16 ms·

Imgur Acquired by Medialab

474 points by mburst 5y ago

vitalychernobyl 5y ago
This is a tough one to make sense of - are they just getting killed by reddit on one side and tiktok on the other and cashing out? Anyone have any insight? (also anyone know the purchase price? just for fun)
- sieabah 5y ago
  They stopped being just an image host and attempted to branch out. Except the content creators just post the garbage to reddit and tiktok directly because the reach is much greater than linking to imgur from the various platforms.
- didntknowya 5y ago
  it use to be my fav time waster app rather than the selfies on IG or silly politics on FB. but yea rarely use it now so I guess engagement is dropping
  - monkeybutton 5y ago
    There is definitely a dedicated subculture there with their own rules (e.g. selfies being mercilessly down voted in usersub). Also the demographic was relatable for me as it skewed more towards older millennials.
EasyTiger_ 5y ago
Wasn't this the company that ostensibly began on reddit? Their founder used to post many promises about "not selling out" and the rest.
- slig 5y ago
  They began on Reddit because Reddit was incapable of handling image uploads.
  - kordlessagain 5y ago
    Reddit forwards /r/imgur to /r/drugs
    - throwaway1777 5y ago
      Fake news.
    - SquareWheel 5y ago
      No it doesn't. If you mean reddit.com/imgur, that's the ID from a random post in /r/Drugs. Reddit automatically expands the post ID to the original thread.
    - ryder9 5y ago
      bullshit artist
  - dpedu 5y ago
    IIRC at the time imgur launched, all of the other free image sharing websites were pretty bad. Reddit itself didn't start allowing uploads until long after imgur.
    - badsectoracula 5y ago
      IMO all the other free image sharing websites are still bad, i've yet to see anything that lets you -e.g.- make direct links to the images for use in Discord, Reddit, forums (phpbb), etc and not surround them with garbage and images tend to stay around for a long time unlike other places where they disappear after a while. The only thing i found annoying with Imgur is the mobile site not allowing zooming for some reason (can be bypassed by loading the desktop version but it is still an annoyance). Not sure if this will still be the case going forward though. I used to like Minus since they allowed all that stuff plus had unlimited GIF sizes and didn't reencode PNGs to JPGs (not sure if Imgur does that anymore) but after Minus was sold it went to hell and then disappeared completely.
      - 5y ago
- WORMS_EAT_WORMS 5y ago
  Ha. I love reading terrible inflaming comments like this. - What would you have done? - Do you even know 1% of the effort the founding team put into this? - Do you know the exact details of the digital cold war between Reddit and them? This is just a terrible comment by a terribly grumpy person to inflame. - It’s AWESOME the founding team exited - It’s AWESOME someone went heads up with Reddit Everything they did mattered. Nothing you shared did.
  - cmbell715 5y ago
    So many straw men, so little time.
    - WORMS_EAT_WORMS 5y ago
      My comment was flagged but what the person is complaining about was probably 10 years ago… and provides little discussion except a quip that doesn’t belong on HN. Whatever.
- judge2020 5y ago
  Yes, and they have since cut out all references to Reddit, even in their company history section. https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/y81ju/i_created_imgur_ama/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=ios_app&utm_name=iossmf https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/y81ju/i_created_imgur... https://imgurinc.com/about?forcedesktop=1#huge-impact-little-teams https://imgurinc.com/about?forcedesktop=1#huge-impact-little...
  - xenihn 5y ago
    I'm sure there's good reasons for this. but I'd be curious for details. I wonder if Reddit would be what it is today without imgur. I started using Reddit shortly before imgur launched, and I can still remember the day that it went live. It was by far the best image uploading experience I'd ever had, and I'd used most (maybe every) major uploader that came before them, between 1995 and 2009.
    - jedberg 5y ago
      > I wonder if Reddit would be what it is today without imgur. It would probably be different, but not worse or better. I was there when Imgur launched, and at the time we thanked Imgur for dealing with the crap of hosting images (checking for child porn, dealing with DMCA notices and other copyright and privacy issues, etc). Had they not existed, reddit would have just done that ourselves. Eventually reddit did do that themselves, but by then Imgur had their own community. I suspect some of those people would still be on reddit.
    - rkagerer 5y ago
      Imgur was to Reddit as PayPal was to eBay.
- pram 5y ago
  My favorite part is that they added 'social' stuff to imgur uploads, so your images (probably) have a separate set of terrible comments you're not even aware of.
  - sbierwagen 5y ago
    Imgur comments have the old twitter length limit, 140 characters.
    - bozhark 5y ago
      watch they weren't even hosting the files, it just backpages to twitter posts
    - ruined 5y ago
      even worse!
  - pfraze 5y ago
    To be fair, the Imgur comments are actually pretty funny
- didntknowya 5y ago
  everyone sells out eventually. nothing wrong with it. either that or they run it into the ground or die. people move on that's just life. congrats to the imgur team and good luck for their next adventures.
  - rapind 5y ago
    Not everyone, but it’s definitely rare. Feels good to believe that everyone sells out though when you’re in the process of selling out.
  - vesinisa 5y ago
    You don't need to sell out if you can create a service or product that people are willing to pay money for - even indirectly. Granted, this is certainly a difficult feat to pull on a free image hosting site.
  - Aeolun 5y ago
    Hmm, as far as I can see you either sell out, or get sold out to. The last one seems like a viable option?
- BurningFrog 5y ago
  "Selling" and "selling out" are not (always) the same thing.
  - munk-a 5y ago
    My dad worked in M&A for a long time and handled the sale of a plastic molding company where the owner was getting quite old and couldn't really run the business anymore. The company was extremely well established and had a very strong and loyal customer base and ran off a single manufacturing facility in a small town out in the boonies. The owner certainly wanted a fair value for the company but he also strongly desired that the plant be kept open and employees retain their positions. Adding this sort of a restriction on a company you're selling is possible - but it is hellishly expensive, generally you're considering adding some sort of third party oversight and auditing for all HR actions and business decisions. If you buy a company under these terms you can end up utterly destroying the company if supply chains shift - the local labour pool is unsustainable or a plethora of other reasons... And almost certainly this burden is mandatorily bundled with the company - so once you've rode the company value down a bit and are looking to get out all of the buyers will know how much of an impossible situation that company is in. At the end of the day when you sell a company you are divorcing yourself from the future direction - you might be invited to stay on as an executive - and the new owners might listen to you... or they might not - that's entirely up to them. Any promises or commitments you've made as an executive are only as good as your word - and when you sell your company your word stops having any power (because you sold that power). I would never shame someone who wanted to keep an ideal going from making an exit they personally need to make - always prioritize your health and happiness over any venture - but when you sell you're accepting the fact that at any moment the buyer may completely reverse the direction of the company.
    - andrekandre 5y ago
      > Any promises or commitments you've made as an executive are only as good as your word - and when you sell your company your word stops having any power (because you sold that power). one option i don't see discussed a lot is selling to your employees (converting to a coop, full esop etc)
