Imgur, great service, lasted this long, amazing. But I always wondered how any of these random image hosts afforded bandwidth (reminds of the other various ones like TwitPic who was saved from being taken offline by Twitter). I mean, I have a gallery of images in there, privately stored, directly linked to here and there around the net, without paying for anything for years. I think at one point I can't even remember now I did pay them a small fee and then they removed that option to go it alone with ads and refused to 'take my money'. Which seemed crazy and still does. Does the small imgur community (Which exists as a bizarre also-ran of Reddit) sustain them enough on ad views?
Regularly, on imgur, you see a pic in interest for a celebrity, a rich person, a movie. It looks organic, but if you look closely, there are plenty of weird things about it. Then it disappears as suddenly as it arrived.
I believe that they sell the front page to PR firms that need to promote something in a way the people think themself came up with the hype.
It's probably the same for a lot of communities with a strong influence on trends, like popular sub reddits or hacker news.
There is no better ads than the one you don't see. There is no better slogan than the one you repeat to your friends as a catchphrase. And there is no better propaganda than the one based on ideas you thought you had by yourself.
I emailed one of them 12 years and 4 months ago to ask how they paid for everything. This was back in 2009 when the internet was still small enough that companies would respond to random emails. They responded to say they had funding covered. They shut down a few years later.
The domain is there, but it just says "ImageHost.org is closed" with a Google Analytics tag.
> But I always wondered how any of these random image hosts afforded bandwidth ... reminds of the other various ones like TwitPic who was saved from being taken offline by Twitter
Image hosting is relatively cheap, so you can have good margins if you can get a lot of use and fill the ad inventory. The way you do it, is by running as thin of an operation as possible.
When the first wave of one-click image hosts were popping up back in 2004-2005 roughly, I noticed one called ImageVenue. The founder, Vlad, was out of Eastern Europe somewhere. I emailed him and bought advertising, the price was right and he had a lot of impressions to fill. Back then he was just buying tons of $40/month dedicated servers from one specific host, using a img7.imagevenue.com scheme for each machine, and filling up the boxes. You can still use ImageVenue.com 17 years later, even though the traffic for the service has never been what it was during the early peak years (tons of image hosting competition swamped the market). I had a running dialogue with Vlad across about a year, he also mentioned in discussing Ajax (early popularity days for Ajax) use at the time, that he wasn't familiar with it and was "only really good with C++ and PHP". So I assume some of it was built in PHP. He was managing ads in-house, where he handled each sale by email, negotiating impressions and duration each month.
And regarding TwitPic, circa 2010: "TwitPic is generating $1.5 to $2 million in ad sales on an annual basis, with 70% profit margins, says its founder Noah Everett"
I don't think it's a big mystery. Bandwidth and ad revenue scale together. Sometimes the image will be embedded, hot linked or the request is otherwise not monetizable, but you can assume that those are a fixed fraction. Every image clicked on otherwise will generate some ad revenue which is multiples of the bandwidth cost of serving it.
Anecdotal and I can't substantiate any of this. About 5 years ago my old boss's wife worked for imgur and it did not sound great. They had constant churn. She was an upper manager of some sort and even she left after a short time. From what I understood, the company was not profitable and like many other tech companies relied heavily on investor.
I seriously doubt their community can sustain the costs of the service. In fact, the quality of imgur's service has declined in an effort to make profit. For instance, all images are compressed now. That used to not be true.
Most platforms you are using today cannot survive without ad's, because their business model is not one that can make a profit without a monopoly first.
You can shop around for bandwidth even if you're a small shop. I run https://filepost.io. It lets you share large files and images. It is profitable with ads alone.
I think there's a cost to taking money from thousands of people vs taking the money from an investor or advertiser.
First off there is tax compliance, if you want to be global it will cost a lot for accountants and lawyers that understand how this should work "anywhere" in the world.
Second, I know some people that will just cancel credit cards because they don't want to make the next recurring payment for a service. Coming after these people is not worth the effort but hurts the bottom line.
Third, you need to hire employees to look after customer accounts and billing if there are any questions.
I think there's other reasons and I know payment processors like Stripe and Square are attempting to make this seamless, but I'm guessing a single source of funding is still desirable.
