[codexon]

I don't see the appeal behind this.

The reason why there was a need for off-site image hosting is because people and websites like reddit didn't want to pay for the bandwidth or be forced to deal with takedown requests.

A decade ago, bandwidth was much more expensive, and it was only because it got much cheaper that imgur's business model of allowing free direct linking is even possible now.

If I want to share an address with someone, there's nothing wrong with a google maps link. There are hundreds of websites out there that allow you to host text or blog.

[nilliams]

I could see this being useful to quickly put up some info about an upcoming event or meeting.

>> There are hundreds of websites out there that allow you to host text or blog.

Blog sites typically need signup, so are slower to get started with than this. Also if you think of something like Blogger, it would not be as clean/minimal out of the box if you just want a clean 'single page' to link someone to.

Pastebin-style hosting can be no-signup but is typically uglier than this, and usually doesn't allow you to embed images/maps.

[codexon]

> Blog sites typically need signup, so are slower to get started with than this. Also if you think of something like Blogger, it would not be as clean/minimal out of the box if you just want a clean 'single page' to link someone to.

If you care that little about the way you are presenting your information that you can't even be bothered to sign up, you most likely don't care about having fancy HTML formatting.

The reason why most blogs require you to sign up is so they can ban you when you start putting up phishing, cookie stuffing, or exploit pages.

Also here is one that I found from a single search. http://www.c99.nl/

[nilliams]

>> If you care that little about the way you are presenting your information that you can't even be bothered to sign up, you most likely don't care about having fancy HTML formatting.

Who says choosing Sitekite would mean I care little about presentation? Sitekite does a better job than (to use my original example, Blogger) for its intended 'share a single page of info' use-case.

>> The reason why most blogs require you to sign up is so they can ban you when you start putting up phishing, cookie stuffing, or exploit pages.

As a user, I don't care about that, I just don't want to have to signup to yet-another-thing just to share some info with my friends/colleagues.

>> Also here is one that I found from a single search. http://www.c99.nl/

Ugly.

[codexon]

> Who says choosing Sitekite would mean I care little about presentation? Sitekite does a better job than (to use my original example, Blogger) for its intended 'share a single page of info' use-case.

The intersection of people who are able to write their own HTML but absolutely refuse to sign up with a fake email, or get their own VPS really comes down to 2 types of people.

Paranoids

Phishers

Both of which are tiny minorities.

> Ugly.

And how is this relevant when you are writing raw html?

[ncza]

You cannot compare those things like that. Not being willing to make all your contributions to a site with the same account or maybe even to have that information displayed to the public has nothing to do with laziness. It can be a matter of privacy or security. As a user I myself see no benefit (i don't even know the password of this HN account).

[alfg]

The appeal is the simplicity. And certainly there are users who would like a decently formatted HTML page without signing up; hence the whole "imgur for websites" approach.

[gautamnarula]

I actually created a site for hosting text (that looked pretty) that doesn't require signup and is very minimal and clean: http://www.millisay.com

Right now it doesn't support any markdown or image embedding mainly because not too many people use it, but I wouldn't be opposed to adding it if users saw the need.