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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.
    - quickthrower2 5y ago
      Who’s paying if there are no ads?
  - degenerate 5y ago
    Correct. ImageShack was the most widely used host on reddit and had recently disabled hotlinking (after nearly a year of ad bloat on their main site) so user MrGrim on reddit created Imgur and announced it on Reddit 12 years ago: https://old.reddit.com/r/reddit.com/comments/7zlyd/my_gift_to_reddit_i_created_an_image_hosting/c07u7kr/ https://old.reddit.com/r/reddit.com/comments/7zlyd/my_gift_t... He did an AMA 3 years later: https://old.reddit.com//r/IAmA/comments/y81ju/i_created_imgur_ama/ https://old.reddit.com//r/IAmA/comments/y81ju/i_created_imgu...
    - gsich 5y ago
      And now Imgur has disabled hotlinking. Depending on device and/or image.
      - corobo 5y ago
        And has an interstitial ad to wait through before upload. I don't think even ImageShack thought of that one
    - tschwimmer 5y ago
      Holy crap, I have not thought about imageshack for a decade. It was hot garbage: slow, ad ridden and if I recall correctly they would disable your hotlinked images if they used too much bandwidth. Imgur was something of a godsend at the time. Now it's commodity unfortunately.
      - jagger27 5y ago
        I remember when ImageShack was the best of all the bad options. TinyPic and PhotoBucket were super slow, and I remember popular forums back then either didn’t support image uploads, or they were even slower to load than external hosts. So much internet history has been lost to “this image has exceeded its bandwidth limit” placeholders from PhotoBucket and TinyPic. Imgur really did change everything.
      - pfraze 5y ago
        The disabled hotlink images are the only reason I know imageshack exists. How’s that for marketing?
  - minimaxir 5y ago
    Here's a data analysis I made years ago on how Reddit native image uploads overtook Imgur uploads: https://minimaxir.com/2017/06/imgur-decline/ https://minimaxir.com/2017/06/imgur-decline/
- techrat 5y ago
  > They began on Reddit because Reddit was incapable of handling image uploads. I'd argue they largely still are incapable of handling image uploads. Their gallery system sucks and the redesign just makes it harder to even see what was posted.
  - cptskippy 5y ago
    The image uploading fails most of the time for me.
  - hanniabu 5y ago
    And their video player is even worse!
  - teraflop 5y ago
    It's not just a poor design. old.reddit.com currently has what ought to be considered a show-stopping functional bug: every gallery post (that is, every post with multiple images) has its URL replaced with the empty string, causing it to render as a purple link that goes nowhere. If you instead click the little "comments" link, the post loads as normal. This has been reported to the admins dozens of times since it first started happening about 3 months ago, and so far the only response is "we're looking into it". I'm not sure which possibility is more damning: the idea that they're incapable of fixing such an obvious regression, or that they literally don't care because they're trying to irritate everybody enough to switch to the newer, uglier version of the site. https://www.reddit.com/r/help/comments/o6ckmr/threads_showing_read_even_though_i_never_clicked/ https://www.reddit.com/r/help/comments/o6ckmr/threads_showin...
    - Abrownn 5y ago
      That 'empty string/purple link' issue still happens to me even on NewReddit. I can find old Galleries that work just fine on both, it's so weird.
      - teraflop 5y ago
        Interesting, I hadn't seen it reported on the new version before. I spend more time than I ought to browsing Reddit, and I literally haven't seen a single correctly-working gallery post on any subreddit in months.
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...

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.
  - quickthrower2 5y ago
    Who’s paying if there are no ads?
- degenerate 5y ago
  Correct. ImageShack was the most widely used host on reddit and had recently disabled hotlinking (after nearly a year of ad bloat on their main site) so user MrGrim on reddit created Imgur and announced it on Reddit 12 years ago: https://old.reddit.com/r/reddit.com/comments/7zlyd/my_gift_to_reddit_i_created_an_image_hosting/c07u7kr/ https://old.reddit.com/r/reddit.com/comments/7zlyd/my_gift_t... He did an AMA 3 years later: https://old.reddit.com//r/IAmA/comments/y81ju/i_created_imgur_ama/ https://old.reddit.com//r/IAmA/comments/y81ju/i_created_imgu...
  - gsich 5y ago
    And now Imgur has disabled hotlinking. Depending on device and/or image.
    - corobo 5y ago
      And has an interstitial ad to wait through before upload. I don't think even ImageShack thought of that one
  - tschwimmer 5y ago
    Holy crap, I have not thought about imageshack for a decade. It was hot garbage: slow, ad ridden and if I recall correctly they would disable your hotlinked images if they used too much bandwidth. Imgur was something of a godsend at the time. Now it's commodity unfortunately.
    - jagger27 5y ago
      I remember when ImageShack was the best of all the bad options. TinyPic and PhotoBucket were super slow, and I remember popular forums back then either didn’t support image uploads, or they were even slower to load than external hosts. So much internet history has been lost to “this image has exceeded its bandwidth limit” placeholders from PhotoBucket and TinyPic. Imgur really did change everything.
    - pfraze 5y ago
      The disabled hotlink images are the only reason I know imageshack exists. How’s that for marketing?
- minimaxir 5y ago
  Here's a data analysis I made years ago on how Reddit native image uploads overtook Imgur uploads: https://minimaxir.com/2017/06/imgur-decline/ https://minimaxir.com/2017/06/imgur-decline/
techrat 5y ago
> They began on Reddit because Reddit was incapable of handling image uploads. I'd argue they largely still are incapable of handling image uploads. Their gallery system sucks and the redesign just makes it harder to even see what was posted.
- cptskippy 5y ago
  The image uploading fails most of the time for me.
- hanniabu 5y ago
  And their video player is even worse!
- teraflop 5y ago
  It's not just a poor design. old.reddit.com currently has what ought to be considered a show-stopping functional bug: every gallery post (that is, every post with multiple images) has its URL replaced with the empty string, causing it to render as a purple link that goes nowhere. If you instead click the little "comments" link, the post loads as normal. This has been reported to the admins dozens of times since it first started happening about 3 months ago, and so far the only response is "we're looking into it". I'm not sure which possibility is more damning: the idea that they're incapable of fixing such an obvious regression, or that they literally don't care because they're trying to irritate everybody enough to switch to the newer, uglier version of the site. https://www.reddit.com/r/help/comments/o6ckmr/threads_showing_read_even_though_i_never_clicked/ https://www.reddit.com/r/help/comments/o6ckmr/threads_showin...
  - Abrownn 5y ago
    That 'empty string/purple link' issue still happens to me even on NewReddit. I can find old Galleries that work just fine on both, it's so weird.
    - teraflop 5y ago
      Interesting, I hadn't seen it reported on the new version before. I spend more time than I ought to browsing Reddit, and I literally haven't seen a single correctly-working gallery post on any subreddit in months.

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...