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Comment by wlesieutre | Hacker News Reader

Yep. Imgur realized that being solely a user-friendly image host wasn't much of a money maker, so they started gradually turning into the Photobucket style messes that it was originally aiming to destroy. Now they run their own community/discussion site and try to show it down the throat of anyone who lands there trying to look at a picture. It's not been good for the user experience of anyone who was just there for one image. And it's also in pretty direct competition with reddit's popular non-text subreddits.

I really can't fault reddit for taking this step. They're the ones who have the ad views on pages linking to (or embedding) these images, they may as well streamline things and manage the uploads/hosting in house.

One hopes Imgur could see this coming.

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I agree that the user experience overall is just plain shitty on imgur right now.

The home page itself is riddled with "viral images". Why would I use imgur like a *chan site? That need is already filled and done much better by other sites.

Question. What's wrong with making just a little bit of money?? (which is presumably still more than i will ever see!)

They raised millions of dollars of VC funding. There certainly are ways to raise money to grow your business slowly and under terms that you're in better control of (small business loans from traditional banks are a great example), but when you agree to take VC money you do it with the intent that you'll grow, baby, grow.

In some fields the winner takes it all. Either you win or you die.

Also money is like a drug. What's wrong with taking a little cocaine in the morning and a little heroin in the evening? Nothing, except there are very few people who can sustain that over an extended period of time. You also wouldn't know about them because they neither become very rich nor very famous. ("Hey look there is the most average guy in the whole country who has no exceptional qualities.") The world belongs to the candles who burn from both ends.

Downvoted you by mistake, apologies.

Nothing is wrong with making a bit of money.

However, when the barrier to entry for providing a service is low you have to be _very_ careful about making that money by negatively impacting the user experience.

If you make money, that's fine. If you make money by taking advantage of users, you can't really be surprised when a competitor pops up and users leave.

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