I thought the comments to this were well above average on the entertaining scale. Pretty embarrassing, though, that probably the majority of comments seemed to take it seriously, even reprimanding the creator for not being serious enough, not taking his Business seriously enough. It seems to create dissonance among many that such a thing even exists. People seem deeply confused it's not full speed ahead, like every other commercial site, trying to grab money from users. We on HN constantly complain that the internet was taken over by smooth, malevolent, lying mega-corporations, with 1GB ToS's and thousands of employees..and here's something completely different and people entitledly shit on it.
It's a joke, people! From HN's own Stavros. Or, who knows what it is. Something Stavros did for fun and uses himself. A thing. Can't things just be allowed to be what they are? It's like people can't tolerate the existence of unique things, and have to see them as just really bad versions of a known category of things. "This round thing is bad because I can't force it into this square hole." And I guess when someone posts something to HN it gets judged as if submitted by the author and designed, badly, for the person now reading it. Ugly font! Bad colours! Unprofessional tone! Bad marketing! etc. ..Wasn't the internet 100% like that in the good old days?
This is how I feel too, it was surprising (and educational) to see some commenters having trouble accepting that someone might have just made a thing for fun. I think it's the fact that you can buy it that trips them up.
I imagine Cards Against Humanity got a lot of the same comments.
This site is a brilliant joke because it plays to so many of the tropes that HN commenters claim to want: Paid service, no ads, cheap prices, CLI interface, Rust for safety, and a company attitude that clearly caters to the programmers who work on the site instead of the customer.
It’s like the culmination of everything HN commenters say they want out of a software company, but those who don’t get the joke absolutely hate it.
People are even complaining about the trivial $1/month or $5/year price point as being too expensive. That’s a great reminder that nearly every time someone claims “I would pay for an alternative service that isn’t ad-supported” is not actually true 95% of the time. People love free services too much.
A Man that steps aside from the World, and hath leisure to observe it without Interest or Design, thinks all Mankind as mad as they think him. – Halifax (1633-95)
I'm always serious when I make jokes. Your silly joke got way to much attention not to make it into a professional joke by adding additional puns to it.
The biggest discovery imho is that people accept your style as a refreshing alternative to the plastic people. We wish you were real. We all have a behavioral picture of an entrepreneur but now we see its all bullshit. Just do what you like and be yourself.
Maybe one should put a fixed position css door on the website with the word EXIT on it and have that nice promt to close the page if one clicks on it.
> Wasn't the internet 100% like that in the good old days?
Maybe I was too harsh and you are describing my comments, but I was reading on this very site image hosting is not a funny joke business, it's a serious endeavor that deals with content abuse and CSAM content infringements quite often. There's maybe truth to your statement, but once a piece of work's defense is its a joke, does it really shield you from the law? Would that work in court? I'm not sure where stavros resides.
> but I was reading on this very site image hosting is not a funny joke business, it's a serious endeavor that deals with content abuse and CSAM content infringements quite often.
one major difference: this is not free unlimited image hosting but paid limited hosting. That reduces "sustainable" abuse vectors quite a bit.
I honestly love this copy. It's fantastically refreshing! I wish I got to see it more often... This was my favourite bit:
> Listen, this is half service, half art project. I made it in two days because I needed one and Imgur is an embarrassing husk of its former self, and I had nothing better to do. If you're expecting professionalism, call Oracle and ask for a quote of Oracle Advanced Image Sharing for Hadoop or whatever crap they sell, IMGZ is awesome but what you see is what you get.
Well that's extremely odd, I will look into that right now.
EDIT: This is very odd, I'm not really doing any processing on the uploaded files, so it should definitely return the originals. I will have this fixed soon though.
EDIT2: Unfortunately, the saved image in the DB itself is corrupt, so you will need to reupload after I solve this.
EDIT3: Alright this should be fixed! Now I can start submitting animated GIFs there.
EDIT4: Ironically, now ONLY animated GIFs work, because 2am is when I do some of my best work. Stand by...
>Yes, it's a database. That's where you're meant to put DATA.
Most (all?) large-scale high-volume image storage architectures I'm aware of do not store billions of images as blobs in a database. Instead, they typically store the images as files. The database only holding metadata info and a pointer to the image filename location (or url if using AWS S3 or CDN).
E.g. Facebook is one of the largest MySQL sites (if not the largest) and they don't store photos directly in MySQL.
I understand that postgres is pretty decent at storing large binary data though?
I've been meaning to investigate trying storing images in postgres on a hobby web project where it could be convenient; I'd still want to make sure I was streaming bytes from postgres to the client, not loading the whole image into memory and only once fully loaded sending it to the client. Looking at the pg API's for my language/platform of choice, it looked at least plausible to do this with a BLOB.
> I understand that postgres is pretty decent at storing large binary data though?
Storing large files in PostgreSQL is possible, but I would advise against it.
PostgreSQL uses a technique called TOAST to store large objects. If you store something in a bytea column, it'll first be compressed (either deflate or a new algorithm that I forgot the name). Then it will be split into 8KB chunks (page size) and stored together with all the other data.
