
How Imgur Became a Megacommunity - dsr12
https://www.fastcompany.com/3057682/startup-report/how-imgur-became-an-image-sharing-meme-generating-megacommunity
======
johansch
My beef with Imgur is that it was essentially announced as a non-spammy/crappy
no-nonsense image host compared to the alternatives of the day:

[https://web.archive.org/web/20090227183112/http://www.reddit...](https://web.archive.org/web/20090227183112/http://www.reddit.com/r/reddit.com/comments/7zlyd/my_gift_to_reddit_i_created_an_image_hosting/)?

In 2009 Imgur was clean, neat and fast. Everyone sane questioned (including in
that announcement thread) how that could possibly stay true in the long run.
The founder just kept saying "we'll try to solve it if it comes to that",
refusing to go into details or presenting anything resembling a plan.

Based on this "commitment" which I would say was either naive or not truthful,
the Reddit userbase propelled Imgur to its current position.

Today Imgur looks like this:

[https://i.imgsafe.org/102b850.png](https://i.imgsafe.org/102b850.png)

(I picked the top link from Reddit 3 minutes ago. Please excuse the Swedish
language ads - but I think you get the picture without being able to read the
language.)

~~~
cdr
If there's an image host as clean, neat, and fast as imgur I'm not aware of
it.

You don't have to interact with the "community" part of it ever if you don't
want to.

When using it to view images on reddit, RES loads images inline and you never
see imgur at all.

The only time I see the site is when uploading images, and that's extremely
slick and fast.

~~~
flashman
Imgur seems to selectively redirect direct links (i.imgur.com/image.jpg) to
the full site (imgur.com/image/) based on the referrer.

I think they originally only did this for direct images posted on Facebook etc
(to avoid pissing off the core Redditors who post all the content), but lately
pretty much all direct image links from my mobile Reddit client get redirected
to an image page.

~~~
TazeTSchnitzel
It might also be based on the HTTP Accept header, with which you can figure
out if a request is for an <img>.

This redirection reminds me of other, less clean image hosting services. :/

------
flashman
> It bans nudity, porn, and hate speech

Ha! Imgur is _awash_ with pornography. They could automatically remove a large
amount of nudity and porn by looking at the contents of /r/nsfw. As a second
gate, they could use Microsoft's image classification service, which has a
'racy' flag.

Imgur is lucky that there aren't powerful rightsholder bodies for images the
way there are for music and video. That's the only way the massive copyright
infringement happening there every day goes unchallenged. Sure, they have DMCA
safe harbor, but so did many other video and music startups who ended up
slapped with lawsuits.

~~~
Palomides
I understand that the community part bans those things; when you upload an
image, you choose whether or not to submit it to the imgur community thing

~~~
Kiro
How does that work exactly? I'm on Imgur daily and never heard of such a
thing. On the other hand I've never understood what "usersub" is either.

~~~
MatthaeusHarris
Browse "User Submitted" by "Newest First" and you'll see the raw firehose of
stuff people are submitting to the main gallery. If you're especially brave,
do this at work.

~~~
Kiro
Aren't all images on Imgur user submitted? Who else would upload stuff?

~~~
TheCartographer
Images from the front page of reddit are autopromoted to the front page of
imgur.

One of the reason I like imgur: it's Reddit without the Reddit UI or
redditors.

~~~
milkey_mouse
One of the reasons I like Reddit: It's Imgur without the Imgur UI or
"imgurians".

~~~
TheCartographer
Fair enough. If Reddit is what works for you then rock it. Regarding the imgur
community, I personally think they are a little too tryhard and silly, myself.

But I don't go there for the community. All I want are the best of the funny,
amusing and interesting images the Internet can generate, served up in a never
ending stream. After a long day of reading, coding, emailing, and everything
else, the last thing I want to do is navigate yet another wall of grey on
white text.

Imgur is pure brain candy in that sense. No thinking, no real discussion, no
need to look at comments or interact with the users. Just _flip_ awww, kitty
_flip_ hey boobs _flip_ neat!

------
CaptSpify
> At first, the service took off not because it did a lot, but because it did
> so little. "Nobody really wants to put images up on the Internet," he
> explains. "What you actually want to do is share it with somebody. So I
> stripped out everything that other image hosts even had, because when you
> just get to the point of sharing, what's really important is speed."

> "I had this insight—that ended up being wrong, by the way—which was, 'This
> content's so good, let's just have it stand on its own,'" he remembers.
> "'I'm not even going to put titles or descriptions or anything on this
> stuff.' Turns out that's actually a dumb idea, because people need context."

Whats funny to me, is that I stopped liking imgur when when added the
community/context stuff. I liked it when it was small and simple. It's gotten
so bloated that it's become a pain to use.

