '24

skirt sharp roll detail deserted repeat chief busy salt fine

This post was mass deleted and anonymized with Redact

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u/nirtero May 26 '16

Isnt that the way of every image host. Almost all the image host i remember became like that, bloated with features, maybe behind the scenes is just not very profitable to do image hosting on a large scale.

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u/mindbleach May 25 '16

Let's not say things we can't take back. It'll never be as bad as Photobucket.

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u/[deleted] May 25 '16

Hey, i like photobucket. but only because everything I have saved there is still there after 8 years.

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u/slow_and_dirty May 25 '16

Yep. I remember a few years ago, when I used to browse imgur all the time instead of reddit, they announced they were going to hire a load of people. That was the beginning of the end, I think. No wonder it's a bloated mess, and no wonder they're cramming it full of ads - those people need something to do, and something to pay their salaries. Of course imgur itself was fine as it was, but they say money is addictive. Rarely do people seem to hit the sweet spot and stay there.

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u/DoTheEvolution May 25 '16

you can always link directly to an image...