←back to thread

Imgur's community was in revolt

(www.404media.co)
163 points miiiiiike | 1 comments | 02 Sep 25 13:33 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source
Show context
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.

replies(15): >>45103630 #>>45103802 #>>45103805 #>>45104036 #>>45104057 #>>45104158 #>>45104190 #>>45104477 #>>45104693 #>>45104738 #>>45105461 #>>45106322 #>>45107845 #>>45110961 #>>45118185 #
1. tw04 ◴[02 Sep 25 19:25 UTC] No.45107845[source]▶
> What the hell was reddit doing that they didn't immediately implement an image hosting feature to keep users on the platform?

Image hosting is insanely expensive and they couldn’t afford to do it or were smart enough not to.

Every image host that added paid accounts or ads all over the place had a horrible reputation at the time (see photobucket). They likely wanted to avoid ruining their reputation before going public.

Heck even Imgur caught heat when they needed to start paying the bills.