It seems like nobody can have a "community-less" image sharing site.

~~~
mrweasel
I really dislike the community part of Imgur as well, mostly because the
people seem weird and childish, but also because it fails to add any value.

Attempting to add context is a good idea, but Imgur fails at that. Images on
Imgur isn't tagged or titled right, which makes search completely useless. If
you see an image, and want to find it, even later that same day, you can
pretty much forget about it. The community part of Imgur might even make the
problem worse, because the users just stay within the confines of Imgur,
meaning they don't feel the need for tagging, good titles and search.

Take this example:
[http://imgur.com/gallery/X4R7y](http://imgur.com/gallery/X4R7y) the title is
"useful for arguments", except it's just a bunch of jumbled gif, there are no
useful tags, no discover-ability or search-ability.

The community part shows up, because regardless of the original intent, sites
do need to make money. There are no real way for sites like Imgur to make
money, other than attempting to sell ads. Having a community helps sell those
ads.

~~~
DanBC
> I really dislike the community part of Imgur as well, mostly because the
> people seem weird and childish, but also because it fails to add any value.

Like /r9k/ it had a great three months, and then everyone found it.

~~~
surge
This seems like the story of every great Internet site, ever.

It's great until the lowest common denominator finds it then it goes to crap.

Reddit is only spared because you can unsubscribe from default subreddit's and
find more niche sub-reddit's that attract a niche audience or subset of users
that are less likely to "sh#tpost" for lack of a better term. Not to say all
new users are bad or don't contribute anything new, but the noise to signal
ratio is way worse the more people pile on and start becoming an echo chamber.
I've even seen it a little with HN as its gained popularity, but thankfully
this site is so niche its not too bad.

But I kind of wish I could do that with other community sites and social
media. I know a lot of people loved twitter, or digg, or whatever _back in the
day_ before the celebrities, media, and extended relatives caught on.

~~~
CM30
I'm not sure this is necessarily an unavoidable fate for internet sites, even
communities. You can keep the signal to noise ratio decent if you've got an
active team of moderators, fairly heavy pruning of content that doesn't add
anything to the conversation and the willingness to say no, my site doesn't
offer 'freedom of speech'.

Unfortunately, most big sites seem to be built on the 'leave it as a complete
free for all with no moderation whatsoever' model, which immediately stops
working the minute the memberbase expands from early adopters to every Tom,
Dick and Harry. That's why Reddit, Twitter, etc have had so many problems.
They were built with the idea of 'anyone can say virtually anything' in mind,
then realised it would lead to massive amounts of trolling and personal
attacks and questionable content, then dug themselves an even deeper hole by
trying to moderate the site in woefully biased ways.

~~~
TazeTSchnitzel
Twitter isn't really a single community, it's many (self-selecting)
communities. This means that Twitter don't really need to moderate low-quality
content or what have you, but they do need to solve harassment.

------
dipnuggetron
How is that Ohanian et al (or whoever was running the Reddit ship around
Imgur's launch) weren't browbeaten by Conde Nast for letting another startup
parasitically use it as a host organism to sucessfully launch and scale? At
some point in the future Imgur could be more valuable than Reddit.

~~~
simonw
I get the impression that back then, nobody at Conde Nast really cared what
those "weird reddit guys" were doing. The team was mostly just struggling just
to keep the lights on.

~~~
moreisee
Yep, if I remember correctly, Imgur also started before the 'Digg Exodus', so
reddit wasn't the biggest kid on the block yet.

------
seanalltogether
I still remember how cautiously negative[1] I was toward the creator in his
initial unveiling on reddit many years ago. Contracting at photobucket and
seeing the state of media hosting at the time made me very pessimistic of the
sector. I'm happy they've grown as large as they have since that moment and
broken away from what other image hosting services were doing.

1\.
[https://www.reddit.com/r/reddit.com/comments/7zlyd/my_gift_t...](https://www.reddit.com/r/reddit.com/comments/7zlyd/my_gift_to_reddit_i_created_an_image_hosting/c07ujci)

~~~
freehunter
On the other hand, they seem to be going down the road of what other image
hosting sites have done in the past. Large, intrusive ads. Most recently, that
cat that pops up on mobile that covers the content with a large paw
encouraging you to swipe to see the next picture. Focusing on building a
community instead of focusing on image hosting. Building value-add stuff like
their meme generator while continuing to avoid the actual difficult problems.
Like having constant infrastructure issues that keeps their site inaccessible
for hours at a time more often than they should be.

I appreciate that it's difficult (costly) to do image hosting, and it's nice
that they accept hotlinking and other activities that produce no revenue for
them, but the Imgur that we have today is a far cry from the Imgur that was
promised seven years ago.

~~~
nalllar
> and it's nice that they accept hotlinking

They are cracking down on that, unfortunately. For example, FIMFiction users
can no longer embed imgur images:

[https://www.fimfiction.net/blog/595986/imgur-
problems](https://www.fimfiction.net/blog/595986/imgur-problems)

~~~
TazeTSchnitzel
Oh wow, their ToS actually prohibits hotlinking now? The ability to hotlink
was one reason it was so popular!

------
e40
My 15 yr old spends lots of time on imgur. He gets news from it, as well as
humor and gamer stuff, much like the previous generation got news from The
Daily Show, though the imgur news is very much more watered down than what one
would get from The Daily Show. He often has a warped sense of what's going on
in the world, but he often knows stuff before I do (because it hasn't
percolated up on HN or reddit).