- Aeolun 5y ago
  Ah, yeah, after the previous host was taken over. We all saw that for the lie it was after they took outside investment of course.
- gjs278 5y ago
  this is a lie MrGrim told reddit. in reality he was promoting imgur on digg, SA, anywhere really. he just told reddit that so they’d think they were part of some secret new club since tinypic, photobucket, and imageshack were all terrible hosts in comparison.
- Havoc 5y ago
  Yes. Though it did seem genuinely well meaning at the time. Reddit was pretty shit pre imgur pictures wise.
- paxys 5y ago
  Imgur should have sold to Reddit a long time ago. Not being able to work out a deal was lose-lose for both companies.
- NaturalPhallacy 5y ago
  It literally began on reddit. I remember reading the thread. The founder (of imgur) was sick of all the bullshit that other hosting sites did. Like not just serving the image. But instead forcing logins, and landing pages etc. I remember the writing was on the wall when someone said, making fun of "imgurians" as people who thought of imgur as "a site to go to" and not just an image host for reddit. It keeps getting more and more user hostile with dark patterns etc. The other day I tried to just go to my page of image uploads on mobile and flat out could not. The site would not let me even though I know the exact url. It was sad, if inevitable to watch imgur become the exact same garbage site it was trying to replace. Time to download my stuff I guess.
- edgyquant 5y ago
  That was before Reddit added image functionality which basically was a fuck you to imgur. I’m surprised the site has lasted this long without selling.
- Vinnl 5y ago
  I'll spend two seconds looking it up, but IIRC the founder said he wouldn't sell out "unless they offer like a million dollars". Edit: Looks like it was in the original FAQ. > Can I advertise on imgur? > Hell no! This is a free site (as in beer) and there will never be any ads on it unless I end up selling out for a million dollars. https://web.archive.org/web/20090226191747/https://imgur.com/faq.php#advertise https://web.archive.org/web/20090226191747/https://imgur.com...
darkwizard42 5y ago
Medialab has now acquired Kik (2019), Imgur (2021), Genius (2021)... Big spree of acquisitions! Anyone have any idea the goal?
- filmgirlcw 5y ago
  To buy old, dilapidated tech/media brands that no longer have any ability to get pay out investors (who are happy to sell on the cheap for a write-off), but still get some level of traffic. Bundle all the traffic together to sell ads across a network of sites with the hopes of profiting. It’s a strategy as old as time. Sometimes it works (IAC, is arguably a good example of a company who has bought or funded companies at various stages of distress/hype (and incubated some that are very successful in their own right, like Match Group) and managed to get goodish CPMs across the sites they bundle together), most of the time it doesn’t. But the goal is to acquire the brand/traffic, cut costs to the bone, and attempt to profit off the traffic by selling ads or user data or whatever. It’s a rollup play and the goal is definitely not to invest back into the companies themselves any more than they need to run.
  - benzible 5y ago
    Most of this is dead on but I've been in the middle of this type of deal and "happy to sell" wouldn't be an accurate description of the investors. Having some % of failures is built into the VC model but they'd still much rather have gotten their capital back. Also, this reminds me of Computer Associates' (later CA Technologies) business model: buy enterprise software companies with locked-in customers, fire staff and cut costs as far as possible, and increase maintenance fees, all with the understanding the the business will deteriorate over time. I think here the equivalent of "increase maintenance fees" may be "load up the product with even more ads".
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- taurath 5y ago
  Yeah to be an ad network like everything else
bubblehack3r 5y ago
Isn't this the company that aquired Kik and completely abandoned it? Pretty sure this is it. There goes Imagur... https://www.distractify.com/p/what-happened-to-kik https://www.distractify.com/p/what-happened-to-kik Edit: fixed spelling mistake
- bozhark 5y ago
  abandoned*
jamescun 5y ago
Interesting, I hadn't heard of MediaLab until just a few days ago when I listened to a Darknet Diaries episode[1] about Kik and some "content problems" that MediaLab are leaving unresolved. [1] https://darknetdiaries.com/episode/93/ https://darknetdiaries.com/episode/93/
- Belphemur 5y ago
  I thought exactly the same. It doesn't bode well for Imgur future. They don't care about their acquisition. It's to wonder why are they doing it in the first place. The company doesn't have any public information either. All I can find is a LONG list of job openings: https://jobs.lever.co/medialab https://jobs.lever.co/medialab Weird list if they are just "investors".
- oneplane 5y ago
  That exactly the first thought that came to my mind as well. RIP Imgur? It doesn't seem like medialab is anything more than the 'internet brand' version of a patent troll.
beervirus 5y ago
Oof. I hope medialab didn’t spend much on this dog.
sergiotapia 5y ago
An image hosting site seems like one of those applications that are easier than ever to build but impossible to monetize. Most people who use imgur just hotlink - what's the incentive for a company to buy or start a new imgur?
- corobo 5y ago
  Same as Imgur. The current image hosting sites suck and you know you can do better Then it works and you need to pay the bills 10 years later you sell it and some new guy makes one
- rastafang 5y ago
  add ads to pictures... that's what everyone else is doing
filmgirlcw 5y ago
They should have sold to Reddit when that option was on the table. The founders didn’t want to because they thought they had options beyond Reddit, but that was never really true. Congrats on any exit, but this one has to be a letdown and I’m sure it didn’t work out for any of the non-founders with options that are now assuredly worthless, but congrats on an exit nonetheless.
andrefuchs 5y ago
There is a great DarknetDiaries episode about the dark side of Medialab's Kik-Messenger. https://darknetdiaries.com/episode/93/ https://darknetdiaries.com/episode/93/
- NJL3000 5y ago
  Yes, MediaLab needs more sunshine. Kik has major issues..
anonymous344 5y ago
imgur has long been a political manipulation machine. I'll bet after this sell it will only get worse. ps. Have you noticed how 9 gag shows you violence or racism every day in one of the top 5 posts. As tought that "happy site" is trying to make you angry...
Andrew_nenakhov 5y ago
I can't share the love for Imgur: for some reason, all imgur posts, including this one, are never displayed on my mobile Firefox. Just blank screen, and that's it. (the only addon I have is uBlock origin, and I'm too lazy to try turning it off for some random images)
- BitwiseFool 5y ago
  Imgur does this weird thing on mobile where it will always redirect you to some page where it can then nag you to download their app with grayouts, big buttons, and then a content feed they hope you scroll down on. It also downloads like 6 megabytes worth of local content. Doesn't matter if you are going to the imgur page of the image, or literally the URI to the image file itself.
  - actusual 5y ago
    Ah yes, the ol' app interstitial where they hound you to download the app by interrupting whatever you were trying to do on their site. I hate websites that use these.
  - ajsnigrutin 5y ago
    Holy fuck that's anoying.. http://example.com/foobar.png http://example.com/foobar.png <- if an url looks like that, I expect a direct link to the image... not some freaky redirect to a shitty webpage with floating popups, cookie prompts and "download the app"... why do I need an app to view a fucking image?! I already have one, it's called a browser!
- mrweasel 5y ago