Bandwidth is pretty cheap if you look beyond cloud. There are providers that offer magnitudes cheaper bandwidth than e.g. AWS but you have to set servers yourself.
A couple of friends of mine are the co-founders of one of the big gif sharing sites. I've heard some pretty interesting, and very funny, stories about the sticker shock on S3 as they grew. But it sounds like Amazon has been fairly flexible and provided some decent leeway with respect to giving grace periods as investment rounds closed.
Imgur for a while had a hugely active Imgur base AFAIK. Folks who just went on Imgur, did things on Imgur, and added to Imgur. That was a meta layer on top of Reddit. The issue was most of those people wouldn’t pay for Imgur storage, and didn’t view Imgur ads
Their community now though not the size of reddit would be comparable to something like 9gag or ifunny, arguably larger. It's become it's own thing separate from reddit now.
Interesting company. It was created in 2018 [1], and the CEO is Michael Heyward, who was a co-founder of Whisper. Some interesting shuffling happened with Whisper [2] and it's now owned by MediaLab. Since then they have acquired a number of other properties, the general idea seems to buy declining brands for cheap and extract as much value as possible on mobile. [3] There is no public information on their funding.
The whisper founders threatened to default on the debt they raised from SVB, then used inside money to buy it at cents on the dollar. because debt is senior to equity, they then wiped out the equity raised and kicked sequoia, shasta, and lightspeed off the board. then raised PE to fund a series of purchases of apps such as kik, and a lot of android apps with churned users with always-on location permissions turned on. They then used that data to build a small ad network.
Hm. My bet would be that you can now count the number of years until imgur links go dead on one hand.
This prompted me to check whether there were any backup efforts already, and how much data that would involve. Indeed, archiveteam has some good info: https://wiki.archiveteam.org/index.php/Imgur
> Imgur serves a massive amount of traffic. In 2012 alone, 42 petabytes of data were transferred. Fortunately, the amount of images uploaded is much less, albeit still a lot. In 2012, around 300,000,000 images were uploaded; assuming an average size of 120KB, that's 36TB in one year. As of 2014, there were 650 million images with 1.5 million being added each day according to one source. An analysis in 2015 based on extrapolation from a sample of random image IDs estimated about 2 billion images with a total raw full-resolution image size of 376 TiB.
Also makes me think about whether/how much I currently link to imgur in various places on the internet, and whether there's anything that I should prepare to replace. Do people have suggestions how to best approach this?
I would change any links you have pointing to Imgur. But as for storing the contents, wasn’t it just a site for memes? I can’t recall a single time over many years seeing anything worth preserving that wasn’t essentially throwaway content.
Medialab's other things include like, Genius (ok, fair enough, sustains itself / useful/ well-used I'm assuming)....and Kik? The teen messaging app from like 2010 that no one uses anymore? hm
Had to look a bit harder to even find their website (https://www.medialab.la/) - 'a holding company of consumer internet brands' heh, sheesh, yeah that's not sketchy.
>Had to look a bit harder to even find their website (https://www.medialab.la/) - 'a holding company of consumer internet brands' heh, sheesh, yeah that's not sketchy.
I find it curious that there's no page about who owns/runs MediaLab. Not even a single blurb about their executives/management!
MediaLab probably got Kik at a pretty big discount. There were child grooming issues, and at one point they did an ICO and subsequently got fined by the SEC.
They were also indirectly responsible for the whole leftpad disaster lol.
Hey, before you judge them, note that their stated goal is: "to enrich and empower consumers in their everyday lives...through expansion and acquisitions."
All I can think of is that silicon valley tech disrupt bit. "We're making the world a better place...through paxos algorithms for consensus protocols."
Kik's the website that had a serious child porn and child sexual solicitation problem. I think they've tried to do something about that in the last couple of years but from a quick Google search it's not clear it's really worked.
The fact that Imgur doesn't care to link to Medialab in their statement makes it even more sketchy.
Normal procedure seems to be that each company links to the other companys statement on the deal.
Also, are we sure they're not "joining Medialab", most Silicon Vally type companies always state that their joining some other company. Not Imgur, nope straight up acquired, which is at least honest.
