This strikes me as being at least as big a deal as the NSFW bit.
For 10+ years, imgur has been many people's go-to way of hosting an image they want to post to a forum or whatever. Many of those people will have paid little attention to whether or not they were logged into imgur when they posted each image. In short, it sounds like a lot of image links are about to break.
Isn't this the cardinal sin of an image host? They are partially killing links in a way that wasn't previously communicated. And to make it worse, it directly targets what was previously the primary strength of the site, easy and accountless uploads with only a few clicks. Why would anyone use them as an image host again?
I wonder if they are hemorrhaging money. This decision gives the impression that they simply don't want to be in the business they're currently in. Such drastic steps usually originate with desperation.
If they want to monetize that old stuff, couldn't they just serve up an ad instead of an image for those ancient images, then display the full image if you visit the actual imgur page by deleting the .jpg extension?
Or they could do what Facebook used to do (still does?), and put them on Blu-ray disk cold storage, then load them into one of those giant jukebox-esque machines that grabs the Blu-ray disk whenever someone click an ancient link and spend 60 seconds serving the image up or whatever.
Hell, write all the images with their URLs to magnetic tape and donate them to the Internet archive, and let them figure out what to do with them if/when they eventually have the funds.
Literally anything would be better than outright deleting those old images.
The blog post has a link to video from FB itself from 2014 and it has no audio. its not the first old FB video I came across that had no audio. Wonder if the cold storage has something to do with it.
In my data hoarding days (as a consumer, not FB scale), I found burning media an archive tool to be much more costly (and less reliable and more physical space) than simply using multiple hard drives.
Now, it could very well be that FB is able to buy burnable media at a much cheaper rate than consumers (i.e. perhaps there is more margin in media that massively bulk purchasing can reduce and the type of HDs that FB would buy would be more expensive than consumer drives, it could also be that actively used burnable media would be more reliable than actively used hard drives. while it's cold storage, its not frozen storage that is rarely used, with that said, the jukeboxes are probably expensive and suffer more reliablity issues than the hard drives), but on the consumer level, it just didn't seem to be a doable thing.
Ex: 8TB HD could cost $120. That's ~ 400 25GB single layer blurays. Now, 400 disks of optical media no matter how efficient one can store them will take up a lot more room than a single 8TB HD. For the 400 bluray blanks to be cheaper than the HD, they would have to be less than 30cents a disk. Glancing at amazon today, the cheapest I see for 25GB BDR blanks (and dual/triple/quad layer blanks are more expensive per GB, i.e. a 50GB blank would be $1.6 a disc) is about 40cents a disk. At that price level, you are better off just buying/copying to multiple disks for even better disaster recovery and it wont really cost you more than to store everything once on optical media.
anyways, if anyone could point out flaws in my assumptions (or why at FB scale the answers are different) I'd be interested.
At scale, you would need to factor in the durability of the media. [0] suggests that some types of bluray disks can last 20 to 50 years. Hard drives typically struggle to last 10 years. So if you need to replace hard drives 5x more than bluray disks, maybe it changes the economics.
That's a random study I found on Google, of course, I'm sure Meta has more accurate data on that.
Besides, you need to build the same kind of redundancy in both cases, so that shouldn't influence the choice.
> At scale, you would need to factor in the durability of the media. [0] suggests that some types of bluray disks can last 20 to 50 years. Hard drives typically struggle to last 10 years. So if you need to replace hard drives 5x more than bluray disks, maybe it changes the economics.
Also consider the economics of actually retrieving and indexing the data. If you have to spend 2 hours looking for a blu-ray/DVD with the data you need, then maybe it changes the economics back to HDDs, which can look up a file within 20 TB of data almost instantaneously using an NTFS Journal.
I'm also curious on how this could work and actually be more cost effective. I just can't see the robot being a reliable method and the cost savings being there. It almost sounds like some one's pet project. The only really interesting property of bluray is that they supposedly can last a very long time unlike other media, but I'd think you'd still want some redundancy at which point hard disks seem like the way to go.
Strange - I'm pretty sure I used to be able to directly link to an image, and that would be the only thing that loaded (had to 'open image in new tab' after uploading to find the direct link)
Possibly they did different things for different IP blocks?
The cardinal sin of an image host is existing as inherently not a profitable venture. They keep sponging off the initial investment or VC rounds or whatever, but in the end they devolve into ad infested garbage, like those domain squatting pages.
>it directly targets what was previously the primary strength of the site, easy and accountless uploads with only a few clicks.
I stopped using imgur several years ago precisely because I couldn't upload anything easily, account or no account.
Mobile in particular couldn't upload period, the feature(?) simply wasn't even there.
I've since moved on to using Discord, specifically a private "server" I made for the purpose, for my image hosting needs. God knows how long that arrangement will last.
All this to say imgur has been useless garbage for many years, its decline to irrelevance is long overdue.
Like I said, I just use Discord for image hosting now.
I can upload by just pasting into the client, and it works anywhere Discord works. I can access images from anywhere by using/sharing the direct links.
If I can easily and simply upload and access images, that's all I want out of an image hoster. Everything else is signal noise.
That function always struck me as an oversight rather than a feature, since the rest of the product is oriented around only being available "in the app".
Personally I am running a mediagoblin server on a Droplet but I have a feeling that only works as long as nothing I make ever goes viral.
Effectively monetizing the hosting of images embedded elsewhere seems like a fool's errand—at best, it's possible to subsidize that usage with other revenue streams. The vast majority of people wanting to post images on forums have never financed their posting and the communities themselves haven't managed to either. Photobucket and Tinypic left a lot of litter on forums that survived their era, and Imgur will ultimately do the same.
It seems a bit like they're saying: "ohhhhh, did you people think we were an image hosting site? Heavens no, we're an SNS and always have been. We'll update our rules to clarify this".
They were image hosting for reddit. Once it was obvious reddit would kill their only use case soon, they became a social media platform. A better idea than simply dying. Every platform now has its own image hosting so their service was rapidly becoming irrelevant.
The big ones do. There is stil the long tail of forums and legacy chat platforms that don't do hosting or have extreme limits. That is what will be most affected by this change.
This is going to be incredibly damaging to forums, in the same way that Photobucket's deletions were. Old forum posts are becoming a ghost town of broken image links.
I have used imgur numerous times thru the years when posting Stack Overflow questions, new feature pull requests on open source apps, troubleshooting reddit posts etc. Very sad to think all that visual context will be lost.
One of imgur's selling points was you opened imgur.com and hit cmd+v to paste the screenshot, or dragged the image over, and bam! You had a sharable version. No muss, no fuss.
The number of times I have used this to share something on a forum or troubleshoot something is uncountable.
This is going to end up being a new Photobucket situation... hopefully Archive Team can try and figure out what images are at risk, especially if they're linked from forum threads and the like, and make sure they're in the Wayback Machine.
This is hardly the first image host that dies. Is there any way to sustainabley fund long term sleek non-ad-infested image hosting? There are some that are donation-funded (e.g. https://abload.de/spenden_en.php) but I don't know how sustainable that is once the service becomes popular enough that commercial usrs might end up using it as free image storage.
Another option is of course to have many smaller hosts, down to personal sites at the extreme. But that only changes the loss from shutdowns from big events to a steady stream of entropy. We really need a much more expanded Internet Archvie that can serve content at reasonable speeds along with browser and forum plugins to automatically redirect old linnks there.
StackOverflow is not just embedding random imgur-hosted images for that though but have a special arrangement with images hosted at i.stack.imgur.com - I doubt this change applies to them.
