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Comment by samstave | Hacker News Reader

it was created by /u/mrgrim as a programming side project because all the other img hosts were shitty, and as it was born of reddit, essentially for reddit, it blew up.

I cant stand the new i.reddit img service, but that could be me just being an off-my-lawn-er...

but I am wary of reddits motivations, as I dont trust the admins all that much given the fact that they are a huge social manipulation tool - and if you don't toe the corporate line in the US, they shut you down.

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For me it's quite the opposite. I like browsing the web in the evening on a 5 year old tablet. Ever since imgur started redirecting mobile clients to the full site for all direct image links the experience gets worse and worse. They keep adding more scripts and shit over time so currently when opening an imgur link the tablet freezes for about 4 seconds until it starts showing the loading spinner and then it takes another couple seconds depending on image size until I can finally see a plain old jpeg. Every fucking time. I mean I don't understand the decision to redirect mobile but not desktop at all. Desktops are faster (cpu and connection) and got more screen space to show ads. Why not the other way round?

Me too. That awful gifv has never worked on my older Samsung tablet. I don't understand why not and I gave up trying to diagnose the problem.

Other imaging hosts that serve up .mp4's as substitutes for .gif like giphy work just fine. It's just Imgur that couldn't figure out how to make this work properly.

It's very likely the terrible redirect shenanigans they do on gifv. And have just expanded to all files on all platforms, oh boy.

Imgur has a ton of flaws, my gripe with reddit is the admins; as a mod of a controversial /r/ - I just don't trust their ability to be for free speech...

> Reddit's motivations

It's effectively a tracking "pixel" for what you click, even if you block their javascript/redirect.

It also keeps that data in house which they can sell (if they need to) rather than give all that data away to imgur for free. Though I wonder if the bandwidth costs will break even.

They can also use it in order to craft personalised suggestions.

I imagine they will also start checking referers and presenting pages, instead of images, to certain visitors. If that isn't happening already.

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