  Imgur was a wonderful idea, but I think they forgot to have a business plan. Imgur is absolutely terrible these days. The Imgur community is almost completely toxic. Imgur apparently care about my privacy, but still want to share information with 1200 different "partners". It's also the most effective way of draining the battery of any device you use. Even the new M1 MacBooks will burn through battery like there's no tomorrow if you load the Imgur website in Safari, or worse any other browser. It's not a great site and haven't been for years.
gsich 5y ago
Imgur has gone to shit.
c3534l 5y ago
Ah, this explains why imgur suddenly became unusable.
jdlyga 5y ago
Imgur was awesome for a bunch of years. Glad they had an exit plan.
bluedino 5y ago
And now the race for the next free image host begins...
DarknessFalls 5y ago
Imgur could have pivoted to becoming like Reddit faster than Reddit was able to pivot to incorporate its own image repo. It's all user-submitted content. One was either a link or a blurb of text, the other was imagery.
lindseymysse 5y ago
I've been doing stuff on neocities.org lately. It reminds me what I love about making the internet. I pay the monthly $5 fee for 50gb, and I have no complaints yet. And if I ever have a product idea -- their website is open source, so I can just fork their project and make my own business.
- quickthrower2 5y ago
  Hosting companies selling 3 years for $150 of traditional PHP shared hosting are still around. I love how skills I learned 15 years ago still work on these and it feels closer to the older web. Probably can run Perl on them! Also a PHP file on one of these is close to “serverless” - it’s a lot simpler doesn’t change its UI and API every 5 minutes like Azure
MauranKilom 5y ago
Hm. My bet would be that you can now count the number of years until imgur links go dead on one hand. This prompted me to check whether there were any backup efforts already, and how much data that would involve. Indeed, archiveteam has some good info: https://wiki.archiveteam.org/index.php/Imgur https://wiki.archiveteam.org/index.php/Imgur > Imgur serves a massive amount of traffic. In 2012 alone, 42 petabytes of data were transferred. Fortunately, the amount of images uploaded is much less, albeit still a lot. In 2012, around 300,000,000 images were uploaded; assuming an average size of 120KB, that's 36TB in one year. As of 2014, there were 650 million images with 1.5 million being added each day according to one source. An analysis in 2015 based on extrapolation from a sample of random image IDs estimated about 2 billion images with a total raw full-resolution image size of 376 TiB. Also makes me think about whether/how much I currently link to imgur in various places on the internet, and whether there's anything that I should prepare to replace. Do people have suggestions how to best approach this?
- catillac 5y ago
  I would change any links you have pointing to Imgur. But as for storing the contents, wasn’t it just a site for memes? I can’t recall a single time over many years seeing anything worth preserving that wasn’t essentially throwaway content.
  - MauranKilom 5y ago
    Well, one (semi-)frequent use case for me would be creating some graphic (e.g. a chart or a UI suggestion) that I would share in some community (e.g. forum). Unlikely anyone looks at them again a decade later, but those embeds will still rot away...
  - wodenokoto 5y ago
    Tons of amazing one-off blog posts told with images as the focus has been posted through Imgur. Things like “how I renovated my house” or “how the circuitry of this gadget works” told through pictures with supporting texts lives solely on Imgur.
  - coldpie 5y ago
srjek 5y ago
https://blog.imgur.com/2021/09/27/celebrating-imgurs-next-chapter/ https://blog.imgur.com/2021/09/27/celebrating-imgurs-next-ch... may be a better url. At least on mobile, the gallery link fails to load. Any scrolling then redirects and rewrites history to a random post.
- soylentgraham 5y ago
  Well, why change a formula that leads to an exit.
solarkraft 5y ago
Oh no. Imgur was already close to being overloaded with ads. I have no doubt this will get much worse. Any suggestions for alternative no bullshit image hosting services?
- mpd 5y ago
  I'm currently using https://postimages.org/ https://postimages.org/ for the odd occasion I want to upload something.
- stavros 5y ago
  I made one: https://imgz.org/ https://imgz.org/
madrox 5y ago
Congrats to Imgur on its exit, I suppose. Honestly, this is probably the best outcome they could hope for. I suspect their growth has stagnated and are losing mindshare in the meme economy to Reddit and Discord. Imgur was started in a very different world from today and they didn't evolve enough. Regardless, I'm grateful to them. Imgur will always have a soft spot in my heart.
ChrisArchitect 5y ago
Imgur, great service, lasted this long, amazing. But I always wondered how any of these random image hosts afforded bandwidth (reminds of the other various ones like TwitPic who was saved from being taken offline by Twitter). I mean, I have a gallery of images in there, privately stored, directly linked to here and there around the net, without paying for anything for years. I think at one point I can't even remember now I did pay them a small fee and then they removed that option to go it alone with ads and refused to 'take my money'. Which seemed crazy and still does. Does the small imgur community (Which exists as a bizarre also-ran of Reddit) sustain them enough on ad views?
- mkr-hn 5y ago
  I emailed one of them 12 years and 4 months ago to ask how they paid for everything. This was back in 2009 when the internet was still small enough that companies would respond to random emails. They responded to say they had funding covered. They shut down a few years later. The domain is there, but it just says "ImageHost.org is closed" with a Google Analytics tag.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
- BiteCode_dev 5y ago
  My guess is PR. Regularly, on imgur, you see a pic in interest for a celebrity, a rich person, a movie. It looks organic, but if you look closely, there are plenty of weird things about it. Then it disappears as suddenly as it arrived. I believe that they sell the front page to PR firms that need to promote something in a way the people think themself came up with the hype. It's probably the same for a lot of communities with a strong influence on trends, like popular sub reddits or hacker news. There is no better ads than the one you don't see. There is no better slogan than the one you repeat to your friends as a catchphrase. And there is no better propaganda than the one based on ideas you thought you had by yourself.
  - djhn 5y ago
efnx 5y ago
Does anybody know what the acquisition price was? Or what the terms were (like how long must the founders remain on the team, etc)?
ChrisArchitect 5y ago
Medialab's other things include like, Genius (ok, fair enough, sustains itself / useful/ well-used I'm assuming)....and Kik? The teen messaging app from like 2010 that no one uses anymore? hm Had to look a bit harder to even find their website (https://www.medialab.la/ https://www.medialab.la/) - 'a holding company of consumer internet brands' heh, sheesh, yeah that's not sketchy.
- jdorfman 5y ago
  > Kik? The teen messaging app from like 2010 that no one uses anymore? I use to think the same thing, until I listened to this episode of Darknet Diaries: https://darknetdiaries.com/episode/93/ https://darknetdiaries.com/episode/93/
  - xmprt 5y ago
    1/3 American Teenagers use the app according to Kik... I have a feeling they're not counting right because that doesn't sound right to me.
  - toyg 5y ago
    After reading this, it's clear everybody knows (multiple legal challenges, involvement by MS...) and nobody with actual power wants to crack down on it. Safe haven or not, when authorities want to destroy a sketchy business, they have a number of weapons at their disposal. To me, it all suggests Kik (and by extension, possibly, Medialab) might well be some sort of law-enforcement front at this point.
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
- NelsonMinar 5y ago
  Kik's the website that had a serious child porn and child sexual solicitation problem. I think they've tried to do something about that in the last couple of years but from a quick Google search it's not clear it's really worked.
mdoms 5y ago
