
Imgur is Covertly Redirecting Image Links on Facebook and Twitter - minimaxir
http://minimaxir.com/2014/02/moved-temporarily/
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rkalla
@judk's comment should be higher... it is the unfortunate cycle of ad-
supported startups.

imgur grew out of the garden that is reddit; it was suppose to replace all
those other crappy hosting services. It's been known for a while that directly
navigating to a i.com/direct-link.jpg link costs imgur because they get no ad
impressions from those loads.

While I think this is the eventual trend of _every_ imgur page load, they are
saving reddit for the last as that is the last community they can afford to
piss off.

I feel for them though... it is really hard to stomach how expensive bandwidth
and storage can get for a "free" media startup like this -- I am guessing they
are slowly shifting scope and "growing" though as they hire more people, like
every other startup in history... at some point they grow out of that sweet
spot they supported (easy/fast image hosting) and into a realm no one really
wanted or needed them (but makes them money).

Oh well. Every time a company does this, it leaves the door open for another
company to come up behind them and re-solve that problem in another
interesting way. It is the way of growth and change.

~~~
mik3y
Semi-OT, but: Considering how much reddit seems to depend on imgur and image
hosting in general, how long will it be until reddit handles the image hosting
themselves?

Sure it would add a ton of new costs and headaches (takedowns, etc), but don't
you have to have a plan for this if you're Yishan? Imgur hasn't exactly been
subtle about adding reddit-like features (comments, comment ranking,
categories, etc)..

~~~
rkalla
I've actually wondered this for years - why reddit let imgur take that lead
and run with it, but to some of the other replies I guess it does come down to
cost. Reddit doesn't have a big budget and until last year I think it was just
3 or 4 of them (now I still think it is < 10) -- the moment they get a huge
influx of money though, the moment they take over media hosting, cripple third
party mobile apps and start punching babies - it seems to be the way of the
startup world.

For what little (nothing?) it is worth, it upsets me that this pattern is
repeated over and over and over... for once I'd like to see a startup grow
organically over time, never forgetting their roots, not being worth $4
billion after a year of being in business and just acting like a good, solid,
mature company that grows into something valuable over a decade.

These overnight-billion-dollar dice rolls are getting exhausting and while
really addictive and interesting, they just suck the air out of the room.

~~~
danpat
Craigslist?

~~~
SomeCallMeTim
I thought of that, and to some degree, yes.

But they are always shooting down anyone who dares to use their data and
present it in a more useful manner.

In particular they're totally screwing up some areas and ignoring complaints.

The Denver/Boulder area of Colorado has multiple overlapping sites that cover
an area smaller than that of the Bay Area, which has one all-encompassing
site. The result is that it's really hard to figure out where to look for
listings -- or where to post listings.

What we need is combined area site like the Bay Area has, that lets you
restrict to certain sub-regions for some searches (apartments, say) and
broader regions for others (antiques?).

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thatthatis
I just can't get upset about this. Perhaps as the article suggests this is the
canary in the coal mine that portends the imminent downfall of imgur as a non
spammy image host. Perhaps. But I don't think so.

First of all, imgur needs to make money somehow. So far they've exercised
extreme restraint and made no short term or short sightef optimizations that
I'm aware of.

Second, what legitimate reasons could they have for this behavior?

* get people to re-share the images, as the destination page has share buttons

* ensure search engines follwing the links pick up the canonical page instead of the raw image page.

* get better analytics or tracking data by being able to run JavaScript. -- they are a free service that needs this data to sell ads, if you don't like being tracked, invest the minimal effort to install an anonymizer.

* it could be a workaround from something that fb/twitter is doing that inadvertently grabs the raw link when users intend to share the canonical page.

I'm sure there are a dozen other reasons, and right now we don't have enough
information to know why they are doing this.

Given their history of restraint, I'm willing to give them the benefit of the
doubt on this one.

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mmahemoff
I tried linking to a photo I'm hosting in a Pro account:
[https://twitter.com/mahemoff/status/431487389866139648](https://twitter.com/mahemoff/status/431487389866139648)

Even for a Pro account, the image redirects from Twitter. It doesn't redirect
me, but it redirects everyone else (I tested from Incognito mode). Which seems
not quite what I thought I was paying for.

Also as a paid user, if I click on anyone else's images, they still redirect
like they would for a guest/free user.

EDIT:

Thanks to Haywain for spotting it changes on 2nd load. Can be replicated:

* Open fresh incognito window

* Visit Twitter link and click on imgur

* It redirects

* Go back to Twitter window and click on imgur link

* No redirect - it links straight to the image

I verified this with a random imgur link too, so it seems there's no
difference between Pro and free.

~~~
Haywain
You may be interested: The first time I clicked the link, it redirected. All
subsequent clicks went directly to the image only.

(OSX, Firefox Nightly)

~~~
w1ntermute
Because the resource has been cached, and so a request was not even made. Try
clearing your cache and see what happens.

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ehutch79
I honestly don't see an issue. if you're sharing links to images on imgur,
you're denying them ad revenue and just leaching bandwidth. I'm all for
adblockers, but complaining you can't direct link images is kinda...

~~~
judk
Imgur was founded as a reddit-friendly image host. "The new site for reddit
images, written by a redditor. None of the slow ad-laden crap of imageshack!"

Now, it is slow ad-laden crap, to the point that I just hit Back button after
hitting a link and seeing the page frame load before the image.

It has been fascinating to watch the common startup pattern of "I am one of
us, making our life awesome" messaging covering a standard 2-year bait-and-
switch free product flip.

Imgur will be dumped as fast as all the image hosting sites it replaced on
reddit.