Since most image formats are already compressed, this just wastes a lot of CPU cycles.
Also, the way storage is allocated in PostgreSQL may bite you in the ass. By default, storage is not returned to the OS. If you delete all images, the data will stay on disk and marked as reusable. Only if you do a full rewrite of the table will the free space be made available again.
Also, backups will become a pain. The easiest way to backup PostgreSQL servers is to just do a pg_dump. It works great up to a few gigabytes of data. If you have images or other large objects in the database, then pg_dump will quickly become unfeasible and you will have to find another way to do backups. Not a deal breaker, but something you should be aware.
Also, for best performance, the database should be on fast storage (eg. NVME SSD), whereas the image data typically doesn't need fast storage.
## A Practical Example:
One project I work on is an image database with 50k images. The high resolution previews are around 20GB. The PostgreSQL database with all the metadata is around 20MB.
It takes 10 seconds to do a full backup of the database. Everytime I change something in the application, I first create a dump of the database (which is just a few MB compressed). Then I do my changes, and if I make a mistake I always have a backup that I could restore in 10 seconds.
If the images were stored in the PostgreSQL database, a full backup would take much longer and would require a fast internet connection. And it would be much harder to work with.
My recommendation: Use the filesystem for storing files.
I've never used PostgreSQLs large objects. You have to use this awkward API to use them, they aren't stored efficiently either, and as far as I can tell it's just a legacy feature that nobody has bothered to deprecate yet.
In my opinion the only neat thing about large objects is that you can edit files with a posix-like API in a database transaction, but I can't think of a scenario where that would actually be useful.
Postgres is indeed good at that. I know from experience.
If you want to commit ten things every second all week, don't transfer so much data in a single transaction that you hold any important locks for half a minute. And if you use replication, test while replicating.
If the blobs you store are small enough to not disturb your commit rate, then pg's drawbacks are IMO smaller than those of the alternatives, particularly if you want some sort of commit that returns when both image data and something else have been committed.
So you've stored images in the db in production and had it work out fine?
I don't want to commit ten things a second. It would be a pretty read-heavy write-light load. Sounds like that would avoid one path of riskiness at least.
Many people answer a question like this: "How good is postgres at storing big blobs, relative to small things?" Postgres is indeed worse at storing large things. However, I think the most interesting question is something along these lines: "What's best, storing everything in Postgres and accepting that inefficiency for the big blobs, or implementing transactions, replication and/or backup with a part of the data in Postgres and the big blobs elsewhere?"
I'm awfully fond of having working backups, and postgres' performance problems with the blobs haven't been big enough that I've really noticed.
Yeah, that hasn't changed. You can also use the pg_upgrade script instead of a full backup/restore, or use logical replication if you want to upgrade the db server with zero downtime, but upgrading PostgreSQL is still somewhat annoying.
I too do that, in a different context, and it's fine. Databases have problems with big items, but images aren't big in that sense nowadays.
The problems relate mostly to backups/copies/reloads, that kind of thing, and copying an image doesn't cause anything to hiccup. A transaction that transferred 1MB over a modem line was a problem, that could block other commits for a long time, on today's networks 1MB doesn't take long.
Binary data in databases is usually not a great idea, but tolerable in low amounts.
I can't imagine storing images in a database, you're probably better off with a document store.
Relational Databases (well, the ones that I know the internals of) tend to have soft limits on row sizes, in PostgreSQL this is 8kb (which is very small for an image); to overcome this limitation Postgres uses what they call a TOAST table, which forces compression by default, which absolutely crumbles on binary data.
But, if it works, I'm not complaining- and I'm very certain that other such sites have worse architectural flaws in the beginning- this one is pretty easy to overcome if it becomes an issue and can be alleviated with aggressive caching of CDNs/varnish to buy you time if there's immediate issues. :)
If you were to go with PostgreSQL, wouldn't you store this in a large object, which is effectively stored outside of the actual table row? So, if you can store enough rows of meta data AND you provision enough storage, why wouldn't the database be able to do this. I don't imagine you want to put a primary key on the actual image data column (not possible with large objects, since the column just contains an "oid"). I'm not arguing for storing images in the database, I've seen it done either way, and done it myself either way, but I believe that it's an ongoing source of heated debate between proponents and opponents. I.e. not settled out of hand.
Large objects are _mostly_ an access method, the underlying implementation is staggeringly similar to TOAST.
> The large object implementation breaks large objects up into “chunks” and stores the chunks in rows in the database. A B-tree index guarantees fast searches for the correct chunk number when doing random access reads and writes.
You might try Foreign Data Wrapping.
In which case I still wouldn't because the database is going to be spending more time in doing round trips, better my application server does that, there's usually more of them.
That sounds right. But even if it works great, it's gonna be the most expensive place to put your data. Those image blobs would be fine on spinning rust.
But yes, there's probably time for that optimization later, if the service takes off.
Hm, very odd that the type wasn't detected properly. The animated GIF issue is because of EXIF stripping ruining the image, though. I'm fixing that now.
He threw it together in 2 days according to what's written on the website.
It literally has no semblance of trying to be a long term long running replacement to imgur. Just a dead simple image upload service that works from the CLI.