I have never seen a service decline so quickly from "simple and actually pretty useful" to "bloated, slow mess" as Imgur. I don't see that trend reversing for them. I suspect much of the slowness is because I live in the ass end of the world (NZ), but that's a problem that can be solved with money.... money they likely don't want to spend.
- seattle_spring 5y ago
  > I have never seen a service decline so quickly from "simple and actually pretty useful" to "bloated, slow mess" as Imgur Reddit did a pretty good job of going from simple and relatively lightweight to bloated and unusable in a very short timeframe.
paxys 5y ago
https://www.medialab.la/ https://www.medialab.la/ for those wondering. > medialab is a holding company of consumer internet brands.
harry8 5y ago
Imgur sort of claims to be organic and user driven but that just seems a stretch. Before the 2016 election it was full of Pro-trump meme content. Now there is absolutely none and it's full of orthodox Democrat boosting meme content with any Republican mention advancing the idea that the whole party and all its supporters are completely beyond redemption being in league with Satan himself. No way that's not curated, for mine and I think it will backfire.
mrkramer 5y ago
Imgur only exists because Reddit at the time didn't have native image host but since they introduced it Imgur is in decline[0]. [0] https://minimaxir.com/2017/06/imgur-decline/ https://minimaxir.com/2017/06/imgur-decline/
l-albertovich 5y ago
Huh, a few days ago I listened to the darknet diaries on kik, I guess imgur is about to become a child porn den... Sarcasm aside, it'd be cool if they got their shit together.
balozi 5y ago
Congratulations to Medialab for their newly-acquired gigantic pile of porno content. Sir, please invite us over when you get settled in. XOXO
calltrak 5y ago
imgur sucks. i prefer https://picc.io https://picc.io
- rastafang 5y ago
  https://picc.io/6SgIC3X.jpg https://picc.io/6SgIC3X.jpg
missedthecue 5y ago
Is this the same Medialab that bought the lyrics website Genius for $80 million last week?
- chptung 5y ago
  Yes
Traster 5y ago
By the way, it's pronounced "Imager" for those that don't know.
reilly3000 5y ago
As a side note I find it amusing how the HN community simultaneously obsesses over startups, equity, funding rounds, etc but gets grumpy when a company actually does sell. The cognitive dissonance is sublime.
- jacquesm 5y ago
  HN contains enough people of different vintage and background that it would be rather more surprising if there was any subject that we all agreed on. This has nothing to do with cognitive dissonance, which is something unique to an individual, at best you could conclude that HN is able to cater to people on opposing sides of some spectra without turning into a hate fest.
- corobo 5y ago
  I find it amusing that people think of "the HN community" as a singular mind or something Different people respond to different things
- NaturalPhallacy 5y ago
  doublethink* CD would be us being uncomfortable with the conflict and possibly resolving it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_dissonance https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_dissonance
- edgyquant 5y ago
  It depends on when they sell and who too. If you create a neat startup and sell for a lot to a respectable company then it’s praised but if you sell to a sketchy company (like this) long after your prime it’s looked down on
seph-reed 5y ago
Damn. Imgur just became amazing in the last month. They rolled out a feature where you can filter out political posts, and it's become the only place I can go to just enjoy some mindless scrolling. There's still a ton of political posters who never tag, but you can mute them. And then there's the "look how dumb those people are" circle jerks, that aren't actually political. But all in all, I have a pretty decent quality to circle jerk ratio.
- rastafang 5y ago
  > There's still a ton of political posters who never tag, but you can mute them. not really scalable
  - seph-reed 5y ago
    You'd be amazed at how many of the daily front page political posts come from only a handful of people. There's still a ton of offenders, but only so many super prolific ones.
tyrfing 5y ago
Interesting company. It was created in 2018 [1], and the CEO is Michael Heyward, who was a co-founder of Whisper. Some interesting shuffling happened with Whisper [2] and it's now owned by MediaLab. Since then they have acquired a number of other properties, the general idea seems to buy declining brands for cheap and extract as much value as possible on mobile. [3] There is no public information on their funding. 1. https://businesssearch.sos.ca.gov/CBS/SearchResults?SearchType=NUMBER&SearchCriteria=C4168042 https://businesssearch.sos.ca.gov/CBS/SearchResults?SearchTy... 2. https://www.latimes.com/business/technology/la-fi-tn-whisper-board-20170829-story.html https://www.latimes.com/business/technology/la-fi-tn-whisper... 3. https://www.assemblyexchange.com/about-us https://www.assemblyexchange.com/about-us - their job ads feature this ad network prominently.
- prostoalex 5y ago
  Darknet Diaries episode on Kik messenger has some background on Medianet https://darknetdiaries.com/episode/93/ https://darknetdiaries.com/episode/93/
- eryu 5y ago
  The whisper founders threatened to default on the debt they raised from SVB, then used inside money to buy it at cents on the dollar. because debt is senior to equity, they then wiped out the equity raised and kicked sequoia, shasta, and lightspeed off the board. then raised PE to fund a series of purchases of apps such as kik, and a lot of android apps with churned users with always-on location permissions turned on. They then used that data to build a small ad network.
  - echelon 5y ago
    Holy shit. That's a mafia move against VC. Pretty much guarantees that these folks will never raise another round from anyone ever again, though. Way to burn bridges...
  - chptung 5y ago
    Source? Because if true this is pretty baller move but also a big f.u to VCs
mackal 5y ago
Imgur jumped the shark long ago.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
JohnJamesRambo 5y ago
There is a shitload of porn on Imgur. Is Medialab going to do the Silicon Valley Puritan investor purge on it?
rastafang 5y ago
Time to get a new gimp addon ... also hopefully Flameshot will switch to another service.
1B05H1N 5y ago
Well, it was nice while it lasted.
ChuckMcM 5y ago
TL;DR - we've been doing this for 12 years and we're tired and want to do something else. These guys gave us enough money to do that. Interesting that there are at least three 'Medialab' brands, one is the management platform for healthcare, one is a department at MIT, and then there is Medialab the holding company (https://www.medialab.la/ https://www.medialab.la/) which bought Genius (YC S11) too. I may be too cynical because I'm guessing they are going to give it the 'Sourceforge' treatment.
- nixpulvis 5y ago
  > Interesting that there are at least three 'Medialab' brands, one is the management platform for healthcare, one is a department at MIT, and then there is Medialab the holding company This really confused me. The logos of the management platform and MIT are practically the same as well.
BugWatch 5y ago
Nothing good ever lasts. Well, then... time to archive the links for future find-and-replace, and to offload everything I have there (luckily, not much, I learned my lesson on imageshack.us once upon a yesteryear).
peanut_worm 5y ago
Imgur is currently almost unusable, for a product so bad maybe this is a good thing. If it isn’t, I would be shocked if they’re still in business in a year.
just-tom 5y ago
I remember 9gag was a hit before imgur took their job.
rkagerer 5y ago
If you have any requests and ideas to continue improving Imgur, let them know here [1]. I just sent one asking them to never change it. [1] https://www.medialab.la/contact-us https://www.medialab.la/contact-us
rkagerer 5y ago
Jeez, I've uploaded hundreds of images over the years to embed directly in forum posts. As to migrating... I know you can download all the pictures in your account. But is there any way to include the corresponding top (or most recent) referrer so you know the places you need to go to update URL's?

