Comment by Workaccount2
8 months ago
What's interesting about imgur, and telling of how times changed, was that it was created mostly to fill the gap in unreliable uploading of images to reddit.
Which begs the question: What the hell was reddit doing that they didn't immediately implement an image hosting feature to keep users on the platform? Imgur rose to fame because it was the darling image host of reddit users, and it wasn't long before imgur needed to pay hosting costs and started sucking users away from reddit and into their own "imgurian" sharing hub.
I guess the internet back then was still in the "Open effort to make the internet awesome for everyone" phase, and hadn't yet gotten to the adversarial "Capture users and never let them leave" phase.
I was an early Reddit user. Very early Reddit was a popular spot for programming discussion because it was mostly tech people using it.
That quickly flipped, as /r/NSFW became the most popular subreddit. You could avoid it by browsing as a guest or by curating your feed, but porn was everywhere.
Early Reddit also had a strong attitude about minimal moderation. The early days were characterized by a feeling that anything goes as long as it wasn’t illegal or too extreme to defend. Combined with the popularity of porn on the website it created strange situations where a lot of subreddits were focused on things like legal-enough photos of underage children. There were also a lot of weird alt-right and white supremacist forums. There was an unofficial (if I recall correctly) “Subreddit of the Day” that attracted controversy because it actually highlighted one of the “jailbait” subreddits and even a white supremacist subreddit.
So if you were there at the time, it was obvious why Reddit wasn’t going to host their own images: It would have been a legal nightmare with all of the porn (copyrighted material), the creepy underage stuff, and white supremacist memes
Reddit did a decent job of containing this stuff out of view of the average user and later removing it from the site. It took many years.
If you peeked at /r/all or browsed new during the early days it would have been clear why image hosting would have been out of the question at the time.
> The early days were characterized by a feeling that anything goes as long as it wasn’t illegal or too extreme to defend.
Q: Wouldn't most of us want to defend the right to publish content that's "not illegal"?
On your own site or services? Of course.
I don’t want to host that content, though. That’s also my right.
As I discovered on the early days on Reddit, I don’t even want to be on a site where content is a free-for-all because you could go from scrolling through programming topics to encountering sexualized imagery of minors by scrolling if you weren’t careful.
This is the problem with every hardcore free speech platform: They attract the people who only come to post that content, while everyone else who doesn’t want to see it starts leaving. Then after some time, the majority of your content is catering to those niches.
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No. I think plenty of us recognize that the law has to have rigidly defined lines that don’t always line up neatly with morality. A great example is the “jailbait” subreddit that was talked about above. It makes sense that it’s technically legal, but I’d rather not be associated with the site that hosts it or the people who frequent it.
Reddit’s eventual livelihood would be based on selling ads, so legality is not the line they were aiming for.
A right to publish it? Yes. An entitlement to a platform that will handle the publishing for you? Only if the owners of that platform freely agree to do so.
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Sadly, no, not most of us. Not even a lot of us.
I didn't have an account at the time, but I tried to like Reddit when it was one of the new link aggregators on the block. The minimalist functionality appealed to me and there were no subreddits at the time. Unfortunately I give up on it after a few weeks because most of the links/discussions were usually about evenly split between Emacs, Ruby and magic mushrooms. None of which I ever got around to trying.
Perhaps its too late but mushrooms are totally worth it. The other two will destroy your brain and leave you a raving lunatic.
Perhaps it's too late but Ruby is totally worth it. The other two will destroy your brain and leave you a raving lunatic.
Perhaps its too late but Emacs is totally worth it. The other two will destroy your brain and leave you a raving lunatic.
(Thank you, MisterTea.)
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You can read a lot more about this on Wikipedia, most would be surprised at just how bad parts of it were -
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Controversial_Reddit_communiti...
Some that come to mind to me from the old days (some less old than others):
- "Street fashion" subs, where photos were NOTICEABLY of underage girls taken on the street candidly, usually from a long distance (telephoto lens), and everyone talked about "fashion" in ways you figured out pretty fast were not about fashion. There were a number operating at the same time as a sort of redundancy as they would vanish from time to time.