I did throw it together in two days, two years ago! I don't know why this image failed, when I tried it it worked. Animated GIFs were failing because I don't use them so I'd never tested on them. It's fixed now, though.
And it’s only accessible for paying users for about a year, slightly more or less according to how much they pay and how much is uploaded by the rest of the internet…
It's a few bucks a year silly image hosting account. I mean, I'm a grumpy, cheap fucker, but even I would struggle to find fault.
- ed
in fact, to clarify - I have twice written to Stavros, and both times he's been upmost helpful. Proving what a liar he is and how he fails to live up to his marketing.
One time I made a joke on HN that feel flat, and he posted a sarcastic comment! He also bought an oscilloscope from me and made sure I marked the package correctly so it didn't get caught up in (corrupt) Greek customs, causing a tiny amount of extra work at my end!
Holy shit I LOVE the Labrador, it's the most useful thing I have. Guys, if you're into electronics at all, buy one right now (https://github.com/EspoTek/Labrador/), it's amazing and only $30.
Also I'd say I'm sorry about the comment but that would imply I've changed but I'm still a sarcastic asshole. I'm working on it though.
I didn't relaunch though, I just wrote a comment about it and someone posted it and now I have to fix my EXIF stripping breaking animated GIFs at 2 am :( Ah well, no better time than the present.
I see a lot of comments about the $5 a year quote. I see $12 on front page - I wonder if it's just changed in last hour or am I getting a Canadian special :-)
Tutanota. They’re a cooler company than Proton but due to the lack of a bright I can’t unconditionally recommend the service - you’re confined to the (web) app.
Those are some pretty terrible prices. You can share images (or anything else) publicly from Dropbox/Box/GDrive/OneDrive for a lot cheaper. Or just cut out the middleman and set up a S3 bucket for a few cents.
The quota is "whenever CloudFlare decides I've used too much of their caching", I think. Hetzner is pretty great about bandwidth, I think they'll let me use as much as will saturate the connection to the DC.
I was but I'd forgotten, thanks for reminding me! Also, Cloudflare now have a very nice image resizing product which I'd probably use if IMGZ didn't need to resize ten images per year.
I'm not sure they're ready for my kind of volume yet.
You'd think so, but have you ever tried to share a file from one of these services to a popular forum or subreddit?
They don't list their per file bandwidth quotas because they are incredibly low, suitable for cloud storage, not for file sharing, especially not mass sharing.
Yes! Definitely don’t upload any pictures of your young daughter taking a bath or of your own body if you are a teenager. Those are evil and hurt people.
The issue was never that iCloud was scanned, it was that your phone is scanning your photos and that the list was opaque- it's a whole other thing if it's your own device which is supposed to be _yours_ that is spying on you. Potentially for big brother.
Free plans: Dropbox 2GB, OneDrive 5GB, Box 10GB, GDrive 15GB. They all let you generate public read-only links which aren't connected back to your account.
I have multiple hosted web storage, google storage, paid-for dropbox etc accounts, as well as reddit and imgur accounts - and the one I use to share stupid images is this one.
This was posted here a couple of years back, I liked the pitch, i paid for it.
> Dropbox and GDrive both shut down the public links feature years ago
What? I routinely use those public read-only links on Dropbox to give [access to] a file to someone or e.g. take a presentation to another computer without logging in to anything, I did it just yesterday.
GP is talking about direct links - the kind you could curl/wget to get the file, or e.g. put in src attribute of img tag (if the link points to an image). Dropbox shut that down a long time ago.
> You are a guest here. You can use IMGZ, and it'll always be great, because I'm great
> It's simple, what do you want
No bullshit, you say?
I like tongue in cheek stuff, jokes and all, but that tone sounds more like “fuck you” than a solid, reliable business relationship with adequate respect where the customer is not the product.
Besides that: Props for so quickly capitalizing on the (probably still brewing) imgur controversy!
> I like tongue in cheek stuff, jokes and all, but that tone sounds more like “fuck you” than a solid, reliable business relationship with adequate respect where the customer is not the product.
Basically, it's a bit funny that people complain that it sounds more like a "fuck you" when that's the entire point, and the site is completely explicit about it. We don't trust services to not want our money, even when they're telling us they don't. We just think it's a ploy.
> Besides that: Props for so quickly capitalizing on the (probably still brewing) imgur controversy!
Thanks! I made the site and bam!, two years later, Imgur imploded and I made $12!
I think I've seen the "where do I put my image files?" in the database or not for about two decades now with no definitive answer. I can't believe someone hasn't come out with a custom database specifically for storing images.
The thing that scares me about doing any type of personal project for image sharing/hosting (especially with a free tier/trial) is that very quickly it will become a magnet for some very awful stuff. What are your plans for dealing with that?
CloudFlare has a thing where it automatically reports bad stuff to me and the authorities, and I turned it on, so hopefully all the abusers will be discouraged by that. Also I have their credit card info.
Personally I would want to know if my uploads were going through some scanning engine from one of the tier-1 Internet gatekeepers who I would have to trust to not keep/forward a copy.