474 points by mburst 5y ago

This is a tough one to make sense of - are they just getting killed by reddit on one side and tiktok on the other and cashing out? Anyone have any insight? (also anyone know the purchase price? just for fun)

sieabah 5y ago
They stopped being just an image host and attempted to branch out. Except the content creators just post the garbage to reddit and tiktok directly because the reach is much greater than linking to imgur from the various platforms.
didntknowya 5y ago
it use to be my fav time waster app rather than the selfies on IG or silly politics on FB. but yea rarely use it now so I guess engagement is dropping
- monkeybutton 5y ago
  There is definitely a dedicated subculture there with their own rules (e.g. selfies being mercilessly down voted in usersub). Also the demographic was relatable for me as it skewed more towards older millennials.

EasyTiger_ 5y ago

Wasn't this the company that ostensibly began on reddit? Their founder used to post many promises about "not selling out" and the rest.

slig 5y ago
They began on Reddit because Reddit was incapable of handling image uploads.
- kordlessagain 5y ago
  Reddit forwards /r/imgur to /r/drugs
  - throwaway1777 5y ago
    Fake news.
  - SquareWheel 5y ago
    No it doesn't. If you mean reddit.com/imgur, that's the ID from a random post in /r/Drugs. Reddit automatically expands the post ID to the original thread.
  - ryder9 5y ago
    bullshit artist
- dpedu 5y ago
  IIRC at the time imgur launched, all of the other free image sharing websites were pretty bad. Reddit itself didn't start allowing uploads until long after imgur.
  - badsectoracula 5y ago
    IMO all the other free image sharing websites are still bad, i've yet to see anything that lets you -e.g.- make direct links to the images for use in Discord, Reddit, forums (phpbb), etc and not surround them with garbage and images tend to stay around for a long time unlike other places where they disappear after a while. The only thing i found annoying with Imgur is the mobile site not allowing zooming for some reason (can be bypassed by loading the desktop version but it is still an annoyance). Not sure if this will still be the case going forward though. I used to like Minus since they allowed all that stuff plus had unlimited GIF sizes and didn't reencode PNGs to JPGs (not sure if Imgur does that anymore) but after Minus was sold it went to hell and then disappeared completely.
    - 5y ago
WORMS_EAT_WORMS 5y ago
Ha. I love reading terrible inflaming comments like this. - What would you have done? - Do you even know 1% of the effort the founding team put into this? - Do you know the exact details of the digital cold war between Reddit and them? This is just a terrible comment by a terribly grumpy person to inflame. - It’s AWESOME the founding team exited - It’s AWESOME someone went heads up with Reddit Everything they did mattered. Nothing you shared did.
- cmbell715 5y ago
  So many straw men, so little time.
  - WORMS_EAT_WORMS 5y ago
    My comment was flagged but what the person is complaining about was probably 10 years ago… and provides little discussion except a quip that doesn’t belong on HN. Whatever.
judge2020 5y ago
Yes, and they have since cut out all references to Reddit, even in their company history section. https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/y81ju/i_created_imgur_ama/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=ios_app&utm_name=iossmf https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/y81ju/i_created_imgur... https://imgurinc.com/about?forcedesktop=1#huge-impact-little-teams https://imgurinc.com/about?forcedesktop=1#huge-impact-little...
- xenihn 5y ago
  I'm sure there's good reasons for this. but I'd be curious for details. I wonder if Reddit would be what it is today without imgur. I started using Reddit shortly before imgur launched, and I can still remember the day that it went live. It was by far the best image uploading experience I'd ever had, and I'd used most (maybe every) major uploader that came before them, between 1995 and 2009.
  - jedberg 5y ago
    > I wonder if Reddit would be what it is today without imgur. It would probably be different, but not worse or better. I was there when Imgur launched, and at the time we thanked Imgur for dealing with the crap of hosting images (checking for child porn, dealing with DMCA notices and other copyright and privacy issues, etc). Had they not existed, reddit would have just done that ourselves. Eventually reddit did do that themselves, but by then Imgur had their own community. I suspect some of those people would still be on reddit.
  - rkagerer 5y ago
    Imgur was to Reddit as PayPal was to eBay.
pram 5y ago
My favorite part is that they added 'social' stuff to imgur uploads, so your images (probably) have a separate set of terrible comments you're not even aware of.
- sbierwagen 5y ago
  Imgur comments have the old twitter length limit, 140 characters.
  - bozhark 5y ago
    watch they weren't even hosting the files, it just backpages to twitter posts
  - ruined 5y ago
    even worse!
- pfraze 5y ago
  To be fair, the Imgur comments are actually pretty funny
didntknowya 5y ago
everyone sells out eventually. nothing wrong with it. either that or they run it into the ground or die. people move on that's just life. congrats to the imgur team and good luck for their next adventures.
- rapind 5y ago
  Not everyone, but it’s definitely rare. Feels good to believe that everyone sells out though when you’re in the process of selling out.
- vesinisa 5y ago
  You don't need to sell out if you can create a service or product that people are willing to pay money for - even indirectly. Granted, this is certainly a difficult feat to pull on a free image hosting site.
- Aeolun 5y ago
  Hmm, as far as I can see you either sell out, or get sold out to. The last one seems like a viable option?
BurningFrog 5y ago
"Selling" and "selling out" are not (always) the same thing.
- munk-a 5y ago
  My dad worked in M&A for a long time and handled the sale of a plastic molding company where the owner was getting quite old and couldn't really run the business anymore. The company was extremely well established and had a very strong and loyal customer base and ran off a single manufacturing facility in a small town out in the boonies. The owner certainly wanted a fair value for the company but he also strongly desired that the plant be kept open and employees retain their positions. Adding this sort of a restriction on a company you're selling is possible - but it is hellishly expensive, generally you're considering adding some sort of third party oversight and auditing for all HR actions and business decisions. If you buy a company under these terms you can end up utterly destroying the company if supply chains shift - the local labour pool is unsustainable or a plethora of other reasons... And almost certainly this burden is mandatorily bundled with the company - so once you've rode the company value down a bit and are looking to get out all of the buyers will know how much of an impossible situation that company is in. At the end of the day when you sell a company you are divorcing yourself from the future direction - you might be invited to stay on as an executive - and the new owners might listen to you... or they might not - that's entirely up to them. Any promises or commitments you've made as an executive are only as good as your word - and when you sell your company your word stops having any power (because you sold that power). I would never shame someone who wanted to keep an ideal going from making an exit they personally need to make - always prioritize your health and happiness over any venture - but when you sell you're accepting the fact that at any moment the buyer may completely reverse the direction of the company.
  - andrekandre 5y ago
    > Any promises or commitments you've made as an executive are only as good as your word - and when you sell your company your word stops having any power (because you sold that power). one option i don't see discussed a lot is selling to your employees (converting to a coop, full esop etc)
Aeolun 5y ago
Ah, yeah, after the previous host was taken over. We all saw that for the lie it was after they took outside investment of course.
gjs278 5y ago
this is a lie MrGrim told reddit. in reality he was promoting imgur on digg, SA, anywhere really. he just told reddit that so they’d think they were part of some secret new club since tinypic, photobucket, and imageshack were all terrible hosts in comparison.
Havoc 5y ago
Yes. Though it did seem genuinely well meaning at the time. Reddit was pretty shit pre imgur pictures wise.
paxys 5y ago
Imgur should have sold to Reddit a long time ago. Not being able to work out a deal was lose-lose for both companies.
NaturalPhallacy 5y ago
It literally began on reddit. I remember reading the thread. The founder (of imgur) was sick of all the bullshit that other hosting sites did. Like not just serving the image. But instead forcing logins, and landing pages etc. I remember the writing was on the wall when someone said, making fun of "imgurians" as people who thought of imgur as "a site to go to" and not just an image host for reddit. It keeps getting more and more user hostile with dark patterns etc. The other day I tried to just go to my page of image uploads on mobile and flat out could not. The site would not let me even though I know the exact url. It was sad, if inevitable to watch imgur become the exact same garbage site it was trying to replace. Time to download my stuff I guess.
edgyquant 5y ago
That was before Reddit added image functionality which basically was a fuck you to imgur. I’m surprised the site has lasted this long without selling.
Vinnl 5y ago
I'll spend two seconds looking it up, but IIRC the founder said he wouldn't sell out "unless they offer like a million dollars". Edit: Looks like it was in the original FAQ. > Can I advertise on imgur? > Hell no! This is a free site (as in beer) and there will never be any ads on it unless I end up selling out for a million dollars. https://web.archive.org/web/20090226191747/https://imgur.com/faq.php#advertise https://web.archive.org/web/20090226191747/https://imgur.com...

