Comment by socalgal2
1 day ago
Imgur is 80% posts of text for people trying to post political messages vs what it used to be, interesting or funny pictures
I guess that's their traffic so that's their market but ugh. Imagine if flickr or some other photo site was run over by people posting photos of text messags.
I discovered recently that a big part of this is that sites weight photos of text higher than text.
I learned that the LinkedIn meta of photos of posts is because their algorithm de-ranks anything with a link, so for farming you should post a picture of text then follow up with a link to a blog post a day later as a comment reply to the post to double-dip the activity.
And, eurgh, so many bad incentives to just make everything worse.
If you earnestly just post a link to a blog, it weights you don't because they don't want people leaving their feed.
And actual text people spend less time hovering than photos of text, so again, down the ranking your post goes.
I don't spend much time on other social media but if Imgur is all just photos of text that won't be an accident, but it'll be what sites optimise for.
> I learned that the LinkedIn meta of photos of posts is because their algorithm de-ranks anything with a link
Twitter is just the same. It honestly sucks.
What imgur used to be was just an image host for reddit. Then they tried to make it into a separate community thing and reddit added their own image/video hosting.
I remember when Imgur tried to become a self-contained community.
Reddit users would post an image in Imgur and the "community" would reply complaining about the lack of context, judging appearances or just being mean in general. The nicest ones would ask users (that would never read anything) to make the images private.
It was a very strange alternate universe.