It literally began on reddit. I remember reading the thread. The founder (of imgur) was sick of all the bullshit that other hosting sites did. Like not just serving the image. But instead forcing logins, and landing pages etc.
I remember the writing was on the wall when someone said, making fun of "imgurians" as people who thought of imgur as "a site to go to" and not just an image host for reddit. It keeps getting more and more user hostile with dark patterns etc. The other day I tried to just go to my page of image uploads on mobile and flat out could not. The site would not let me even though I know the exact url.
It was sad, if inevitable to watch imgur become the exact same garbage site it was trying to replace.
My favorite part is that they added 'social' stuff to imgur uploads, so your images (probably) have a separate set of terrible comments you're not even aware of.
Interesting, I hadn't heard of MediaLab until just a few days ago when I listened to a Darknet Diaries episode[1] about Kik and some "content problems" that MediaLab are leaving unresolved.
That exactly the first thought that came to my mind as well. RIP Imgur? It doesn't seem like medialab is anything more than the 'internet brand' version of a patent troll.
To buy old, dilapidated tech/media brands that no longer have any ability to get pay out investors (who are happy to sell on the cheap for a write-off), but still get some level of traffic. Bundle all the traffic together to sell ads across a network of sites with the hopes of profiting.
It’s a strategy as old as time. Sometimes it works (IAC, is arguably a good example of a company who has bought or funded companies at various stages of distress/hype (and incubated some that are very successful in their own right, like Match Group) and managed to get goodish CPMs across the sites they bundle together), most of the time it doesn’t. But the goal is to acquire the brand/traffic, cut costs to the bone, and attempt to profit off the traffic by selling ads or user data or whatever. It’s a rollup play and the goal is definitely not to invest back into the companies themselves any more than they need to run.
Based on this episode of Darknet Diaries: https://darknetdiaries.com/episode/93/
It sounds like they buy up dead/dying online properties, fire basically everyone, put the service on life support to keep it barely functioning, milk all the money they can from the remaining users as the service goes to shit, buy something else.
As a side note I find it amusing how the HN community simultaneously obsesses over startups, equity, funding rounds, etc but gets grumpy when a company actually does sell. The cognitive dissonance is sublime.
HN contains enough people of different vintage and background that it would be rather more surprising if there was any subject that we all agreed on. This has nothing to do with cognitive dissonance, which is something unique to an individual, at best you could conclude that HN is able to cater to people on opposing sides of some spectra without turning into a hate fest.
It depends on when they sell and who too. If you create a neat startup and sell for a lot to a respectable company then it’s praised but if you sell to a sketchy company (like this) long after your prime it’s looked down on
Honestly, this is probably the best outcome they could hope for. I suspect their growth has stagnated and are losing mindshare in the meme economy to Reddit and Discord. Imgur was started in a very different world from today and they didn't evolve enough.
Regardless, I'm grateful to them. Imgur will always have a soft spot in my heart.
This is a tough one to make sense of - are they just getting killed by reddit on one side and tiktok on the other and cashing out? Anyone have any insight? (also anyone know the purchase price? just for fun)
They stopped being just an image host and attempted to branch out. Except the content creators just post the garbage to reddit and tiktok directly because the reach is much greater than linking to imgur from the various platforms.
I can't share the love for Imgur: for some reason, all imgur posts, including this one, are never displayed on my mobile Firefox. Just blank screen, and that's it.
(the only addon I have is uBlock origin, and I'm too lazy to try turning it off for some random images)
Imgur was a wonderful idea, but I think they forgot to have a business plan. Imgur is absolutely terrible these days.
The Imgur community is almost completely toxic. Imgur apparently care about my privacy, but still want to share information with 1200 different "partners". It's also the most effective way of draining the battery of any device you use. Even the new M1 MacBooks will burn through battery like there's no tomorrow if you load the Imgur website in Safari, or worse any other browser.
Imgur does this weird thing on mobile where it will always redirect you to some page where it can then nag you to download their app with grayouts, big buttons, and then a content feed they hope you scroll down on.