The paid-only model makes the host a lot less attractive for this. The free trial accounts will likely become a problem at some point, but there's still a verified e-mail address, so the next step would be banning throwaway mail hosters, and/or limiting the lifetime of uploads by trial accounts.
* All prices paid per year but shown per month because if I get another person telling me that "$5 A MoNth Is toO ExPeNSiVe FoR 1 GB" I'm going to lose it. Small print may be too small to read. Service comes with no guarantee, not even guarantee of service. Do not email us for support you do not get any. Paying us money doesn't entitle you to anything except owning less money. Disclaimer may make less sense as you read on, this is not the disclaimer's fault and is by design.
It used to be $5/yr but everyone complained that $5/mo was too high, so I changed it to "$1/mo billed annually", which amazingly has solved the complaints without reducing subscriptions at all (they were already at zero).
I changed mine a while back[1], (I was Jaruzel), although I don't think dang would be that happy if we all started asking.
Stavros, now that I'm in your comment replies... can I hijack this comment branch to ask what payment provider you are using and what the integration process was like ?
---
[1] I did it during a peak of self-loathing, I kinda regret it now, but ho-hum.
Excuse me stavros, this is brilliant. I have no real intention of using the service but I got a subscription because this really cracked me up. I love every little bit of it. Great work!
Or maybe I will use it as I have an account now. We shall see.
Stavros. You need to detach a little bit, get a 10,000m view. You've got something, you can be successful. But your approach is "out of whack" and people aren't going to support you. Conform to influence.
actually, conform to influence doesn't mean that. It means, to influence a group you need to be part of the group. To be part of the group, you need to first conform to the group.
It's actually a very pithy phrase, because it's exactly the "message" of the product as art, reversed.
Stavros would prefer not to conform, and doesn't care if that means he doesn't influence.
Although... ironically he is probably one of the more influential HN posters. Now, profitable, I dunno, do you really mean "conform [in order] to profit", does "influence" just mean "exploit" [in the economic sense. mostly] now?
Can we conceive of someone who would rather not conform and in fact would rather not exploit?
Is it not ok to make a "little bit" (you can be wealthy beyond your wildest dreams from a small business) of money from a opinionated business (akin to a restauraunt, perhaps) rather than conform and become just one more ycombinator-esque startup in the hope you'll make even more money if you make it big.
Basically the issue I had with it is that they seem to make the site less and less usable as an image host. They used to have (or at least allow) a way to upload images from the command line, but mine stopped working at some point, I couldn't find the page with all my images, they started putting comments on stuff I posted, things like that.
It had turned into a social network when I just wanted a place to send a screenshot to a friend, which I was very dissatisfied about.
Is it free? Free image hosting always eventually shuts down or monetizes with redirects to an html page with your image and bunch of ads. Bandwidth isn't cheap enough for free image hosting to survive.
I used to be a subscriber (until my subscription lapsed, but I would have renewed if there was a reminder email!), I went for the cheapest plan. (also if you pay with bitcoin you get a fun message after subscribing)
I can do this myself for much cheaper by buying a used computer from eBay, waiting 3 weeks for it to ship with missing parts, trading my old bike for more RAM from Craiglist, setting up Arch on it, compiling my own drivers, writing a webserver and firewall from scratch, connecting it to the internet and then using it twice before my ISP cuts my service for breaking TOS by running hosting on a consumer plan. I could have even just gotten a DigitalOcean VPS for $5 a month and conned friends into paying my costs for me in return for creating them a username and password to a half-working FTP server where they can upload their images in sixteen easy steps.
I'm not sure that meets US legal standards for moderation of sexual images, particularly ones involving children. Of course the last thing the host of IMGZ wants is child porn. But it's going to happen anyway and preventing it is a major barrier to hosting images in this way.
Unfortunately, Stavros has some issues keeping his services up. I was a user of his https://historio.us long-time ago, a paying one, and he just killed the service and lost all my data. Some time later, he restarted the service and gave my username to somebody else. Don't put anything meaningful and valuable into his services!
Hello,
I'm afraid I couldn't find your backup file :/ It looks like your account may have been one of the older ones to be reclaimed, when we hadn't added the backup functionality yet. I'm sorry about that :/
Thanks,
Stavros
That's a bit of a liberal retelling. You had a free account, the system sends you one (or two, I forget) emails if your free account is inactive, and if you don't log in for a few months it deletes the data to make room for others.
There was a period where I didn't keep backups of the data on free accounts, but people complained, so I added that.
I think it's a bit unfair to expect me to keep account data around forever for free, even after notifications that the account is inactive and will be deleted. Also, wasn't this more than half a decade ago?
EDIT: Also, your account isn't even deleted, only the pages are, so your username should still be there, no?
EDIT2: Also also, paid users don't get deleted, so something must have happened there. Maybe your payment method failed when renewing, or you didn't have a paid account? What's the username?
EDIT3: I found the thread:
You: Why did all my bookmarks disappear from my account?
Me: We only delete the links of unpaid accounts, as they take up too much space. We do have a backup export of your links I can send you, though.
You: Can you please? I will upgrade to a paid account if you restore my links.
