I'm trying to think of when I'd want to pay for this.
If I have to put a link to an image somewhere to be able to refer to it anonymously on someone like Reddit or HN (that is, I want someone to see an image, but I don't want to give them a personally-identifiable account) I'm ok posting to Imgur. Sure, I don't like being the product, but I have an ad-block, I do it like twice a year, and it's not enough to pay $12 for.
If I want to actually share photos or something with people I know, I'll use Google Photos.
If I need to share an image with someone professionally, I'll use Google Drive.
- Introduction: In the first line "but are ashamed of what Imgur has become?" why should I be ashamed of imgur?
- Emotional Appeal: If you are referring to a person who is willing to pay a non zero amount of money as "You are cheap" why would one go ahead and press the pay button?
- Screaming I don't care : You seek feedback and state that you might not do anything about it in the same sentence.
I guess you might have actively prevented few willing customers and made them to reconsider their choices.
I just want you to know that even I won't be paying for your service, the marketing worked for me, too. Haters gonna hate, but those who know, know. Thanks for all that you do.
> - Emotional Appeal: If you are referring to a person who is willing to pay a non zero amount of money as "You are cheap" why would one go ahead and press the pay button?
To get a subscription, of course!
> - Screaming I don't care : You seek feedback and state that you might not do anything about it in the same sentence.
Yeah, I thought about the contradiction there, but I somehow don't care that people don't sign up and also want to know why they aren't signing up.
I absolutely love the abrasive tone and if I had need for an image host, I'd be on that sweet-sweet cheapass tier in no time flat.
I like knowing this is just a person, and I would be willing to pay for that. I get the sense this person is too annoyed to double monetize me secretly (only half jokingly: you wont get that kinda confidence just anywhere). And they don't attempt to put-on-airs wrt the competence required to work a small-to-mid scale image hosting platform. Yet it still feels competent enough that I'm not worried about uptime. Plus they have cli tools to boot.
However, as others have said, I just don't know when I would use this.
To be frank, I don't even fully understand how igmur makes money with most people using some form of adblock (there was an article on here claiming 50% of Americas now do so). Plus I imagine if you are looking for some type of hosting that skews even further. I hadn't even realize igmur pivoted into a four-video-ads-per-image social media platform because of said adblock.
It is very clearly a joke recognizing that the service doesn't actually provide any value that isn't easily found elsewhere for free. But it's also functional, in that those that are paying for it are likely to see that if they want to keep it going they will need to pay more, but if they don't really need it, they can let it die. It puts the choice in the hands of the users without trying to bullshit them that the service is actually worth the cost.
Boy, I was not expecting the set of comments I'm looking at here.
Folks -- this is _clearly_ sarcasm! This guy could not care less how many people use his service (or at least, he's maintaining a good spirit about how hard it can be).
For what it's worth, I thought it was very funny :)
But with that being said, media hosting sites (image, video, even email hosting) become deceptively low margin very fast.
With no ability to purge a users catalog of media, over time - a user become LESS profitable for you (because the more you’re having to store for them, the higher that user costs you).
If new account growth slows, it can create a situation where you are unprofitable.
Just FYI in case anyone is looking to get into this business.
They also just aren’t that useful anymore. A while back, if you wanted to send someone an image, you had to host it somewhere. Now almost any platform that you could send someone a link, you can also send/embed an image.
I used to be a heavy user of imgur for Reddit and irc, but I haven’t had a need for it in ages.
When you factor in credit card fees, server cost, storage costs, bandwidth, customer support, etc. - margins become razor thin (if not unprofitable if your user base is high utilizing their plans)
Even BackBlaze, known for building their own storage servers to drive down cost, they too have been losing money for years.
Ahh, no, yep, I made it! I did explicitly stay away from the cloud, because it makes the service a thousand times cheaper, up to a certain scale (where I'll have a good problem, anyway).
In line with the answers in the FAQ and what other commenters have mentioned this is intentionally made to be hostile and out of touch, and I absolutely love it for that.