It also downloads like 6 megabytes worth of local content. Doesn't matter if you are going to the imgur page of the image, or literally the URI to the image file itself.
They should have sold to Reddit when that option was on the table. The founders didn’t want to because they thought they had options beyond Reddit, but that was never really true.
Congrats on any exit, but this one has to be a letdown and I’m sure it didn’t work out for any of the non-founders with options that are now assuredly worthless, but congrats on an exit nonetheless.
Jeez, I've uploaded hundreds of images over the years to embed directly in forum posts.
As to migrating... I know you can download all the pictures in your account. But is there any way to include the corresponding top (or most recent) referrer so you know the places you need to go to update URL's?
I've been doing stuff on neocities.org lately. It reminds me what I love about making the internet.
I pay the monthly $5 fee for 50gb, and I have no complaints yet. And if I ever have a product idea -- their website is open source, so I can just fork their project and make my own business.
Hosting companies selling 3 years for $150 of traditional PHP shared hosting are still around. I love how skills I learned 15 years ago still work on these and it feels closer to the older web. Probably can run Perl on them! Also a PHP file on one of these is close to “serverless” - it’s a lot simpler doesn’t change its UI and API every 5 minutes like Azure
imgur has long been a political manipulation machine.
I'll bet after this sell it will only get worse.
ps. Have you noticed how 9 gag shows you violence or racism every day in one of the top 5 posts. As tought that "happy site" is trying to make you angry...
Nothing good ever lasts. Well, then... time to archive the links for future find-and-replace, and to offload everything I have there (luckily, not much, I learned my lesson on imageshack.us once upon a yesteryear).
Damn. Imgur just became amazing in the last month.
They rolled out a feature where you can filter out political posts, and it's become the only place I can go to just enjoy some mindless scrolling.
There's still a ton of political posters who never tag, but you can mute them. And then there's the "look how dumb those people are" circle jerks, that aren't actually political. But all in all, I have a pretty decent quality to circle jerk ratio.
Imgur sort of claims to be organic and user driven but that just seems a stretch.
Before the 2016 election it was full of Pro-trump meme content. Now there is absolutely none and it's full of orthodox Democrat boosting meme content with any Republican mention advancing the idea that the whole party and all its supporters are completely beyond redemption being in league with Satan himself.
No way that's not curated, for mine and I think it will backfire.
I have never seen a service decline so quickly from "simple and actually pretty useful" to "bloated, slow mess" as Imgur. I don't see that trend reversing for them. I suspect much of the slowness is because I live in the ass end of the world (NZ), but that's a problem that can be solved with money.... money they likely don't want to spend.
TL;DR - we've been doing this for 12 years and we're tired and want to do something else. These guys gave us enough money to do that.
Interesting that there are at least three 'Medialab' brands, one is the management platform for healthcare, one is a department at MIT, and then there is Medialab the holding company (https://www.medialab.la/) which bought Genius (YC S11) too.
I may be too cynical because I'm guessing they are going to give it the 'Sourceforge' treatment.
> Interesting that there are at least three 'Medialab' brands, one is the management platform for healthcare, one is a department at MIT, and then there is Medialab the holding company
This really confused me. The logos of the management platform and MIT are practically the same as well.
Imgur is currently almost unusable, for a product so bad maybe this is a good thing. If it isn’t, I would be shocked if they’re still in business in a year.
ChrisArchitect|4 years ago
BiteCode_dev|4 years ago
Regularly, on imgur, you see a pic in interest for a celebrity, a rich person, a movie. It looks organic, but if you look closely, there are plenty of weird things about it. Then it disappears as suddenly as it arrived.
I believe that they sell the front page to PR firms that need to promote something in a way the people think themself came up with the hype.
It's probably the same for a lot of communities with a strong influence on trends, like popular sub reddits or hacker news.
There is no better ads than the one you don't see. There is no better slogan than the one you repeat to your friends as a catchphrase. And there is no better propaganda than the one based on ideas you thought you had by yourself.
stavros|4 years ago
mkr-hn|4 years ago
The domain is there, but it just says "ImageHost.org is closed" with a Google Analytics tag.
adventured|4 years ago
Image hosting is relatively cheap, so you can have good margins if you can get a lot of use and fill the ad inventory. The way you do it, is by running as thin of an operation as possible.