Me: Sure, but it will have to be tomorrow, as I'm not at the computer right now.
And then what you posted above.
So it wasn't a paid account, this was seven years ago, your username wasn't given to someone else, and I didn't kill the service or lose your data.
It seems like there's a dispute of fact, whether this person was paying you or not: you say "You had a free account," and they say they were a paying customer.
I don't think "half a decade ago" is a reasonable time horizon after which to consider accusations of outright fraud irrelevant. If this person is telling the truth, then not only did you defraud them a few years ago, but you're lying about it now; this seems like an important thing for potential users of your new service to know about you. (Presumably your character has not changed much in the last five years, whether it was good or bad before.) If you're telling the truth, they're lying, presumably in order to hurt you.
I found and posted the email thread where he admitted to not having a paid account. He also managed to get into his account fine (that's how he saw that the data wasn't there), so the stuff about the username isn't accurate either. I can look at payment records, but I've literally never had a single complaint of paid users' data being deleted by accident.
I don't think he wants to hurt me (who cares about me or my service anyway?), I just think he's misremembering stuff from seven years ago.
Publicly accusing you of fraud is at the very least malicious disregard for the truth if it's a false accusation. This is supposed to be Hacker News, not Character Assassination News. (That's Twitter.)
Never said it was fraud; it was a huge disrespect to my data, as if it was deliberately deleted and not data loss, it only worsens the situation - I did not get any warning; I did not get any offer to upgrade to keep my data! I will search for the payment. I could be wrong, my hundreds if not thousands of stored links, and hours were lost due to this disrespect. Look at the pricing page for this "new" service - it screams the same attitude!
You didn't say use the word "fraud," but the scenario you described—where Stavros accepted your money for a service and then chose not to provide it—would amount to him defrauding you.
From your perspective the difference may not be significant: your links are just as lost either way, and the money you might or might have not paid for the service is tiny compared to the time you had invested in creating the links. The difference, from my perspective, is that setting up a free bookmarking service and then shutting it down without enough warning is not a very rewarding activity, so it tends to be a self-limiting problem; by contrast, selling a paid service you then don't bother to provide can be extremely lucrative, like spamming, so it's the kind of problem that tends to grow rapidly without countermeasures.
That makes it a considerably more inflammatory accusation.
Well, maybe you don't follow as many startups as I do, but we, who are early technology adopters, get thousands of emails a day from all kinds of services we've tried out. So, if you care about us, busy technology professionals, the essence of your email should be in the subject line, especially when you expect time-sensitive actions from them or destruction could follow if they skip your email! Absolutely every other service puts that sense of urgency in the subject line! Instead of defending your position, learn from my experience as it's really huge!
Do you want me to provide you with the email trail? I remember paying for the account.
EDIT: Did you warn customers that their data (maybe a couple of megabytes) would be deleted? Did you offer me "upgrade to keep your data"? You simply disrespect our data. Also, your service was down for months if not years!
EDIT 2: Yes, you did say free accounts would probably get deleted after just 2 months without logging in.
My email thread [0] starts with me being certain I've paid for the account - that was 7 years ago and my memory back then was outstanding. Your free account had a limit of like 500 links and I had thousands and my account was paid for sure, but I was one of you first users and probably it was deleted by mistake or some flawed data migration.
Please, respect customers' data, it should be sacred - even if they are not paying customers! It didn't cost much to store links, even back in 2010!
Here's the email with the innocent subject of "historious hasn't seen you in a while!":
Hello!
We noticed that you haven't logged on historious in a while. Is there anything we can do to help? Please don't hesitate to reply to this email with anything you may need.
To refresh your memory, historious is a new kind of bookmarking service which creates your very own, personalised search engine of things you like.
Just as a reminder, our address is http://historio.us/ and your username, in case you have forgotten, is "nikolay".
Please note that, if you do not log in or historify something for two months, the data in your free account might be removed to ensure that our service always remains fresh. If you are not using historious, you can safely ignore this email.
If you would like to prevent this, just log into historious or historify something in the next month. If you are a subscriber, you don't need to do this, as we will not touch any of your data.
Thanks!
Team historious
It says "the data might be removed". Typically, you get multiple warnings before your data gets deleted, because people forget, and the warning is alarming. All these emails were unread - we all get a lot of spam and lots of informative emails and many of us just read the subject. If the subject is not suggesting that action should be taken otherwise there will be dire consequences, people might just read the subject and not open it.
> It says "the data might be removed". Typically, you get multiple warnings before your data gets deleted, because people forget, and the warning is alarming.
Sorry, but it's quite explicit. Might be removed means will be removed!
> All these emails were unread - we all get a lot of spam and lots of informative emails and many of us just read the subject.
Is it stavros fault?
> people might just read the subject and not open it.
I’m sure we’re all very sorry that you didn’t read an email which, in retrospect, was important. It was careless of you, but we’re all careless sometimes.
I doubt stavros has the ability to force you to read your emails, though. Given that, it’s possible they aren’t at fault for your oversight.
He definitely can by putting a warning on the subject. If I read every email from every online service I've ever signed up for, I would be doing this all day long and be unemployed!
