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0 pointsdpedu4y ago0 comments

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.

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degenerate4y 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_t...

He did an AMA 3 years later: https://old.reddit.com//r/IAmA/comments/y81ju/i_created_imgu...

tschwimmer4y 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.

jagger274y 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.

pfraze4y ago

The disabled hotlink images are the only reason I know imageshack exists. How’s that for marketing?

gsich4y ago

And now Imgur has disabled hotlinking. Depending on device and/or image.

corobo4y ago

And has an interstitial ad to wait through before upload. I don't think even ImageShack thought of that one

epa4y ago

It was one specific date which imageshack decided to essentially ban all images being linked on Reddit. Imgur filled the void and grew via their own social.

minimaxir4y 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/

badsectoracula4y 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.

quickthrower24y ago

Who’s paying if there are no ads?

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