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Comment by DigitalSea | Hacker News Reader

I forgot that Photobucket even existed, with far more superior choices like Google Photos and Dropbox existing. This is insane, RIP Photobucket.

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What about imgur?

Only a matter of time before they do something about hotlinking. Direct image links now redirect to tell you to download their app, I'd be surprised if they didn't start watermarking embedded images or putting ads on them. Reddit hosting images on their own site haven't helped imgur

The 'open in app' also helpfully floats over the image on mobile with a nice narrow area to close the floating popup, oh look the store has just opened for me to download the imgur app again, if only they under stood by clicking X I'm never going to want your app.

I wrote a simple extension to disable the new direct image link behaviour: https://github.com/DavidBuchanan314/imgur-anti-anti-hotlink

I consider imgur a poor choice because it doesn't work with JavaScript disabled (dunno how Drive, Dropbox or Photobucket do, just that imgur breaks). It's in the business of serving JPEGs and HTML containing <img> tags pointing to JPEGs; to break that HTML such that those JPEGs don't serve is failing to deliver on its core business.

Sure, use JavaScript to implement infinite scrolling or on-demand loading, but fall back to usable pure HTML.

I'm confused. Which part doesn't work without js, the hosting or uploading?

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