- CSAM investigation type subs, where users who REALLY knew the lingo and details of CSAM talked about how they were investigating CSAM elsewhere on the internet ... like they were amateur police, but it was kinda indistinguishable from them being connoisseurs. They also would tell each other very suspicious stories about their investigations, like something a jr. high student would make up because they don't know how the world works. It was like they thought they were setting up some sort of plausible deniability or something...
- Gamergate and that whole bizzaro world spanned subs but it was absolutely insane how emotionally charged the devotes were about something as inconsequential as ... video game reviews.
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Alexis's mom had cancer. He wanted her so see him succeed, so they sold it in the first year to Conde Nast (the published of Wired magazine). Conde had a popular blog called Webmonkey, and there was a reddit feed in the sidebar.
Early reddit skewed heavily towards people who make shit online; fitting for a site made by people making shit online.
Just to give you an idea of just how hands off Reddit moderation was at the start there used to be a /r/sexwithdogs subreddit. That was not fun seeing in /r/all one day.
Years ago, someone on r/datahoarder made a toy website that showed a “waterfall” of the newest images being posted to Imgur.
Initial comments of “oh neat!” quickly turned into “oh no!” and the toy site didn’t last long as it was. I think Imgur had some kind of detection (possibly automatic+manual) of illegal material going on, but it (the manual side of it?) would occur some time after posting.
I was a mod of a few semipopular subs back then and this is accurate. Understating it even.
One of my favorite early-reddit memory is a guy sharing his S3 bucket over a holiday. People were uploading and downloading so many things... I don't even want to know what that guy's bill looked like.
Also the old days of image hosting (and maybe now) was kinda unprofitable ... Reddit didn't have to do it / spend money on it when others were happy to lose money on their behalf.
/r/programming circa 2008 was full of interesting links and discussions, i can testify that
> What the hell was reddit doing that they didn't immediately implement an image hosting feature
Maybe partly because it wasn't Imgur that added image hosting to reddit it was more reddit always had images they were just on ImageShack, PhotoBucket and there was another reddit darling one who's name escapes me before imgur which I think added ads or started deleting images that caused Imgur to be created.
So Imgur was more just the most successful in a long line of image hosts and the only one to successfully transplant reddit users to their own thing.
Tinypic maybe? I know we used it a lot on Gaia back in the day.
Might've been Minus
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I remember waffleimages
that was somethingawful
Imgur was created because ImageShack was what everyone used and they'd gotten increasingly terrible. In the beginning, ImageShack was good. But images were expensive to host in the 2000's. So they moved very quickly into the exploit phase, and they exploited it hard.
ImageShack removed images that became too popular, which created maximal outrage with the most people, just as content was going viral. Images hosted on ImageShack would randomly get corrupted, and it'd be difficult to reach support to fix this. ImageShack was annoying. You'd try to go directly to the .jpg URL and it'd load the HTML website with lots of ads. In order to upload to ImageShack, you'd have to register an account and potentially pay money.
Imgur was a breath of fresh air. They didn't do any of those things. It was just the simple reliable free image upload service people wanted. So it took over ImageShack's role almost overnight. Imgur eventually rolled in their own exploitation, but they did it a lot more moderately than ImageShack.
Once you start hosting images, you open up a whole bucket of worms for moderation, separate from handling storage, bandwidth etc. I can see plenty of rationale for deferring that, knowing that you can always add it later with an easier to use UI than going to a third party site.
One of the other reddit admins will likely have a better answer, but at the time I worked for them (10-11), the answer was it was a complexity the reddit team didn't want to have to deal with.
Running an image host takes a lot of effort. You have to deal with removals, content policing, and the other nasties, as well as just having to deal with the sheer volume of data, which was a much larger concern in the 2010 era internet than it is now.
Reddit at the time just wanted to focus on being a link and text post site, much like HN is.
