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Comment by KuriousCat | Hacker News Reader

The language and messaging is very negative.

- Introduction: In the first line "but are ashamed of what Imgur has become?" why should I be ashamed of imgur?

- Emotional Appeal: If you are referring to a person who is willing to pay a non zero amount of money as "You are cheap" why would one go ahead and press the pay button?

- Screaming I don't care : You seek feedback and state that you might not do anything about it in the same sentence.

I guess you might have actively prevented few willing customers and made them to reconsider their choices.

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When IMGZ was first announced a few years ago[1], someone mentioned that the marketing style was "extremely distasteful and offensive."[2]

I had the same thought. If I was going to pay someone, it would be nice if the recipient sounded more professional.

I guess the marketing didn't work.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21627714

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21629734

It worked for me!

I just want you to know that even I won't be paying for your service, the marketing worked for me, too. Haters gonna hate, but those who know, know. Thanks for all that you do.

> Listen, this is half service, half art project

To be fair, the admin is pretty upfront about the project in their FAQ.

> why should I be ashamed of imgur?

You don't have to, but you can, if you want.

> - Emotional Appeal: If you are referring to a person who is willing to pay a non zero amount of money as "You are cheap" why would one go ahead and press the pay button?

To get a subscription, of course!

> - Screaming I don't care : You seek feedback and state that you might not do anything about it in the same sentence.

Yeah, I thought about the contradiction there, but I somehow don't care that people don't sign up and also want to know why they aren't signing up.

I don't even know what it is

Surely a well meaning joke that I missed :)

It was!

Can you include some form an MLM scheme into subscriptions as well?

That is also an interesting idea. Maybe you can get friends to sign up and upload a bunch of images, and you get cash back.

I absolutely love the abrasive tone and if I had need for an image host, I'd be on that sweet-sweet cheapass tier in no time flat.

I like knowing this is just a person, and I would be willing to pay for that. I get the sense this person is too annoyed to double monetize me secretly (only half jokingly: you wont get that kinda confidence just anywhere). And they don't attempt to put-on-airs wrt the competence required to work a small-to-mid scale image hosting platform. Yet it still feels competent enough that I'm not worried about uptime. Plus they have cli tools to boot.

However, as others have said, I just don't know when I would use this.

To be frank, I don't even fully understand how igmur makes money with most people using some form of adblock (there was an article on here claiming 50% of Americas now do so). Plus I imagine if you are looking for some type of hosting that skews even further. I hadn't even realize igmur pivoted into a four-video-ads-per-image social media platform because of said adblock.

I guess this is why we can't have nice things.

I love you and want you as a customer. The emails we'd exchange alone would be worth it all.

Making the pivot to dating service. I like it.

Swipe right to pay $3, swipe left to have your data sold to a thousand partners.

It is very clearly a joke recognizing that the service doesn't actually provide any value that isn't easily found elsewhere for free. But it's also functional, in that those that are paying for it are likely to see that if they want to keep it going they will need to pay more, but if they don't really need it, they can let it die. It puts the choice in the hands of the users without trying to bullshit them that the service is actually worth the cost.

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