[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...)