It's absolutely fair game to post customer chats/emails that contradict a false and damaging narrative. Maybe the OP misremembered, maybe the OP has an axe to grind, either way the issue is firmly resolved now.
>It's absolutely fair game to post customer chats/emails that contradict a false and damaging narrative.
Eh, not really. Most half-decent businesses have a privacy policy/TOS that explicitly makes this a no-go, and would be grounds for a lawsuit if a company posted a customer's conversations with said company. It doesn't look like Historious has such a policy, so legally it might be okay, but it's still scummy IMO.
Posting your side of the story is fine, but using communications that are expected to be private usually isn't, and you should be able to correct the story without posting private info (we don't even know if the transcript that Stavros posted is true.. he could have completely made it up for all we know).
With all that said, it made me curious to look at the TOS for IMGZ, and... yikes... https://imgz.org/help/terms/
I see humor in the entire project, and am okay with this. Given Stavros' clear intent to be funny and make it abundantly clear what _isn't_ being promised, it's pretty great.
I mean c'mon - have a little fun.
At any rate it's classic absurdist marketing, and I approve.
Besides, I don't read the TOS of most other services. Why would I start now?
Oh I see the humor in it and I too am entertained, but I think it's a strange attitude to take in a paid product. This seems like more the territory of "optional donations accepted".
Just think, if this were a larger company doing this, they would be absolutely crucified for deceiving customers by hiding critical info in tiny text or TOSes that nobody reads.
And FWIW, I haven't actually tried paying yet, but if IMGZ is handling any actual payments info, a clever TOS that says "we don't make any promises about your privacy" won't protect you from fun legal action if that info is ever breached (though I'd guess and really hope that Stavros is using some payments provider like Stripe or Paypal).
> Service comes with no guarantee, not even guarantee of service. Paying us money doesn't entitle you to anything except owning less money.
So if you go into this service paying money expecting images to be hosted you're gonna have a bad time. Still humorous though, finally a payment page that states what every big company wants to state.
>This is my project, and I make no promises at all, even though you're paying. I'm not even promising I'll host your images. I don't believe in stealing your money or compromising your privacy, but even those aren't promises either.
TBH, I would avoid this service on the grounds it seems to be run by one person (to what extent its just clever self promotion hinges on charitable interpretation) -- this blurb whilst humorous is on line with the Discord cutesy error messages. It really hammers home this is not in the big leagues (or the minor leagues rather) and if you are using this service, you should be fine with that. However charging customers for it is interesting since that's a sure source of customer pressure via expectation.
I haven't been this entertained for the mere price of $12 in a very long time. I think it's worth the price of admission even if I never even try to upload an image.
Oh no no no, that won't do. Please send your SLA and NDA for me to sign, we can't be spending $12 willy-nilly! We could have almost bought one movie ticket to Cats for that money!
Look, kudos for having a great sense of humour, but nobody is talking about a SLA or NDA, I was talking about the fact it's almost a guarantee that your service will cause an inordinate amount of pressure on you and that's quite obvious. Though I must congratulate you for making trawling through hckrnews a source of work as evidenced by the corrupt file upload that was brought to your attention.
I doubt that, this is the tenth or so service that I create and run and it's all been fine. You see, my secret power is that I'm terrible at marketing, so I only ever have two active users.
Woah, why so hostile? I am not trying to self advertise anything. The type of business this is in line with -- image uploading where probally data retention matters. There's just one guy runnning this and it's a no brainer you shouldn't use it for anything serious outside memes.
I'm not talking to stavros initially (but look, he replied so it's reasonable for reading that intent), I'm talking to people like me who want an imgur replacement (a la imgur acquired announcement yesterday at the same time) and host a lot of images, or just people who want a service that will be here for longer than the life of a single person.
But if you want to shut off your brain, go ahead, I had a laugh too. Just make to shut it off when reading my comments too, as it's not serious in that context then, and plus it'll be a no-op for you and it won't warrant implying I'm running a consultancy (where did this fabrication come from, really? I have no links or socials at all but I'm software guy who has a datahoarder hobby) -- please for the love of god, think me atleast smart enough to shit on the produt to try and get some sort of consultancy work.
If you get your socks off at the idea of a paid single developer lead image hosting, then let's hope the guy doesn't lose interest (as there is no obligation not to) or even, not get hit by a bus as the bus factor seems to be one.
Lucky for you, I wrote more than that. Trying to nitpick that sentence might as be well deserved from my criticism, I accept that, but I missed the boat this project was meant to be a "Joke" and had to deal with stuff like content abuse (seems like it's not on the CDN's radar from other threads), CSAM, data retention (see other customer thread here where data was corrupted). My biggest complaint really was it's one guy, and what happens when he gets hit by a bus? Or takes a vacation? Or is busy with other life stuff really. Really, shame on me for thinking that stuff matters given the context, and I regret that, but let's be clear, this is not a serious project, my serious criticism, let's just ignore that here (and let new people discover it out for themselves)? Lest I agitate you further let me preemptively call my observations banal -- that's a new word for you to use, it will make you less boring.