When the first wave of one-click image hosts were popping up back in 2004-2005 roughly, I noticed one called ImageVenue. The founder, Vlad, was out of Eastern Europe somewhere. I emailed him and bought advertising, the price was right and he had a lot of impressions to fill. Back then he was just buying tons of $40/month dedicated servers from one specific host, using a img7.imagevenue.com scheme for each machine, and filling up the boxes. You can still use ImageVenue.com 17 years later, even though the traffic for the service has never been what it was during the early peak years (tons of image hosting competition swamped the market). I had a running dialogue with Vlad across about a year, he also mentioned in discussing Ajax (early popularity days for Ajax) use at the time, that he wasn't familiar with it and was "only really good with C++ and PHP". So I assume some of it was built in PHP. He was managing ads in-house, where he handled each sale by email, negotiating impressions and duration each month.
And regarding TwitPic, circa 2010: "TwitPic is generating $1.5 to $2 million in ad sales on an annual basis, with 70% profit margins, says its founder Noah Everett"
https://mixergy.com/interviews/twitpic-noah-everett/
ma2rten|4 years ago
dh4h45b4|4 years ago
I seriously doubt their community can sustain the costs of the service. In fact, the quality of imgur's service has declined in an effort to make profit. For instance, all images are compressed now. That used to not be true.
Most platforms you are using today cannot survive without ad's, because their business model is not one that can make a profit without a monopoly first.
dapatil|4 years ago
tppiotrowski|4 years ago
First off there is tax compliance, if you want to be global it will cost a lot for accountants and lawyers that understand how this should work "anywhere" in the world.
Second, I know some people that will just cancel credit cards because they don't want to make the next recurring payment for a service. Coming after these people is not worth the effort but hurts the bottom line.
Third, you need to hire employees to look after customer accounts and billing if there are any questions.
I think there's other reasons and I know payment processors like Stripe and Square are attempting to make this seamless, but I'm guessing a single source of funding is still desirable.
intricatedetail|4 years ago
cknoxrun|4 years ago
vrc|4 years ago
michaelbrave|4 years ago
pyuser583|4 years ago
tyrfing|4 years ago
1. https://businesssearch.sos.ca.gov/CBS/SearchResults?SearchTy...
2. https://www.latimes.com/business/technology/la-fi-tn-whisper...
3. https://www.assemblyexchange.com/about-us - their job ads feature this ad network prominently.
eryu|4 years ago
lxm|4 years ago
MauranKilom|4 years ago
This prompted me to check whether there were any backup efforts already, and how much data that would involve. Indeed, archiveteam has some good info: https://wiki.archiveteam.org/index.php/Imgur
> Imgur serves a massive amount of traffic. In 2012 alone, 42 petabytes of data were transferred. Fortunately, the amount of images uploaded is much less, albeit still a lot. In 2012, around 300,000,000 images were uploaded; assuming an average size of 120KB, that's 36TB in one year. As of 2014, there were 650 million images with 1.5 million being added each day according to one source. An analysis in 2015 based on extrapolation from a sample of random image IDs estimated about 2 billion images with a total raw full-resolution image size of 376 TiB.
Also makes me think about whether/how much I currently link to imgur in various places on the internet, and whether there's anything that I should prepare to replace. Do people have suggestions how to best approach this?
Aeolun|4 years ago
That’s not that bad.
catillac|4 years ago
gremloni|4 years ago
ornornor|4 years ago
ChrisArchitect|4 years ago
Had to look a bit harder to even find their website (https://www.medialab.la/) - 'a holding company of consumer internet brands' heh, sheesh, yeah that's not sketchy.
Jerry2|4 years ago
I find it curious that there's no page about who owns/runs MediaLab. Not even a single blurb about their executives/management!
kyle-rb|4 years ago
They were also indirectly responsible for the whole leftpad disaster lol.
jdorfman|4 years ago
I use to think the same thing, until I listened to this episode of Darknet Diaries:
https://darknetdiaries.com/episode/93/
maccolgan|4 years ago
It's not "none uses anymore" anymore, it's widely used for nefarious and degenerate sexual solicitation and shit like that.
teawrecks|4 years ago
All I can think of is that silicon valley tech disrupt bit. "We're making the world a better place...through paxos algorithms for consensus protocols."
