If you have Flash installed and don't have an adblocker, for most textual content (not Imgur, YouTube), your browser is working 10x harder than it needs to.
It's depressing that an image viewing site and a video playing site are in the same list of resource uses. YouTube plays 1080p videos. Imgur shows photos. It's a testament to the brazen disrespect of client resources that went into building the latter.
If you're viewing imgur without ad blocker your computer isn't working 10x harder than it should, but 100x.
I remember when imgur was started because there were no good image sharing sites. They were all bulky, slow and terrible. imgur came along and made sharing images easy. Now they are one of the ones they set out to fix.
It sucks, but I don't know if they had much choice. Imgur is the classic example of the "treadmill" inherent to business models like image hosting:
1. All the existing image hosting sites suck
2. Someone gets sick enough of it that they launch a new one, with all the features people want: free, direct linking, no/unobtrusive ads, etc.
3. Because this new site is so much better, everyone flicks to it. Bandwidth costs skyrocket.
4. The operators need to cover their costs, so they start adding more ads and blocking direct links. The site starts to suck. Go to step 1.
Sometimes investor dollars get involved, but it doesn't change the basic formula. This is why we've seen Photobucket -> minus -> giphy-> imgur -> gfycat, and it will continue in his vein forever. I don't think there's any way to run a site like this profitably without pissing people off sufficiently that they go elsewhere.
There is an additional components for imgur : it became more than an image sharing site, it's now a weird looking social network with a very niche community with its own rules and culture.
Imgur was originally developed 'as a gift' for reddit. As any HN commenters would tell you, your business model should never rely on external companies.
Maybe we need a more distributed model for image hosting for it to be sustainable?
I'm thinking about something like a P2P solution, IPFS-style. You could pay for upload space in two ways - either directly, the bog standard way, or with your own drive space. So for instance, you get 1GB free space for image uploads if you agree to set aside 1GB on your drive as a cache. Couple that with your own "seeding" CDNs storing all the images, and maybe this would be enough to distribute bandwidth costs across all the people who want their images hosted?
Not sure if the browsers are capable enough to pull something like this off without relying on some sort of plugin or an application.
Before imgur, there was photobucket, imageshack, whatever - they were beyond dumpy jankey messes that you truly didn't know what you were going to get when you clicked on them. There was a good chance a new window was going to open behind your current target, or that the images would be intentionally low res until you clicked into them (for more CPM's for the host).
Imgur came along and stole their bread and butter, but then they took on a bunch of VC money and had to figure out how they were going to profit. I'm not sure if they've figured it out, but their site has definitely suffered - although not nearly to the degree as the predecessors that they replaced.
> It's a testament to the brazen disrespect of client resources that went into building the latter.
I particularly like how imgurl flat-out refuses to work if you disable JavaScript. It's an image-viewing site. Browsers have been able to download images since the beginning, and have been able to render them inline since almost the beginning. There's no need for JavaScript at all, and yet imgurl deliberately choose not to work. 'Brazen disrespect' doesn't begin to describe it.
I don't mind that they try to use JavaScript to minimise the data they serve. They could always show one or a few images without JavaScript, and provide a link to more (and hide it when JavaScript is enabled).
Note that this has nothing to do with ad blocking — they could display all the ads they want to a non-script-executer.
'Brazen disrespect' really doesn't begin to describe it. 'Rank unprofessionalism' starts to.
YouTube's videos decompress to much larger quantities of data than Imgur images, but that's not what really affects browser responsiveness, especially when the video decoding is handled by dedicated hardware.
Whether you're displaying a static image or an animated GIF or a H.246 stream, drawing the next frame doesn't require interpreting or JIT compiling any JavaScript, it doesn't require thrashing the garbage collector, and it doesn't require re-computing the page layout.
To be entirely fair: there's a lot of video content on there now too, with the gifv and related shenanigans. Personally I find it incredibly convenient that uploading gifs or mp4's there automatically converts them to gifv, gif and mp4. That's really handy, especially for a free service with no strings attached (that I know of) to offer.