Strike while the iron is hot I guess, but not sure why you you are being such an ass in your copy, it's kind of a turn off, even if it is super cheap.
Maybe it's a trend where if something is super cheap people tend to write in that style, but it kind of erodes trust, unless this is supposed to be a joke site, but the fact that I don't know really hurts your chance to actually get users to want to give you their email or money.
Nothing against being edgy or sweary or whatever, I like it normally, but not when you are trying to sell something on the Internet when you don't have some trust anchor that makes me ignore it like a big name brand.
Did anybody else read the copy, then read this comment, then read the copy again and go "what planet is this guy from?"
How did "being such an ass" get defined down to something this mild? People are so easily offended these days.
You can sign up for any image hosting website you want. I mean, you wouldn't go to Chipotle and rant at them for three paragraphs about how their mild salsa is way too spicy for you.
It this was a normal startup, the tone wouldn't inspire trust or be good PR. Fortunately this is a personal project, so the author can do whatever the heck he wants with its public image.
In the context of informal Internet chat, this is mild.
But as a business, in my own personal subjective opinion, it’s a real turn-off. I don’t ever EVER want companies to feign personality. At the moment it seems like this site exists purely because someone’s upset with Imgur. That’s a trrrible business model. I’m not about to rely on this existing in six months.
What I want is the most dead simple version of:
1. What it does
2. What’s in it for you
3. What’s in it for us
Everyone misses 3 but it’s imperative. Tell us why you’re here and how you plan on staying in business. If you don’t I’ll assume the worst.
This is a good comment. #3 is important, as it can build trust if it seems genuine or plausible. If not, you have probably done a lot of damage to potential trust.
Yeah I was having the same problem. If he posted I host images , people would probably be less likely to join. People just like to complain about nothing
Alright, I'll bite. Which one? Seriously scoured the pages searching trying to be offended, couldn't find a "domestic violence joke".
- edit -
Ah the ToS, the one thing I never read. I thought it was pretty funny FWIW.
Never got the point to being offended by a joke myself or on someone else's behalf. Jokes help you cope and heal, they work wonders for overcoming dark situations.
The trick is to lighten up and learn to recognize an insult from a joke. Noone was insulted or attacked.
That's one of my favorite jokes on there, it's meant to draw attention to the excuses abusers use to make it sound like it's the victim's fault. It's not making fun of the victims, it's saying you shouldn't fall for that manipulation.
Honestly I'd rather have this straightforward no-BS talk than the "take this amazing journey with us" all is happy BS that is much easier to be cynical and skeptical about. What about the copy is false? It seems true to me, if it is blunt. I can't say the same for other website content that is much more bland, but also much more false.
I don't know why talk like this gets a reputation as being straightforward and no-BS. It would be more straightforward and have less BS if it just said, "Image sharing made simple. Like imgur, but without he bullshit."
Not a long ramble about being ashamed (why?) about an image board I never even think of.
We're trying to maintain the puritanical simplicity of the internet, didn't you hear?
On a more serious note, I tend to agree with you and would add one more thing: I have several friends who have explicitly asked for more websites with this paid model. My friends want to pay to not be advertised to or have their data sold. It also happens to be the case that those same people all express their opinions in a very similar style as this website's copy.
I think the author commented on this view in their FAQ:
> Listen, this is half service, half art project. I made it in two days because I needed one and Imgur is an embarrassing husk of its former self, and I had nothing better to do. If you're expecting professionalism, call Oracle and ask for a quote of Oracle Advanced Image Sharing for Hadoop or whatever crap they sell, IMGZ is awesome but what you see is what you get.
Because the customers know that "free" has a cost. That's the reason for this site's creation -- because if you're not the customer, you're the product. Free isn't the alternative that it might seem to be.
You know, this is an interesting question. The site makes it, I think, abundantly clear that I don't really care whether you use the site or not, I made it for me and you can use it if you pay for your resources. It's even open source and you can self-host if you want!
Yet people in the comments seem a bit offended at the perceived breaking of the unspoken assumption that a service can't exist without a need for customers. Merely asking the question "why should I trust you?" implies that I want you to trust me, which I don't.
I think it's very interesting how deeply culturally embedded the notion that a service wants customers is. It's so ingrained that we even don't believe that something can just exist without wanting us to use it.
To me, this kind of feels like you coming to my house, asking me whether you have some of my dinner, and when I say "yes but you need to pay me for the materials" you ask "why should I trust you with my money?".
> I think it's very interesting how deeply culturally embedded the notion that a service wants customers is.
By definition, a “service” is to serve. Even if you are the only “customer”, it’s still serving someone. And most people have this notion because most services do, in fact, serve other customers, and that’s their main purpose. Not sure why that’s surprising.
> I don't really care whether you use the site or not, I made it for me and you can use it if you pay for your resources.
Going through the effort to make this a publicly accessible service with copy explaining how to use it and what it costs, implies that you at least care enough to serve other customers to go through the effort to do that much.
That’s just one definition. According to Google and the Oxford dictionary, the first definition of a service is “the action of helping or doing work for someone”.
It does not need to involve customers or even be a business transaction.
