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Imgur's community was in revolt

(www.404media.co)
163 points miiiiiike | 4 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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jtokoph ◴[02 Sep 25 14:31 UTC] No.45103630[source]▶
My guess would be cost. I don’t think Reddit had much, if any, revenue at the time and images would likely require orders of magnitude more storage.
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1. akho ◴[02 Sep 25 16:11 UTC] No.45105007[source]▶
And yet imgur, with no revenue at all, managed to fill that gap.
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2. fckgw ◴[02 Sep 25 17:18 UTC] No.45106068[source]▶
They made hotlinking increasingly difficult, turned the site into a social network and sold ads against content. It is no longer a "image hosting site" the way it was back then, it was going bankrupt as well.
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3. kjkjadksj ◴[02 Sep 25 18:09 UTC] No.45106874[source]▶
It still is the same old imgur for making posts. One button to upload, you get served your album link, right click image for direct link. Same as its been for 15 years. Just used it as such last week.
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4. LikesPwsh ◴[03 Sep 25 00:28 UTC] No.45110872{3}[source]▶
Imgur deleted a huge number of old reddit posts when retroactively banning nudity.

They broke the social contract of being a trusted host, that's the biggest change.