ChrisArchitect|4 years ago
Edit: Sorry missed that was news from the 16th:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28550527
NelsonMinar|4 years ago
mrweasel|4 years ago
Normal procedure seems to be that each company links to the other companys statement on the deal.
Also, are we sure they're not "joining Medialab", most Silicon Vally type companies always state that their joining some other company. Not Imgur, nope straight up acquired, which is at least honest.
EasyTiger_|4 years ago
NaturalPhallacy|4 years ago
I remember the writing was on the wall when someone said, making fun of "imgurians" as people who thought of imgur as "a site to go to" and not just an image host for reddit. It keeps getting more and more user hostile with dark patterns etc. The other day I tried to just go to my page of image uploads on mobile and flat out could not. The site would not let me even though I know the exact url.
It was sad, if inevitable to watch imgur become the exact same garbage site it was trying to replace.
Time to download my stuff I guess.
judge2020|4 years ago
https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/y81ju/i_created_imgur...
https://imgurinc.com/about?forcedesktop=1#huge-impact-little...
pram|4 years ago
slig|4 years ago
BurningFrog|4 years ago
Vinnl|4 years ago
Edit: Looks like it was in the original FAQ.
> Can I advertise on imgur?
> Hell no! This is a free site (as in beer) and there will never be any ads on it unless I end up selling out for a million dollars.
https://web.archive.org/web/20090226191747/https://imgur.com...
didntknowya|4 years ago
people move on that's just life. congrats to the imgur team and good luck for their next adventures.
edgyquant|4 years ago
Aeolun|4 years ago
paxys|4 years ago
Havoc|4 years ago
gjs278|4 years ago
[deleted]
WORMS_EAT_WORMS|4 years ago
[deleted]
jamescun|4 years ago
[1] https://darknetdiaries.com/episode/93/
Belphemur|4 years ago
It doesn't bode well for Imgur future. They don't care about their acquisition. It's to wonder why are they doing it in the first place.
The company doesn't have any public information either. All I can find is a LONG list of job openings: https://jobs.lever.co/medialab
Weird list if they are just "investors".
oneplane|4 years ago
darkwizard42|4 years ago
Big spree of acquisitions! Anyone have any idea the goal?
filmgirlcw|4 years ago
It’s a strategy as old as time. Sometimes it works (IAC, is arguably a good example of a company who has bought or funded companies at various stages of distress/hype (and incubated some that are very successful in their own right, like Match Group) and managed to get goodish CPMs across the sites they bundle together), most of the time it doesn’t. But the goal is to acquire the brand/traffic, cut costs to the bone, and attempt to profit off the traffic by selling ads or user data or whatever. It’s a rollup play and the goal is definitely not to invest back into the companies themselves any more than they need to run.
exogeny|4 years ago
taurath|4 years ago
jccalhoun|4 years ago
unknown|4 years ago
[deleted]
jacquesm|4 years ago
reilly3000|4 years ago
jacquesm|4 years ago
corobo|4 years ago
Different people respond to different things
edgyquant|4 years ago
NaturalPhallacy|4 years ago
CD would be us being uncomfortable with the conflict and possibly resolving it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_dissonance
srjek|4 years ago
soylentgraham|4 years ago
bubblehack3r|4 years ago
https://www.distractify.com/p/what-happened-to-kik
Edit: fixed spelling mistake
bozhark|4 years ago
madrox|4 years ago
Honestly, this is probably the best outcome they could hope for. I suspect their growth has stagnated and are losing mindshare in the meme economy to Reddit and Discord. Imgur was started in a very different world from today and they didn't evolve enough.
