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Comment by toomuchtodo

7 months ago

It is an image storage service masquerading as a business. It will be of no loss if it were to fail entirely.

13 comments

toomuchtodo

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donatj  7 months ago

> image storage service masquerading as a business

…

> service

Money is good for goods and services…

If people give them money or cough ad revenue and get the service they want, that’s called a business.

perihelions  7 months ago

> "It will be of no loss if it were to fail entirely."

That's decades of the public internet that would be permanently erased; billions of dead links pointing nowhere. HN alone would lose ~32,000 images from its archives,

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

Is it not hubris to call it "no loss" if, say, 3 hours ago, "Design of a LISP-based microprocessor / Page 22 has a map of the processor layout:" was forever lost to humanity, as collateral damage to some techbros' dispute?

Decentralization can't arrive soon enough.

  • Jach  7 months ago

    As already pointed out that link is already gone, except for the IA. That's part of why it's "no loss" -- it's not actually lost.

    Personally even if the IA didn't have a copy, I'd still say "marginal loss" and "inconvenient". imgur is just another in the line of image hosting sites that have come and gone. Much of what it hosts isn't actually high value, and isn't actually the sole copy.

    Not sure what you're pining for with respect to "decentralization" -- we already have it, nothing stops someone from uploading an imgur image elsewhere, either the original uploader or someone downloading and reuploading somewhere. There are other image hosting sites. And yes, the internet is filled with dead URLs, privatized or deleted forums and discords and twitter accounts that host or previously hosted unique discussion or media, etc. etc. and any number of other minor tragedies. imgur totally dying would be among the least of them.

  • toomuchtodo  7 months ago

    > Is it not hubris to call it "no loss" if, say, 3 hours ago, "Design of a LISP-based microprocessor / Page 22 has a map of the processor layout:" was forever lost to humanity, as collateral damage to some techbros' dispute?

    https://web.archive.org/web/20230427181813/https://i.imgur.c... (link is already dead at Imgur)

    Wayback will have them, as is tradition. A crawl (non IA) has been kicked off to reconcile to ensure maximum coverage of Imgur links on HN.