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 <i>pay them</i> 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?
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.<p>1. <a href="https://businesssearch.sos.ca.gov/CBS/SearchResults?SearchType=NUMBER&SearchCriteria=C4168042" rel="nofollow">https://businesssearch.sos.ca.gov/CBS/SearchResults?SearchTy...</a><p>2. <a href="https://www.latimes.com/business/technology/la-fi-tn-whisper-board-20170829-story.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.latimes.com/business/technology/la-fi-tn-whisper...</a><p>3. <a href="https://www.assemblyexchange.com/about-us" rel="nofollow">https://www.assemblyexchange.com/about-us</a> - their job ads feature this ad network prominently.
Hm. My bet would be that you can now count the number of years until imgur links go dead on one hand.<p>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: <a href="https://wiki.archiveteam.org/index.php/Imgur" rel="nofollow">https://wiki.archiveteam.org/index.php/Imgur</a><p>> Imgur serves a <i>massive</i> 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.<p>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?
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<p>Had to look a bit harder to even find their website (<a href="https://www.medialab.la/" rel="nofollow">https://www.medialab.la/</a>) - 'a holding company of consumer internet brands' heh, sheesh, yeah that's not sketchy.
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.<p>[1] <a href="https://darknetdiaries.com/episode/93/" rel="nofollow">https://darknetdiaries.com/episode/93/</a>
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.
<a href="https://blog.imgur.com/2021/09/27/celebrating-imgurs-next-chapter/" rel="nofollow">https://blog.imgur.com/2021/09/27/celebrating-imgurs-next-ch...</a> may be a better url. At least on mobile, the gallery link fails to load. Any scrolling then redirects and rewrites history to a random post.
Isn't this the company that aquired Kik and completely abandoned it? Pretty sure this is it. There goes Imagur...<p><a href="https://www.distractify.com/p/what-happened-to-kik" rel="nofollow">https://www.distractify.com/p/what-happened-to-kik</a><p>Edit: fixed spelling mistake
Congrats to Imgur on its exit, I suppose.<p>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.<p>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)
Imgur only exists because Reddit at the time didn't have native image host but since they introduced it Imgur is in decline[0].<p>[0] <a href="https://minimaxir.com/2017/06/imgur-decline/" rel="nofollow">https://minimaxir.com/2017/06/imgur-decline/</a>
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.<p>(the only addon I have is uBlock origin, and I'm too lazy to try turning it off for some random images)
There is a great DarknetDiaries episode about the dark side of Medialab's Kik-Messenger.<p><a href="https://darknetdiaries.com/episode/93/" rel="nofollow">https://darknetdiaries.com/episode/93/</a>
Imgur could have pivoted to becoming like Reddit faster than Reddit was able to pivot to incorporate its own image repo.<p>It's all user-submitted content. One was either a link or a blurb of text, the other was imagery.
An image hosting site seems like one of those applications that are easier than ever to build but impossible to monetize.<p>Most people who use imgur just hotlink - what's the incentive for a company to buy or start a new imgur?
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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.
imgur has long been a political manipulation machine.
I'll bet after this sell it will only get worse.<p>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).
<a href="https://www.medialab.la/" rel="nofollow">https://www.medialab.la/</a> for those wondering.<p>> medialab is a holding company of consumer internet brands.
Damn. Imgur just became amazing in the last month.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>No way that's not curated, for mine and I think it will backfire.
Oh no. Imgur was already close to being overloaded with ads. I have no doubt this will get much worse.<p>Any suggestions for alternative no bullshit image hosting services?
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.<p>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 (<a href="https://www.medialab.la/" rel="nofollow">https://www.medialab.la/</a>) which bought Genius (YC S11) too.<p>I may be too cynical because I'm guessing they are going to give it the 'Sourceforge' treatment.
<i>If you have any requests and ideas to continue improving Imgur, let them know here [1]</i>.<p>I just sent one asking them to never change it.<p>[1] <a href="https://www.medialab.la/contact-us" rel="nofollow">https://www.medialab.la/contact-us</a>
Huh, a few days ago I listened to the darknet diaries on kik, I guess imgur is about to become a child porn den...<p>Sarcasm aside, it'd be cool if they got their shit together.
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.