darkwizard42 5y ago

Medialab has now acquired Kik (2019), Imgur (2021), Genius (2021)... Big spree of acquisitions! Anyone have any idea the goal?

filmgirlcw 5y ago
To buy old, dilapidated tech/media brands that no longer have any ability to get pay out investors (who are happy to sell on the cheap for a write-off), but still get some level of traffic. Bundle all the traffic together to sell ads across a network of sites with the hopes of profiting. It’s a strategy as old as time. Sometimes it works (IAC, is arguably a good example of a company who has bought or funded companies at various stages of distress/hype (and incubated some that are very successful in their own right, like Match Group) and managed to get goodish CPMs across the sites they bundle together), most of the time it doesn’t. But the goal is to acquire the brand/traffic, cut costs to the bone, and attempt to profit off the traffic by selling ads or user data or whatever. It’s a rollup play and the goal is definitely not to invest back into the companies themselves any more than they need to run.
- benzible 5y ago
  Most of this is dead on but I've been in the middle of this type of deal and "happy to sell" wouldn't be an accurate description of the investors. Having some % of failures is built into the VC model but they'd still much rather have gotten their capital back. Also, this reminds me of Computer Associates' (later CA Technologies) business model: buy enterprise software companies with locked-in customers, fire staff and cut costs as far as possible, and increase maintenance fees, all with the understanding the the business will deteriorate over time. I think here the equivalent of "increase maintenance fees" may be "load up the product with even more ads".
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
taurath 5y ago
Yeah to be an ad network like everything else

bubblehack3r 5y ago

Isn't this the company that aquired Kik and completely abandoned it? Pretty sure this is it. There goes Imagur... https://www.distractify.com/p/what-happened-to-kik https://www.distractify.com/p/what-happened-to-kik Edit: fixed spelling mistake

bozhark 5y ago
abandoned*

jamescun 5y ago

Interesting, I hadn't heard of MediaLab until just a few days ago when I listened to a Darknet Diaries episode[1] about Kik and some "content problems" that MediaLab are leaving unresolved. [1] https://darknetdiaries.com/episode/93/ https://darknetdiaries.com/episode/93/

Belphemur 5y ago
I thought exactly the same. It doesn't bode well for Imgur future. They don't care about their acquisition. It's to wonder why are they doing it in the first place. The company doesn't have any public information either. All I can find is a LONG list of job openings: https://jobs.lever.co/medialab https://jobs.lever.co/medialab Weird list if they are just "investors".
oneplane 5y ago
That exactly the first thought that came to my mind as well. RIP Imgur? It doesn't seem like medialab is anything more than the 'internet brand' version of a patent troll.

beervirus 5y ago

Oof. I hope medialab didn’t spend much on this dog.

sergiotapia 5y ago

An image hosting site seems like one of those applications that are easier than ever to build but impossible to monetize. Most people who use imgur just hotlink - what's the incentive for a company to buy or start a new imgur?

corobo 5y ago
Same as Imgur. The current image hosting sites suck and you know you can do better Then it works and you need to pay the bills 10 years later you sell it and some new guy makes one
rastafang 5y ago
add ads to pictures... that's what everyone else is doing

filmgirlcw 5y ago

They should have sold to Reddit when that option was on the table. The founders didn’t want to because they thought they had options beyond Reddit, but that was never really true. Congrats on any exit, but this one has to be a letdown and I’m sure it didn’t work out for any of the non-founders with options that are now assuredly worthless, but congrats on an exit nonetheless.

andrefuchs 5y ago

There is a great DarknetDiaries episode about the dark side of Medialab's Kik-Messenger. https://darknetdiaries.com/episode/93/ https://darknetdiaries.com/episode/93/

NJL3000 5y ago
Yes, MediaLab needs more sunshine. Kik has major issues..

anonymous344 5y ago

imgur has long been a political manipulation machine. I'll bet after this sell it will only get worse. ps. Have you noticed how 9 gag shows you violence or racism every day in one of the top 5 posts. As tought that "happy site" is trying to make you angry...

Andrew_nenakhov 5y ago

I can't share the love for Imgur: for some reason, all imgur posts, including this one, are never displayed on my mobile Firefox. Just blank screen, and that's it. (the only addon I have is uBlock origin, and I'm too lazy to try turning it off for some random images)

BitwiseFool 5y ago
Imgur does this weird thing on mobile where it will always redirect you to some page where it can then nag you to download their app with grayouts, big buttons, and then a content feed they hope you scroll down on. It also downloads like 6 megabytes worth of local content. Doesn't matter if you are going to the imgur page of the image, or literally the URI to the image file itself.
- actusual 5y ago
  Ah yes, the ol' app interstitial where they hound you to download the app by interrupting whatever you were trying to do on their site. I hate websites that use these.
- ajsnigrutin 5y ago
  Holy fuck that's anoying.. http://example.com/foobar.png http://example.com/foobar.png <- if an url looks like that, I expect a direct link to the image... not some freaky redirect to a shitty webpage with floating popups, cookie prompts and "download the app"... why do I need an app to view a fucking image?! I already have one, it's called a browser!
mrweasel 5y ago
Imgur was a wonderful idea, but I think they forgot to have a business plan. Imgur is absolutely terrible these days. The Imgur community is almost completely toxic. Imgur apparently care about my privacy, but still want to share information with 1200 different "partners". It's also the most effective way of draining the battery of any device you use. Even the new M1 MacBooks will burn through battery like there's no tomorrow if you load the Imgur website in Safari, or worse any other browser. It's not a great site and haven't been for years.

gsich 5y ago

Imgur has gone to shit.

c3534l 5y ago

Ah, this explains why imgur suddenly became unusable.

jdlyga 5y ago

Imgur was awesome for a bunch of years. Glad they had an exit plan.

bluedino 5y ago

And now the race for the next free image host begins...