Sure, but the OP is implying that this “service” is intended for himself primarily, without regard to anyone else consuming it; that it’s odd for “service” to imply it should be used by multiple consumers. When, in fact, most services exist for the consumption of multiple consumers.
Because the author isn't hiding who they are (there's literally a link to their personal page in the footer), he's a well-known HNer with some street cred, and he operates in Europe. We happen to have laws here. He's set himself up so that if he screwed with your CC, he'd find himself in jail faster than your bank could process the chargeback.
If your credit card data is stolen, you can reverse the charges and in the worst case get a new card, canceling the old one. You will be made whole very quickly. If your data is stolen, you have very little recourse. Honestly of all the things to be worried about, stolen credit card details is probably one of the least of my concerns. Besides, he's using a payment service where he doesn't even see the credit card details, so you wouldn't be sharing your credit card details, just a token for charging. And if he fraudulently charges the card, you reverse it. Your credit card details are still safe.
My personal data is worth a lot more to me than credit card details.
> Looking for a dead-simple way to share some images but are ashamed of what Imgur has become?
I don't even know why I should be ashamed of what imgur has become. I still use it to host images I want to post to social media, be they funny memes, or screen shots of system/programming errors I'm seeking help solving. It works fine. What's the problem with imgur exactly? I imagine I'm not the only imgur user who doesn't notice any issue with it.
Imgur started as a way to share images on Reddit. Imgur was even a great way browse all the images in a subreddit at once. Eventually Reddit implemented their own image uploading and hosting and added the new layout, which makes images bigger when browsing feeds. Imgur pivoted into being their own social network, and use cases like yours began to be ignored because they generated far more abuse than they do revenue.
Even if you once paid for Imgur, like I did, the non-social features are completely broken. I can't even view my own images using https://statico.imgur.com/all, and I can't get to my old albums of images.
Just wait. The company that brought you Kik and Whisper and Genius is now the proud owner of Imgur and all the fabulous images and data contained within.
Ah, see, you're assuming the site is not serious and I didn't actually make this because I needed it and it'll be a hassle if other people use it so they need to give me money to offset the hassle.
It would be interesting to see what kind of innovative products got made if everyone worried about being tut-tutted by self righteous internet critics for everything they did.
Honestly your comment is a charicature of the kind of internet objections we'd expect to see to a new marketing style.
I'm not sure there's any definite way to erode trust these days, since the most polished and believable sites can (and often do) completely betray the trust they instill or profess to uphold.
Perhaps the creator is truly tired of the BS and guesses that there's an audience who also is. And for $5/yr, it costs virtually nothing to try.
The bigger question is about limits of what can be posted, policing of content, and privacy.
The fact that it's so cheap makes it feel even sketchier, like who am I giving my credit card to if they are making it that cheap and easy to do; is it a trick to get my CC? They don't care how little I give, because the $5 isn't their target, it's something else.
As a developer I know you can build stuff that actually is that cheap, but still, makes some alarm bell go off. Maybe if the site was worded differently, it wouldn't push things over the edge and I would "just try it".
Also, I think if you want just $5 a year, why even ask for anything, unless you justify why it's so cheap and how it will just be enough to cover x costs or something.
Goes perfectly well with the spirit of Imgur's style back in 2009. I like the cheeky tone in personal projects like this, it doesn't have to be serious because it's not a startup with investors and neckties, at least not yet.
It's hilarious, and befitting what appears to be basically a personal project that accepts money and provides services as part of its schtick. Not everything on the internet has to be glossy and professional and trustworthy and inviting. It's ok to have fun.
I think people greatly underestimate this. It was lots and lots of fun to make this, and to see people's reactions when they come across it. It was the most fun of everything I've made, and it made me realize what art is: To me, it's being able to say whatever you want, because that's how you like it, without caring whether others will like it. If they like it, good, if not, still good.
I'd definitely recommend making a silly thing like this to everyone, with their only compass being their personal aesthetic. It's very liberating.
Plus, if you can use the thing to store images, even better.
Eh, it isn't too far off from the "I created an image hosting service that doesn't suck." language used in the announcement of Imgur on Reddit 12 years ago.
There's a difference between being an asshole against a problem or another company and being an asshole to the person you are trying to get to sign up.
Here's what gave me the double-take:
Already have an account?
No you don't.
Try to log in below if you think you do anyway.
Why are you being a dick to me, I just got here. I didn't care that you want to shit on Imgur, but now I'm not sure what your problem is and don't care to waste any more time on this.
Anyway, you can write your site however you want, but so can anyone share their thoughts.
It's a joke, people! From HN's own Stavros. Or, who knows what it is. Something Stavros did for fun and uses himself. A thing. Can't things just be allowed to be what they are? It's like people can't tolerate the existence of unique things, and have to see them as just really bad versions of a known category of things. "This round thing is bad because I can't force it into this square hole." And I guess when someone posts something to HN it gets judged as if submitted by the author and designed, badly, for the person now reading it. Ugly font! Bad colours! Unprofessional tone! Bad marketing! etc. ..Wasn't the internet 100% like that in the good old days?