There’s not enough humor and parodies in startups and software. Bring it on :)
Also, definitely not paying for a service like this. Especially not with this level of professionalism.
I think I’ll go to the competitor, Oracle Advanced Image Sharing for Hadoop…
Having never heard of this service, I personally had a negative reaction to the name. I think it comes from seeing the z and associating it with warez, aka something illegal.
I didn’t even know that this existed. But I upload images for public sharing perhaps once a year or once in two years. So I don’t need this service.
I’m not writing an email as requested in the blog post because that entire post has not even one link to the main page of the service being talked about. Only those who click on one link to another blog post and then navigate to the main page may bother to email.
I think something is deeply missing in the way this blog post is written. And it’s likely that this is not the only post with such deficiencies.
I think the problem may be that if you’re technical enough to want a privacy first static image host, you probably can use S3, GCP, etc.
If you’re not all that technical, you’ll just post to instagram or send on a messaging app.
Maybe some kind of feature with a static page to host images could be useful to folks? Maybe just a service that lets folks host a single image on a domain, even.
If you didn't want people to think it's a joke, why have you posted it less than two months _before_ April first?
Also, do you have RSS on the blog? I've missed it on February, sorry
I find the idea of hosting anything on s3 to be terrifying since someone could set up a script to spam download it and AWS will send me a $1000 bill for the usage.
It’s nearly wordy enough to be seen as an elaborate satire on why tech savvy should pay for an image host.
If you seriously want to bother maintaining a solution your market has out grown then strip it down to pure utility. Remove all copy, branding, colors, and lower price to $2/year.
I have to thank you. Because like you, I had the desire to subvert the mainstream, question normality, and be cool, but I could feel my desire to do so waning after seeing your example. (I'm serious)
Sigh, yet another business that takes money in exchange for a service. I'm sick of it. I think this site would be much more compelling if I could pay an annual fee, and then get some money back for each image I want to become an ad-riddled social media-ified mess. That way, I could deposit my life savings and use it to top up my bank account whenever I need some liquid cash.
This actually sounds really appealing to me! Sharing photos with family is generally pretty easy since everyone uses Google photos, but once or twice every year I want to get a photo from someone on IOS and it is a nightmare every single time. If I could send them a link and say "just upload it here and send me back the link it gives you", rather than having to explain for the hundredth time that if they send it in a text it will get turned into a potato, that would be pretty awesome.
Unfortunately I can't tell if that would be possible because either you are hugged to death (at 37 upvotes?) or Cloudflare has decided I'm a robot (maybe I am..)
For what it's worth, the direct, joking, but somehow simultaneously no bullshit tone if the site was incredibly appealing to me. If it had been a bunch of smooth talking "look how we'll solve all your problems" mumbo jumbo like most commercial sites I'd almost certainly have bounced and not even made it as far as commenting here. I'm still a long way from becoming an actual paying user, but I'm interested.
Hmm, that's an interesting idea, I could make a secret link that people could use to upload files to your space, without ever seeing the resulting image link. Thanks for the idea!
Most image sharing is ephemeral. Nobody cares if the image is gone 3 weeks from now, or if some private equity firm destroys the host company entirely in a year. Nobody's going to go through the hoop jumps required to pay for such a service, even just constantly having to re-log-in if you don't use it too often.
I thought I recognized that url. Those first two blog posts were some much needed humor in late 2020. Glad to see it’s still a thing. We need more irreverent shit like this.
If I have to put a link to an image somewhere to be able to refer to it anonymously on someone like Reddit or HN (that is, I want someone to see an image, but I don't want to give them a personally-identifiable account) I'm ok posting to Imgur. Sure, I don't like being the product, but I have an ad-block, I do it like twice a year, and it's not enough to pay $12 for.
If I want to actually share photos or something with people I know, I'll use Google Photos.
If I need to share an image with someone professionally, I'll use Google Drive.