DarknessFalls 5y ago

Imgur could have pivoted to becoming like Reddit faster than Reddit was able to pivot to incorporate its own image repo. It's all user-submitted content. One was either a link or a blurb of text, the other was imagery.

lindseymysse 5y ago

I've been doing stuff on neocities.org lately. It reminds me what I love about making the internet. I pay the monthly $5 fee for 50gb, and I have no complaints yet. And if I ever have a product idea -- their website is open source, so I can just fork their project and make my own business.

quickthrower2 5y ago
Hosting companies selling 3 years for $150 of traditional PHP shared hosting are still around. I love how skills I learned 15 years ago still work on these and it feels closer to the older web. Probably can run Perl on them! Also a PHP file on one of these is close to “serverless” - it’s a lot simpler doesn’t change its UI and API every 5 minutes like Azure

MauranKilom 5y ago

Hm. My bet would be that you can now count the number of years until imgur links go dead on one hand. This prompted me to check whether there were any backup efforts already, and how much data that would involve. Indeed, archiveteam has some good info: https://wiki.archiveteam.org/index.php/Imgur https://wiki.archiveteam.org/index.php/Imgur > Imgur serves a massive amount of traffic. In 2012 alone, 42 petabytes of data were transferred. Fortunately, the amount of images uploaded is much less, albeit still a lot. In 2012, around 300,000,000 images were uploaded; assuming an average size of 120KB, that's 36TB in one year. As of 2014, there were 650 million images with 1.5 million being added each day according to one source. An analysis in 2015 based on extrapolation from a sample of random image IDs estimated about 2 billion images with a total raw full-resolution image size of 376 TiB. Also makes me think about whether/how much I currently link to imgur in various places on the internet, and whether there's anything that I should prepare to replace. Do people have suggestions how to best approach this?

catillac 5y ago
I would change any links you have pointing to Imgur. But as for storing the contents, wasn’t it just a site for memes? I can’t recall a single time over many years seeing anything worth preserving that wasn’t essentially throwaway content.
- MauranKilom 5y ago
  Well, one (semi-)frequent use case for me would be creating some graphic (e.g. a chart or a UI suggestion) that I would share in some community (e.g. forum). Unlikely anyone looks at them again a decade later, but those embeds will still rot away...
- wodenokoto 5y ago
  Tons of amazing one-off blog posts told with images as the focus has been posted through Imgur. Things like “how I renovated my house” or “how the circuitry of this gadget works” told through pictures with supporting texts lives solely on Imgur.
- coldpie 5y ago

srjek 5y ago

https://blog.imgur.com/2021/09/27/celebrating-imgurs-next-chapter/ https://blog.imgur.com/2021/09/27/celebrating-imgurs-next-ch... may be a better url. At least on mobile, the gallery link fails to load. Any scrolling then redirects and rewrites history to a random post.

soylentgraham 5y ago
Well, why change a formula that leads to an exit.

solarkraft 5y ago

Oh no. Imgur was already close to being overloaded with ads. I have no doubt this will get much worse. Any suggestions for alternative no bullshit image hosting services?

mpd 5y ago
I'm currently using https://postimages.org/ https://postimages.org/ for the odd occasion I want to upload something.
stavros 5y ago
I made one: https://imgz.org/ https://imgz.org/

madrox 5y ago

Congrats to Imgur on its exit, I suppose. Honestly, this is probably the best outcome they could hope for. I suspect their growth has stagnated and are losing mindshare in the meme economy to Reddit and Discord. Imgur was started in a very different world from today and they didn't evolve enough. Regardless, I'm grateful to them. Imgur will always have a soft spot in my heart.

ChrisArchitect 5y ago

Imgur, great service, lasted this long, amazing. But I always wondered how any of these random image hosts afforded bandwidth (reminds of the other various ones like TwitPic who was saved from being taken offline by Twitter). I mean, I have a gallery of images in there, privately stored, directly linked to here and there around the net, without paying for anything for years. I think at one point I can't even remember now I did pay them a small fee and then they removed that option to go it alone with ads and refused to 'take my money'. Which seemed crazy and still does. Does the small imgur community (Which exists as a bizarre also-ran of Reddit) sustain them enough on ad views?

mkr-hn 5y ago
I emailed one of them 12 years and 4 months ago to ask how they paid for everything. This was back in 2009 when the internet was still small enough that companies would respond to random emails. They responded to say they had funding covered. They shut down a few years later. The domain is there, but it just says "ImageHost.org is closed" with a Google Analytics tag.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
BiteCode_dev 5y ago
My guess is PR. Regularly, on imgur, you see a pic in interest for a celebrity, a rich person, a movie. It looks organic, but if you look closely, there are plenty of weird things about it. Then it disappears as suddenly as it arrived. I believe that they sell the front page to PR firms that need to promote something in a way the people think themself came up with the hype. It's probably the same for a lot of communities with a strong influence on trends, like popular sub reddits or hacker news. There is no better ads than the one you don't see. There is no better slogan than the one you repeat to your friends as a catchphrase. And there is no better propaganda than the one based on ideas you thought you had by yourself.
- djhn 5y ago

efnx 5y ago

Does anybody know what the acquisition price was? Or what the terms were (like how long must the founders remain on the team, etc)?

ChrisArchitect 5y ago

Medialab's other things include like, Genius (ok, fair enough, sustains itself / useful/ well-used I'm assuming)....and Kik? The teen messaging app from like 2010 that no one uses anymore? hm Had to look a bit harder to even find their website (https://www.medialab.la/ https://www.medialab.la/) - 'a holding company of consumer internet brands' heh, sheesh, yeah that's not sketchy.

jdorfman 5y ago
> Kik? The teen messaging app from like 2010 that no one uses anymore? I use to think the same thing, until I listened to this episode of Darknet Diaries: https://darknetdiaries.com/episode/93/ https://darknetdiaries.com/episode/93/
- xmprt 5y ago
  1/3 American Teenagers use the app according to Kik... I have a feeling they're not counting right because that doesn't sound right to me.
- toyg 5y ago
  After reading this, it's clear everybody knows (multiple legal challenges, involvement by MS...) and nobody with actual power wants to crack down on it. Safe haven or not, when authorities want to destroy a sketchy business, they have a number of weapons at their disposal. To me, it all suggests Kik (and by extension, possibly, Medialab) might well be some sort of law-enforcement front at this point.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
NelsonMinar 5y ago
Kik's the website that had a serious child porn and child sexual solicitation problem. I think they've tried to do something about that in the last couple of years but from a quick Google search it's not clear it's really worked.

mdoms 5y ago

I have never seen a service decline so quickly from "simple and actually pretty useful" to "bloated, slow mess" as Imgur. I don't see that trend reversing for them. I suspect much of the slowness is because I live in the ass end of the world (NZ), but that's a problem that can be solved with money.... money they likely don't want to spend.