Regardless, I'm grateful to them. Imgur will always have a soft spot in my heart.
vitalychernobyl|4 years ago
sieabah|4 years ago
didntknowya|4 years ago
mrkramer|4 years ago
[0] https://minimaxir.com/2017/06/imgur-decline/
Andrew_nenakhov|4 years ago
(the only addon I have is uBlock origin, and I'm too lazy to try turning it off for some random images)
mrweasel|4 years ago
The Imgur community is almost completely toxic. Imgur apparently care about my privacy, but still want to share information with 1200 different "partners". It's also the most effective way of draining the battery of any device you use. Even the new M1 MacBooks will burn through battery like there's no tomorrow if you load the Imgur website in Safari, or worse any other browser.
It's not a great site and haven't been for years.
BitwiseFool|4 years ago
It also downloads like 6 megabytes worth of local content. Doesn't matter if you are going to the imgur page of the image, or literally the URI to the image file itself.
andrefuchs|4 years ago
https://darknetdiaries.com/episode/93/
NJL3000|4 years ago
efnx|4 years ago
DarknessFalls|4 years ago
It's all user-submitted content. One was either a link or a blurb of text, the other was imagery.
JohnJamesRambo|4 years ago
sergiotapia|4 years ago
Most people who use imgur just hotlink - what's the incentive for a company to buy or start a new imgur?
corobo|4 years ago
Then it works and you need to pay the bills
10 years later you sell it and some new guy makes one
rastafang|4 years ago
filmgirlcw|4 years ago
Congrats on any exit, but this one has to be a letdown and I’m sure it didn’t work out for any of the non-founders with options that are now assuredly worthless, but congrats on an exit nonetheless.
rkagerer|4 years ago
As to migrating... I know you can download all the pictures in your account. But is there any way to include the corresponding top (or most recent) referrer so you know the places you need to go to update URL's?
lindseymysse|4 years ago
I pay the monthly $5 fee for 50gb, and I have no complaints yet. And if I ever have a product idea -- their website is open source, so I can just fork their project and make my own business.
quickthrower2|4 years ago
anonymous344|4 years ago
ps. Have you noticed how 9 gag shows you violence or racism every day in one of the top 5 posts. As tought that "happy site" is trying to make you angry...
missedthecue|4 years ago
chptung|4 years ago
Traster|4 years ago
BugWatch|4 years ago
paxys|4 years ago
> medialab is a holding company of consumer internet brands.
seph-reed|4 years ago
They rolled out a feature where you can filter out political posts, and it's become the only place I can go to just enjoy some mindless scrolling.
There's still a ton of political posters who never tag, but you can mute them. And then there's the "look how dumb those people are" circle jerks, that aren't actually political. But all in all, I have a pretty decent quality to circle jerk ratio.
rastafang|4 years ago
not really scalable
harry8|4 years ago
Before the 2016 election it was full of Pro-trump meme content. Now there is absolutely none and it's full of orthodox Democrat boosting meme content with any Republican mention advancing the idea that the whole party and all its supporters are completely beyond redemption being in league with Satan himself.
No way that's not curated, for mine and I think it will backfire.
solarkraft|4 years ago
Any suggestions for alternative no bullshit image hosting services?
stavros|4 years ago
mpd|4 years ago
bluedino|4 years ago
mdoms|4 years ago
seattle_spring|4 years ago
Reddit did a pretty good job of going from simple and relatively lightweight to bloated and unusable in a very short timeframe.
ChuckMcM|4 years ago
Interesting that there are at least three 'Medialab' brands, one is the management platform for healthcare, one is a department at MIT, and then there is Medialab the holding company (https://www.medialab.la/) which bought Genius (YC S11) too.
I may be too cynical because I'm guessing they are going to give it the 'Sourceforge' treatment.
nixpulvis|4 years ago
This really confused me. The logos of the management platform and MIT are practically the same as well.
rkagerer|4 years ago
I just sent one asking them to never change it.
[1] https://www.medialab.la/contact-us
gsich|4 years ago
l-albertovich|4 years ago
Sarcasm aside, it'd be cool if they got their shit together.
peanut_worm|4 years ago
c3534l|4 years ago
balozi|4 years ago
unknown|4 years ago
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1B05H1N|4 years ago
rastafang|4 years ago
mackal|4 years ago
just-tom|4 years ago
calltrak|4 years ago
rastafang|4 years ago
jdlyga|4 years ago
beervirus|4 years ago