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.
I'm sure there's good reasons for this. but I'd be curious for details.
I wonder if Reddit would be what it is today without imgur. I started using Reddit shortly before imgur launched, and I can still remember the day that it went live. It was by far the best image uploading experience I'd ever had, and I'd used most (maybe every) major uploader that came before them, between 1995 and 2009.
> I wonder if Reddit would be what it is today without imgur.
It would probably be different, but not worse or better. I was there when Imgur launched, and at the time we thanked Imgur for dealing with the crap of hosting images (checking for child porn, dealing with DMCA notices and other copyright and privacy issues, etc). Had they not existed, reddit would have just done that ourselves.
Eventually reddit did do that themselves, but by then Imgur had their own community. I suspect some of those people would still be on reddit.
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.
IIRC at the time imgur launched, all of the other free image sharing websites were pretty bad. Reddit itself didn't start allowing uploads until long after imgur.
Correct. ImageShack was the most widely used host on reddit and had recently disabled hotlinking (after nearly a year of ad bloat on their main site) so user MrGrim on reddit created Imgur and announced it on Reddit 12 years ago:
Holy crap, I have not thought about imageshack for a decade. It was hot garbage: slow, ad ridden and if I recall correctly they would disable your hotlinked images if they used too much bandwidth. Imgur was something of a godsend at the time. Now it's commodity unfortunately.
I remember when ImageShack was the best of all the bad options. TinyPic and PhotoBucket were super slow, and I remember popular forums back then either didn’t support image uploads, or they were even slower to load than external hosts. So much internet history has been lost to “this image has exceeded its bandwidth limit” placeholders from PhotoBucket and TinyPic.
It was one specific date which imageshack decided to essentially ban all images being linked on Reddit. Imgur filled the void and grew via their own social.
IMO all the other free image sharing websites are still bad, i've yet to see anything that lets you -e.g.- make direct links to the images for use in Discord, Reddit, forums (phpbb), etc and not surround them with garbage and images tend to stay around for a long time unlike other places where they disappear after a while.
The only thing i found annoying with Imgur is the mobile site not allowing zooming for some reason (can be bypassed by loading the desktop version but it is still an annoyance).
Not sure if this will still be the case going forward though. I used to like Minus since they allowed all that stuff plus had unlimited GIF sizes and didn't reencode PNGs to JPGs (not sure if Imgur does that anymore) but after Minus was sold it went to hell and then disappeared completely.
> They began on Reddit because Reddit was incapable of handling image uploads.
I'd argue they largely still are incapable of handling image uploads. Their gallery system sucks and the redesign just makes it harder to even see what was posted.
It's not just a poor design. old.reddit.com currently has what ought to be considered a show-stopping functional bug: every gallery post (that is, every post with multiple images) has its URL replaced with the empty string, causing it to render as a purple link that goes nowhere. If you instead click the little "comments" link, the post loads as normal.
This has been reported to the admins dozens of times since it first started happening about 3 months ago, and so far the only response is "we're looking into it". I'm not sure which possibility is more damning: the idea that they're incapable of fixing such an obvious regression, or that they literally don't care because they're trying to irritate everybody enough to switch to the newer, uglier version of the site.
Interesting, I hadn't seen it reported on the new version before. I spend more time than I ought to browsing Reddit, and I literally haven't seen a single correctly-working gallery post on any subreddit in months.
No it doesn't. If you mean reddit.com/imgur, that's the ID from a random post in /r/Drugs. Reddit automatically expands the post ID to the original thread.
My dad worked in M&A for a long time and handled the sale of a plastic molding company where the owner was getting quite old and couldn't really run the business anymore. The company was extremely well established and had a very strong and loyal customer base and ran off a single manufacturing facility in a small town out in the boonies. The owner certainly wanted a fair value for the company but he also strongly desired that the plant be kept open and employees retain their positions. Adding this sort of a restriction on a company you're selling is possible - but it is hellishly expensive, generally you're considering adding some sort of third party oversight and auditing for all HR actions and business decisions. If you buy a company under these terms you can end up utterly destroying the company if supply chains shift - the local labour pool is unsustainable or a plethora of other reasons... And almost certainly this burden is mandatorily bundled with the company - so once you've rode the company value down a bit and are looking to get out all of the buyers will know how much of an impossible situation that company is in.
At the end of the day when you sell a company you are divorcing yourself from the future direction - you might be invited to stay on as an executive - and the new owners might listen to you... or they might not - that's entirely up to them. Any promises or commitments you've made as an executive are only as good as your word - and when you sell your company your word stops having any power (because you sold that power).
I would never shame someone who wanted to keep an ideal going from making an exit they personally need to make - always prioritize your health and happiness over any venture - but when you sell you're accepting the fact that at any moment the buyer may completely reverse the direction of the company.
> Any promises or commitments you've made as an executive are only as good as your word - and when you sell your company your word stops having any power (because you sold that power).
one option i don't see discussed a lot is selling to your employees (converting to a coop, full esop etc)
I think this mostly goes against the idea that the owner wanted to exit with significant value in most cases. Companies (even small ones) can easily accrue a lot of value just reinvesting earnings over a moderate amount of time which is likely going to be out of reach of an employee collective or other local funding source.
For the company I was talking about above it definitely didn't have a local or particularly regular customer base - they were well known as a market leader but the sort of thing you might buy every few years at most.
Seriously though, I remember MC before it was a kids game. It was already becoming one by the time Microsoft bought it, but since then almost every update has been gimmicks for kids. The world generation is still ridiculous (jungles next to arctics), the weather patterns are binary (hard rain, or nothing), and proximity chat is practically impossible.
They've made a lot of money off making it into a kids game, but I personally haven't been delighted by any updates since they took it over.
If it's any consolation, there are really good mods for proximity voice chat and jungles next to arctics is being fixed in the next major update.
I don’t quite agree that every update has been gimmicks for kids - I can’t really point to a “childish” new mechanic added. Maybe your perception of the game has changed?
Sounds like the attention of those properties' users is worth more in some other metric than the maintenance/improvements cost in engineer time. I wonder what.
Minecraft drives actual profits on consoles - you have to subscribe to play with your friends. Some of these consoles (XBox) are even directly owned by MS.
Github is a massive piece in the developer ecosystem. It drives adoption of other MS products that can integrate with it, and generates a lot of goodwill towards MS.
LinkedIn, eh, that's probably the weakest property. On the other hand, it's massive in the enterprise space - again lots of goodwill, this time from "suits", and maybe some cool metrics about hiring.
You don't need to sell out if you can create a service or product that people are willing to pay money for - even indirectly. Granted, this is certainly a difficult feat to pull on a free image hosting site.