~~~
Grue3
>reddit-friendly

Exactly. Not Facebook-friendly. Not Twitter-friendly. Not Google-Plus-friendly
Those can host images themselves.

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skywhopper
This pattern is inevitable. How is Imgur going to survive if it just serves up
naked image links to all comers?

The best way around this situation is to develop ways for web users to have
their own hosting space for the images they wish to share. So long as we
depend on other companies to do it for us for free, this is the pattern we'll
keep seeing.

~~~
Kluny
I think they are doing that. Stackexchange has their own imgur subdomain, for
example. Here's a blog post about it - I've lost the exact url to the
subdomain.

[http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2010/08/new-image-upload-
suppo...](http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2010/08/new-image-upload-support/)

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tantalor
I think they do this because the "i" subdomain is meant for embedding (<img>
tag), not linking (<a> tag).

Facebook, Twitter, etc. don't embed the image (incorrect behavior), but Reddit
does (correct behavior).

~~~
dangrossman
Other than text self-posts, Reddit submission titles are all links to external
URLs. There's no special case for imgur. They're links, not embeds.

~~~
ihuman
Unless you use RES (Reddit Enhancement Suite)

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kevando
This could easily be because the redirected domain allows them to provide
og:image meta data specifically tailored for the sites.

~~~
minimaxir
I thought that at first too, but for some reason, the Open Graph and Twitter
cards don't render on their respective services. (although the meta
information is present, which makes it weird. I believe Facebook/Twitter can
still get meta info through redirects.)

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stopcodon
I noticed when I uploaded an image a few days ago, the "direct link to image"
field was missing entirely. I figured it was meant to curb direct hotlinking.

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ahoge
> _Error Code 302_

It's a status code. 3XX is redirection.

4XX is client error and 5XX is server error.

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rnnr
Look at you all the drama queens.

Hotlinking makes sense if you intend embedding inline an image to your
site/forum/blog. Imgur still offers you this feature.

There is no (obvious) reason doing that when you are sharing a link to the
image. Facebook/twitter dont allow you embedding images from external servers,
imgur knows you are just linking to it, and redirects you to the image's page,
as a well behavioured netizen should have done by themselves.

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georgemcbay
An even worse issue for imgur recently (IMO) is the fact that the site is dog
slow unless you hit the img. subdomain.

I don't know if they are throttling it themselves or it has something to do
with the cloud traffic reprioritization people have been talking about lately,
but I've basically been avoiding clicking any imgur links on reddit because I
know they are going to load so slow that I'll just close the tab before the
image loads.

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kudu
There's a huge contradiction in this article. It gets close to saying that
this behavior is unethical, then makes a point of saying that it _won 't say_
that it is. Of course it is. When a website offers me a _direct link_ , I
expect a _direct link_. If they can't make money offering direct links, they
should stop offering them or find a new business model!

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pkamb
Direct links were also recently removed from the right sidebar after uploading
an image. The ".png" link used to be either the first or second link in this
list: [http://i.imgur.com/CrKe6pLl.png](http://i.imgur.com/CrKe6pLl.png)

Now it's missing from the convenience links, and the top option is to link to
the imgur page.

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Goladus
Facebook and twitter do their own image hosting. I think the slippery slope
people are wrong about the slippery slope. Maybe I'll eat crow someday but
until then if you want to share images on facebook upload them to facebook
like facebook wants you to do anyway.

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probablyfiction
Web dev here; just wanted to say that those are status codes in the header,
not error codes.

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calbear81
Any reason Reddit isn't exploring peer-to-peer image caching? Given how much
time folks stay on Reddit and the disproportionate amount of traffic going to
front page posts, when an image gets to the top, there should be tons of user
connections open to allow for peer-based caching.

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sli
I tried this out using the Twitter search link provided in the article and was
not redirected a single time when clicking Imgur links in the search results.
Either Imgur is only redirecting some folks or this was just some temporary
thing. I'm also not logged in to Imgur currently.

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ben0x539
Another case of user-hostile behavior enabled by browsers betraying what site
the user is on to third-party services. Down with referer headers~

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qqg3
Everybody seems to be ignoring the fact that there is a huge community ON
imgur alongside people using imgur with platforms like Facebook or Reddit.

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cordite
That's interesting.

I do not think it is particularly honest either, but they are much nicer about
it than places like funny junk when it comes to direct links.

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mahouse
Try linking to "img.imgur.com" instead.

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bhartzer
Another way of checking to see what's really going is to use something like
Live HTTP Headers in Chrome or Firefox.

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bobzimuta
Does Cloudfront support anything like this?

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izzydata
Not sure why today is the first day I'm hearing about imgur. Are they somehow
superior to dropbox for image linking? Do they have a desktop syncing
application with quick access to hotlinking url's from a context menu?

What is imgur's selling point?

~~~
infinita740
Imgur and Dropbox are for two totally different purposes. Typically you would
use imgur when you quickly want to share an image (no need for an account),
post images on reddit or on a forum (no limit on bandwidth and direct
linking).

