[Crosseye_Jack]

I don’t disagree that if people want to be able to hot-link images they should pay for the hosting themselves (It’s something I do myself - instead of replying on imgur I just pay to host the files on S3).

I just find it amusing that imgur was born out of being a better image host then the competition as linking to images on reddit at the time sucked, and now (IMO) has turned to “the dark side” and are doing the things that made the competition so crappy to start with.

I’m not saying they shouldn’t show ads but I’ve seen and reported countless bad ads on the site (forced redirects away from the site, unannounced “would you like to open the App Store” dialogs. APKs just auto downloading. Seemed at the time they or their ad network would accept any old crap of an advert (this was a quite a while ago, hopefully they are more choosing about the ads they run).

Also their UI is a pain in the arse (IMO) on mobile Safari it’s a pain in the arse to pinch and zoom (not that it will do any good as the image on mobile UI has been resized) and getting to the full sized image is another pain in the arse. For images like above it makes it impossible to read. They said look at the force applied but the wording on the scale is just a blur making the graph hard to understand.

It’s their site and they can do what they like with it. I just find it amusing that (IMO) they have become what they hated. At least they managed to include reddit style communities/comments before reddit started hosting images themselves.

[baud147258]

> they have become what they hated

I think that's the fate of all image hosts: current offerings have a lot of (crappy) ads to pay for hosting => competitors arrives, starts with less ads to incite onboarding => competitors gets a market share => competitors now has to turn a profit => add more ads (or ask money for hosting)

[Crosseye_Jack]

Thing is imgur was profitable (before reddit became its own image host, dunno what their status is these days, I just know there submission numbers dropped sharply after reddit did that, but maybe their own community was able to recover from that).

Back in the day you used to be able to pay to upgrade your imgur account to allow larger file uploads (which was great for gifs), disable the ads you saw site wide and disable the ads people saw coming to your submissions. I guess the Rev they were generating off ads back in 2015 was out stripping the Rev generated from Pro accounts (esp with the ability to prevent ads on your submissions. If you were a imgur pro user you were either trying to support that platform or was a power user and getting a fair few visits to your submissions) because that’s when they they dropped them and they were reporting as profitable back then. Which is odd (to me) because it’s been since then that the service (IMO) has gotten worse. To me they had a winning formula and the user base to make it work but fucked it up (or not, they are still around today. So maybe they did the right thing, I’m just an old grumpy user who doesn’t like change. Now get off my lawn, I have clouds to shout at...)