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Comment by spinlock | Hacker News Reader

Why are there so many reddit clones? Reddit doesn't make money. Imgur, on the other hand, is printing cash by selling ad space. But, no one is trying to move into their market.

I just don't understand why people are going after a market that seems to be unprofitable. Am I missing something?

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I suspect they're being launched by people who love reddit, but hate x about it. Fix x, and boom! Your very own reddit that actually works.

Why do so many people run forums, blogs, social networks, wikis and other community focused sites?

Because for a lot of them, it's fun. And for a similarly high amount of them, it's a chance to run their own community that fixes the perceived problems with others they've been part of online.

Not everything is about the money here.

1) Most of the Reddit competitors are hobbies while Imgur was built as a business. Similarly, their competition with Reddit is largely ideological rather than practical values people care about en mass.

2) Everyone who tried to move into Imgur's position found image hosting was very expensive and impractical as a hobby. The problem is they've largely been ideological and cut off from Reddit's ecosystem due to Imgur's incumbency.

3) Ultimately, until Reddit or Imgur stumbles in a substantial way that pisses off users none of them will be viable even with VC money.

For instance:

https://www.reddit.com/r/MediaCrush https://www.reddit.com/r/MediaCrush/comments/2tzuv0/mediacru... https://www.reddit.com/r/MediaCrush/comments/2v8ume/why_didn...

which was followed by:

https://www.reddit.com/r/MediaCrush/comments/2vpfwe/imgrushc...

Currently the only really one I know of is:

https://voat.co/v/veuwer aka http://www.veuwer.com/

Slimgur

http://www.breitbart.com/tech/2015/11/03/imgur-alternative-s...

which became:

https://voat.co/v/slimg https://sli.mg/

I wouldn't say imgur was built as a business. The guy that made it made it as a "gift for reddit" and struggled with hosting for a couple of weeks.

https://www.reddit.com/r/reddit.com/comments/7zlyd/my_gift_t...

It is a story he tells but he made the same claim on Digg and other places as well. It was effective social marketing but there are a few things like that about that just are popular beliefs that are just repeated 'cause the founder was a college student at the time.

Most of the original links/evidence of that are gone from the internet at this point tho and I'm tired of digging for them. :/

EDIT:

http://web.archive.org/web/20090328080325/http://digg.com/od...

http://archive.is/JS5DV

> imgur - the simple image sharer. The best in image hosting. imgur.com — imgur is a free image sharing/hosting service that allows you to quickly upload and edit your photos and share them with friends the Internet. Now you're asking, "How is this different from imageshack, tinypic, or photobucket?" Well that's simple. imgur is free (as in beer), no ads, anonymous, and easier to use. It's my gift to the Internet. Enjoy!

Ah archive.org still has it.

But yeh, it was effective guerilla marketing only. It was posted to Digg slightly before Reddit btw.

> Imgur, on the other hand, is printing cash by selling ad space. But, no one is trying to move into their market.

There are a few. Slimgur is one of the most common direect competitors I can think of, but there are also the various meme maker sites that host the resulting memes for users.

Another incredibly common competitor for a small slice of the market is gifycat, which used to be the crappy newcomer that never worked and is now almost a de-facto standard on Reddit.

> Why are there so many reddit clones? Reddit doesn't make money.

Sometimes, people make a website because they want that website to exist, not because they want to get rich.

There are lots of competitors for imgur, but imgur has a major advantage with its association with Reddit.

Welcome to the tech bubble!

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