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Comment by static_noise | Hacker News Reader

Last time I've opened an imgur link on mobile I got served with an ad popup and a "virus warning" dialog. That is something I haven't seen in a long time. Imgur seems to go the way of SourceForge.

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This seems like a common pattern

1. Realize you need to make a lot more money (to meet investor expectations, pay for the fat the company has accumulated, etc)

2. Panic

3. Apply dark patterns (http://darkpatterns.org/)

4. Something better comes along and eats your lunch

5. Repeat.

It's sad because imgur was originally created as the "something better".

I'm sure they made mistakes but when you see massive growth like imgur did someone's gotta pay the sever bills somehow. Plenty of image uploading sites have come and gone because of server costs.

Dear lamb, we had a great time but now I have to eat.

These are all good points but I have a strong feeling of déjà-vu with another thread in these comments...

SourceForge got bought by new folks who reversed all the misleading ads and bundling stuff:

https://sourceforge.net/blog/sourceforge-acquisition-and-fut...

This is good, but I wonder how hard it will be to turn that negative momentum around.

To be fair, I think those are usually the fault of malicious ads getting into whatever ad networks imgur uses and they usually get rid of them fairly quickly. They used to pop up every few weeks but I haven't seem them recently (in my experience as a daily imgur user for the past year or so).

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