Imgur is essentially a parasite upon reddit which exploited and relied upon reddit's lack of native image posts. Imgur's dependency on reddit led to it trying to compete directly with it to ensure its survival without its host (Imgur is now also a place to find and comment on images), but also ensured reddit would eventually drop it, thus paradoxically also hurting its survival.
Ultimately I think Imgur is destined to the same fate as TwitPic.
It started as a symbiotic relationship. Reddit had no good image hosting solution and it was a real problem. Before Imgur came along, you'd often find image posts where the link was dead, dog slow, or took you to a page filled with ads and malware. Imgur made Reddit better.
If anything, Reddit was the parasite because its users used a ton of Imgur bandwidth and by direct linking, didn't give anything in return.
Once Imgur decided to actually try to become a sustainable business, they had to change how that worked by trying to ensure that people coming to the site also saw ads. Then they started building their own community and working to become a direct competitor to Reddit.
At that point, the right biological metaphor is probably too organisms with the same food source in the same ecosystem, competing for resources.
Given that, it's no surprise that they are both working to sever ties to each other.
But that was back in a time when reddit really was a news-sharing site. Huff huff get off my lawn and all, but back in the day it was more akin to hackernews, and so the "problem" of hosting images wasn't a problem at all - you'd be linking to articles that had their own image hosting solution. Nowadays it's a heavy picture, meme, whatever browser. Makes sense that imgur is trying to take over that niche.
Honestly before RES came out the proportion of images on reddit was very low. Going back further before subreddits I remember it as largely just news articles and discussions, much like HN.
Before subreddits, yes, it was mostly links to articles. But pics was one of the first subreddits, and images made an increasingly large fraction of posts over time. I think RES was as much a response to that as it was a driver of it. If anything, I think the rise of smartphones was the big push. It's simply easier to consume imagery than text on a small screen like that.
That's some strong words. Imgur wasn't a parasite, it was offering a service that Reddit didn't offer but we needed. Yes Imgur was quite dependent on Reddit at the beginning but now Imgur has its own community and the two are quite different.
If you look at the numbers, after the beta Imgur was starting to grow again. It was a hit yes, but not an exodus.
> Imgur wasn't a parasite, it was offering a service that Reddit didn't offer but we needed.
Well… sure, you could say at first it was more of a symbiotic relationship, though probably providing more benefit to reddit than to Imgur, the latter absorbing the former's bandwidth costs and not getting much in return.
The parasitical part comes with
> but now Imgur has its own community
because, in order to ensure its survival, Imgur has tried to grow itself into an independent community on the back of reddit, to eventually be self-sustaining.
Now that reddit's cutting it off, maybe it actually will be self-sustaining. All the more power to them if that works.
But I don't think “parasitical” is an unfair characterisation of how things have worked so far. It's not really intended as a value judgement on my part.
It was absolutely a parasite. It would not have survived to grow to the size it did without Reddit. Parasites can offer a beneficial service to the host but cannot live without it.
It has since evolved into something possibly capable of existing on its own but only time will tell.
My guess is it lives for a few more years at best.
>Parasites can offer a beneficial service to the host but cannot live without it.
Incidentally, this is not what biologists consider parasitism. To a biologist, a parasitic relationship is one that benefits one while harming the other. Do you think that reddit was harmed by imgur? If imgur benefited but reddit was not harmed, their relationship was commensal. If they both benefited, their relationship was mutual.
To capture the idea that imgur was totally dependent on its relationship with reddit (but not vice versa), you would say that their mutualism was obligate for imgur but facultative for reddit.
That's absolutely incorrect. In this case, since the relationship was mutually beneficial it's literally called mutualism. It does not require that both parties require the relationship to survive.
Parasitism is when one party benefits while the other is harmed.
I don't think we have the same definition of a parasite or we see things differently. For me a parasite is a startup being a copy-cat, eating your market share, stealing your content, and stealing your customers. But Reddit and Imgur are two different websites. If Reddit was that mad about it, they could have done it in a month on S3... If you want a parasite I will say 9gag.
It's true that Imgur has to grow its product now to something bigger. I won't even give them many years if they don't do that for a product that simple and ephemeral. They have challenges here.
"For me a parasite is a startup being a copy-cat,"
The parasite metaphor does not include the idea of being a "copy-cat"; parasites in the real world do not do the same things as their host. Indeed, that is the entire point of a parasite, in some sense; to take advantage of the host setting up various expensive systems to survive and just using them instead of developing their own.
Parasite terminology aside, this is also another entry for the 'digital sharecropping'/'own the platform'/'commoditize your complement' files. Imgur built itself on the Reddit platform; then the platform decided, like Twitter or Facebook, to eat it. Now Imgur is going to be pushed even faster along the wheel of reincarnation for filesharing/image-hosting websites...
Too bad for any of the artists or photographers or content-creators who were depending on Imgur, but, 'Mister you knew I was a scorpion when you picked me up' as the story goes.
Everyone here is taking offense to the word parasite, when it's nearly the perfect definition of the relationship from the first day. Imgur couldn't survive without Reddit, it grew and fed off of Reddit, and it was almost exclusively dependent on Reddit for its early users.
I think a lot of people in this thread don't know that one of the primary definitions of parasite can include not harming the host and generically mean: "an organism living in, with, or on another organism."
And if you question the dependency part of Imgur being a parasite, just wait until you see how things go for Imgur the next few years post Reddit handling its own images. One can thrive without the other, it's obvious which that is.
People don't generally use the parasite metaphor unless they're intention is to paint an ugly picture. Anyway, people still use Imgur very heavily in Reddit comments. I don't know if that's because reddit doesn't have a better alternative at the moment or if people just don't know how to use it.
Doesn't help that the Imgur community tends to be incredibly toxic toward reddit's, which is hilarious given the parasitic relationship you described. There's even a subreddit for it! /r/IgnorantImgur
> Imgur is essentially a parasite upon reddit which exploited and relied upon reddit's lack of native image posts.
Given that many subreddits have in their rules that people submitting images and blog posts should copy and paste the content into Reddit rather than linking to the actual creator, it seems more accurate to say that Reddit was a parasite on Imgur.
Though it may have started as a, "parasite upon reddit," imgur does stand pretty well on its own now. Try out their mobile app and you'll see a pretty active community.
It could successfully metamorphise. Without reddit, it would have less traffic, but also less hotlinking, so it might be more profitable. But reddit traffic might be its lifeblood, I'm not sure.
That's an unfair comparison. Imgur was originally created specifically to be an image host for reddit users, and succeeding in that market, slowly tried to become a reddit competitor on the back of reddit traffic.
Ultimately I think Imgur is destined to the same fate as TwitPic.