seattle_spring 5y ago
> I have never seen a service decline so quickly from "simple and actually pretty useful" to "bloated, slow mess" as Imgur Reddit did a pretty good job of going from simple and relatively lightweight to bloated and unusable in a very short timeframe.

paxys 5y ago

https://www.medialab.la/ https://www.medialab.la/ for those wondering. > medialab is a holding company of consumer internet brands.

harry8 5y ago

Imgur sort of claims to be organic and user driven but that just seems a stretch. Before the 2016 election it was full of Pro-trump meme content. Now there is absolutely none and it's full of orthodox Democrat boosting meme content with any Republican mention advancing the idea that the whole party and all its supporters are completely beyond redemption being in league with Satan himself. No way that's not curated, for mine and I think it will backfire.

mrkramer 5y ago

Imgur only exists because Reddit at the time didn't have native image host but since they introduced it Imgur is in decline[0]. [0] https://minimaxir.com/2017/06/imgur-decline/ https://minimaxir.com/2017/06/imgur-decline/

l-albertovich 5y ago

Huh, a few days ago I listened to the darknet diaries on kik, I guess imgur is about to become a child porn den... Sarcasm aside, it'd be cool if they got their shit together.

balozi 5y ago

Congratulations to Medialab for their newly-acquired gigantic pile of porno content. Sir, please invite us over when you get settled in. XOXO

calltrak 5y ago

imgur sucks. i prefer https://picc.io https://picc.io

rastafang 5y ago
https://picc.io/6SgIC3X.jpg https://picc.io/6SgIC3X.jpg

missedthecue 5y ago

Is this the same Medialab that bought the lyrics website Genius for $80 million last week?

chptung 5y ago
Yes

Traster 5y ago

By the way, it's pronounced "Imager" for those that don't know.

reilly3000 5y ago

As a side note I find it amusing how the HN community simultaneously obsesses over startups, equity, funding rounds, etc but gets grumpy when a company actually does sell. The cognitive dissonance is sublime.

jacquesm 5y ago
HN contains enough people of different vintage and background that it would be rather more surprising if there was any subject that we all agreed on. This has nothing to do with cognitive dissonance, which is something unique to an individual, at best you could conclude that HN is able to cater to people on opposing sides of some spectra without turning into a hate fest.
corobo 5y ago
I find it amusing that people think of "the HN community" as a singular mind or something Different people respond to different things
NaturalPhallacy 5y ago
doublethink* CD would be us being uncomfortable with the conflict and possibly resolving it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_dissonance https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_dissonance
edgyquant 5y ago
It depends on when they sell and who too. If you create a neat startup and sell for a lot to a respectable company then it’s praised but if you sell to a sketchy company (like this) long after your prime it’s looked down on

seph-reed 5y ago

Damn. Imgur just became amazing in the last month. They rolled out a feature where you can filter out political posts, and it's become the only place I can go to just enjoy some mindless scrolling. There's still a ton of political posters who never tag, but you can mute them. And then there's the "look how dumb those people are" circle jerks, that aren't actually political. But all in all, I have a pretty decent quality to circle jerk ratio.

rastafang 5y ago
> There's still a ton of political posters who never tag, but you can mute them. not really scalable
- seph-reed 5y ago
  You'd be amazed at how many of the daily front page political posts come from only a handful of people. There's still a ton of offenders, but only so many super prolific ones.

tyrfing 5y ago

Interesting company. It was created in 2018 [1], and the CEO is Michael Heyward, who was a co-founder of Whisper. Some interesting shuffling happened with Whisper [2] and it's now owned by MediaLab. Since then they have acquired a number of other properties, the general idea seems to buy declining brands for cheap and extract as much value as possible on mobile. [3] There is no public information on their funding. 1. https://businesssearch.sos.ca.gov/CBS/SearchResults?SearchType=NUMBER&SearchCriteria=C4168042 https://businesssearch.sos.ca.gov/CBS/SearchResults?SearchTy... 2. https://www.latimes.com/business/technology/la-fi-tn-whisper-board-20170829-story.html https://www.latimes.com/business/technology/la-fi-tn-whisper... 3. https://www.assemblyexchange.com/about-us https://www.assemblyexchange.com/about-us - their job ads feature this ad network prominently.

prostoalex 5y ago
Darknet Diaries episode on Kik messenger has some background on Medianet https://darknetdiaries.com/episode/93/ https://darknetdiaries.com/episode/93/
eryu 5y ago
The whisper founders threatened to default on the debt they raised from SVB, then used inside money to buy it at cents on the dollar. because debt is senior to equity, they then wiped out the equity raised and kicked sequoia, shasta, and lightspeed off the board. then raised PE to fund a series of purchases of apps such as kik, and a lot of android apps with churned users with always-on location permissions turned on. They then used that data to build a small ad network.
- echelon 5y ago
  Holy shit. That's a mafia move against VC. Pretty much guarantees that these folks will never raise another round from anyone ever again, though. Way to burn bridges...
- chptung 5y ago
  Source? Because if true this is pretty baller move but also a big f.u to VCs

mackal 5y ago

Imgur jumped the shark long ago.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

JohnJamesRambo 5y ago

There is a shitload of porn on Imgur. Is Medialab going to do the Silicon Valley Puritan investor purge on it?

rastafang 5y ago

Time to get a new gimp addon ... also hopefully Flameshot will switch to another service.

1B05H1N 5y ago

Well, it was nice while it lasted.

ChuckMcM 5y ago

TL;DR - we've been doing this for 12 years and we're tired and want to do something else. These guys gave us enough money to do that. Interesting that there are at least three 'Medialab' brands, one is the management platform for healthcare, one is a department at MIT, and then there is Medialab the holding company (https://www.medialab.la/ https://www.medialab.la/) which bought Genius (YC S11) too. I may be too cynical because I'm guessing they are going to give it the 'Sourceforge' treatment.

nixpulvis 5y ago
> Interesting that there are at least three 'Medialab' brands, one is the management platform for healthcare, one is a department at MIT, and then there is Medialab the holding company This really confused me. The logos of the management platform and MIT are practically the same as well.

BugWatch 5y ago

Nothing good ever lasts. Well, then... time to archive the links for future find-and-replace, and to offload everything I have there (luckily, not much, I learned my lesson on imageshack.us once upon a yesteryear).

peanut_worm 5y ago

Imgur is currently almost unusable, for a product so bad maybe this is a good thing. If it isn’t, I would be shocked if they’re still in business in a year.

just-tom 5y ago

I remember 9gag was a hit before imgur took their job.

rkagerer 5y ago

If you have any requests and ideas to continue improving Imgur, let them know here [1]. I just sent one asking them to never change it. [1] https://www.medialab.la/contact-us https://www.medialab.la/contact-us

rkagerer 5y ago

Jeez, I've uploaded hundreds of images over the years to embed directly in forum posts. As to migrating... I know you can download all the pictures in your account. But is there any way to include the corresponding top (or most recent) referrer so you know the places you need to go to update URL's?