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Imgur's community was in revolt

(www.404media.co)
163 points miiiiiike | 2 comments | 02 Sep 25 13:33 UTC | HN request time: 0.001s | source
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Workaccount2 ◴[02 Sep 25 14:27 UTC] No.45103567[source]▶
What's interesting about imgur, and telling of how times changed, was that it was created mostly to fill the gap in unreliable uploading of images to reddit.

Which begs the question: What the hell was reddit doing that they didn't immediately implement an image hosting feature to keep users on the platform? Imgur rose to fame because it was the darling image host of reddit users, and it wasn't long before imgur needed to pay hosting costs and started sucking users away from reddit and into their own "imgurian" sharing hub.

I guess the internet back then was still in the "Open effort to make the internet awesome for everyone" phase, and hadn't yet gotten to the adversarial "Capture users and never let them leave" phase.

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whywhywhywhy ◴[02 Sep 25 14:46 UTC] No.45103805[source]▶
> What the hell was reddit doing that they didn't immediately implement an image hosting feature

Maybe partly because it wasn't Imgur that added image hosting to reddit it was more reddit always had images they were just on ImageShack, PhotoBucket and there was another reddit darling one who's name escapes me before imgur which I think added ads or started deleting images that caused Imgur to be created.

So Imgur was more just the most successful in a long line of image hosts and the only one to successfully transplant reddit users to their own thing.

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birdman3131 ◴[02 Sep 25 15:02 UTC] No.45104010[source]▶
Tinypic maybe? I know we used it a lot on Gaia back in the day.
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1. hnuser123456 ◴[02 Sep 25 15:23 UTC] No.45104271[source]▶
Might've been Minus
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2. fckgw ◴[02 Sep 25 17:16 UTC] No.45106034[source]▶
Yeah, that's it! I remember Min.us because they had a larger file size limit so you could actually post GIFs there where longer ones wouldn't upload to Imgur.