My guess would be cost. I don’t think Reddit had much, if any, revenue at the time and images would likely require orders of magnitude more storage.
Yeah, when imgur came about reddit was 99% text on the site. Hosting images would have been a huge step up in cost considering the user count. Then of course people realized that if imgur can make money on ads thanks to reddit's traffic, reddit could potentially make even more and it has been all down hill from there.
Not to mention the liability of hosting users' media, which would have needed costly moderation to ensure nothing too illegal made its way in.
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Reddit was a link aggregator till the recent shitty redesign. So image posts were just a post with a URL. You needed RES if you wanted to open the image inline with the post and comments.
Isn't storage cheap? Telegram advertises as free unlimited storage.
Storage multiplies and becomes more expensive once you're replicating across regions, backing up into an eternally growing corpus, and so on.
But the biggest impediment by far were internet transport costs. I mean, they're still onerous for a lot of media-heavy sites, but it was much worse at the time. Offloading that to third parties made an incredible amount of sense.
It's actually kind of bizarre that there is an Imgur "community". I know the operation ran at a massive money-losing proposition for quite some time.
Storage and bandwidth were way more expensive in 2009.
And yet imgur, with no revenue at all, managed to fill that gap.
They made hotlinking increasingly difficult, turned the site into a social network and sold ads against content. It is no longer a "image hosting site" the way it was back then, it was going bankrupt as well.
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> What the hell was reddit doing that they didn't immediately implement an image hosting feature to keep users on the platform
Reddit was a hub for illegal porn so presumably, they didn't want to face a crackdown for hosting that kind of content. It still is, but nsfw posts are banned from /r/all now.
I don't think any of the porn on Reddit is illegal.
Illegal posts were never allowed, but I imagine any site focused on sharing porn is going to become filled with copyrighted content.
They also had a lot of severely creepy subreddits involving underage children or adult photos talents and shared with consent.
It was really bad. I left the site for years because that type of content was everywhere.
Except for all the revenge porn, creep shots, and the infamous "fappening" over 10 years ago
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Ohhhhhh think again
Doesn't beg the question. There's a whole evolving history there. Reddit didn't need to 'keep users on the platform' because they weren't leaving it. Most images on imgur shared on reddit (and a billion forums elsewhere) were direct links to the images, they weren't going to any sort of imgur landing page or whatever. Imgur just slowly developed that later and surprisingly developed its own also-ran community onsite.
Similarly over on twitter without any image hosting capabilities let third party sites like twitpic host images for years before evetually developing their own service. Twitpic eventually caved under the load of hosting so much stuff without income and it was good that Twitter was successful enough to take it all on directly.
The other responses are correct, but they're not including an important detail. Reddit was originally a replacement for all of the niche bulletin board sites that had cropped up around the internet. It was a way to create and manage a community without the cost and technical expertise required for phpBB. It also gave you access to existing users without them having to create a new account.
All of those previous Bulletin Board sites did not host images themselves either.
> What the hell was reddit doing that they didn't immediately implement an image hosting feature to keep users on the platform?
Image hosting is insanely expensive and they couldn’t afford to do it or were smart enough not to.
Every image host that added paid accounts or ads all over the place had a horrible reputation at the time (see photobucket). They likely wanted to avoid ruining their reputation before going public.
Heck even Imgur caught heat when they needed to start paying the bills.
Also it was a different internet. We hadn't fully internalized that Reddit was becoming more a stupid meme/image/video dump primarily than a place for discussion of articles.
Image hosting used to be expensive, so forums avoided it and image hosts were scummy and filled with ads. Imgur was a first mover when cloud hosting and CDNs meant it could be relatively cheap for a small shop to do quality image hosting.
Meanwhile, reddit was a forgotten subsidiary of Condé Nast working out of a corner in Wired's SF office. Jedberg will chime in, but when imgur was founded, reddit's handful of engineers were busy keeping the site from falling over. They didn't have time to build out image hosting.
I remember that time on Reddit.
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