I created Imgur. AMA.

Please, don't ever change the UI for the sake of changing the UI. Imgur does what you wanted it to do (well, it's doing what I want it to do anyway). So far, the only interface changes I've seen have been unobtrusive improvements (like drag & drop) and I really like it.

Seriously, Facebook had a fine UI and they keep changing it for no real reason other than they feel like it. Youtube keeps adding features that ultimately make it less useful than it once was. Digg killed itself doing this.

imgur's like a unix program. It only does one thing, but it does it really, really fucking well.

EDIT: Holy crap, I think this is the most karma I've gotten in one comment by half an order of magnitude. And the top of the page too!

That's really great to hear!

I know how important the UI is, and that's why it's the way it is. It won't ever change from being super easy and simple.

First, thanks. A lot. Between you and RES, you've made Reddit 10 times better, not to mention easier.

1. Are you getting rich off of it?
2. What is your next masterpiece that you are working on?

1. I keep most of it in the business in order to grow it and hire more people.

2. Imgur takes most of my time these days, so nothing unfortunately. However, I'm on the board of directors for another Ohio University startup called Flarecode. I've been trying to help them out too.

I just wanted to thank you for a fast, easy upload site. Made proving my proof for my AMA's easy.

You're welcome!

Has anyone tried to buy imgur from you and who?

Imageshack tried to buy it 6 months after I made it. Glad I didn't sell...

Imgur is now bigger than they are, as well as yfrog which is by the same company.

did they offer more than 100K?

It didn't go that far. I told them right up front that it was too early, so we never negotiated a price.

My cool story. I submitted (I think via Twitter? can't remember) for some free stickers, which you sent so thank you very much. But I loved the fact you included this little hand drawn sheep, which I keep stuck on the wall at work.

http://imgur.com/gUhc3

I'm not sure if that was you or Sarah (or someone else) but it's awesome so thanks again!

It was Sarah. She's pretty awesome sometimes.

How did you come up with the name "Imgur"?

I made a list of about 15 names that I liked and then looked at which ones were available. I liked imgur because it's kind of a play on the acronyms, img for image and your for ur. So in a way, it's "your imager". It also rhymes with sharer, so "your imager is the simple image sharer".

Not IMaGe Upload for Reddit?

Wow, that works really well. I don't think that crossed my mind, but I may have to start using it.

can you please fix the way the ads are displayed on the mobile version of your website? they often cover parts of the pictures and they cannot be closed. thank you

I'm sorry to hear that :(

I'll see what I can do.

Sarah mentioned (on Facebook a while ago) that Android and iOS apps were coming soon. Any estimate on when? I'm just antsy. Thanks again for making such a fantastic site! (And for the t-shirt I received a couple of days ago :)

She's right. They should be here in a few months. People are working on them 15 feet from me as I type this.

Am I really going to get my imgur sticker in the mail? I like stickers.

You will! It's going to take a while though. There are almost 2000 emails...

EDIT: For those of you just now seeing this, I can't guarantee you'll get stickers because of the amount of emails we have now. It was kind of a thing we were doing yesterday, so you're a bit late, but we'll do our best. I promise.

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Pretty much everyone thought that it was unmonetizable. I even got some angry PMs from people yelling about how stupid I was.

What's the most bizarre, f'd up pic you've come across on your site? Link please.

I don't have the links, but you really don't want to see them anyway. Trust me.

I've seen a dead man with his penis cut off and shoved in his mouth, as well as a penis that was split like a banana peel.

is it wrong that i know exactly what picture you are talking about? the penis in the mouth one that is

yeah, probably

Have you ever used your status on the internet as a pink up line?

Do you ever impress girls with pictures of cute cats?

Yes, but it doesn't work. Somehow the word "internet" in pickup lines is not sexy. I even had a really outgoing friend use my story and he said it almost worked once, but ended up failing.

I will try using 'internet' in a pick-up line and reclaim its sexy use.

For you, good sir.

For, you,

I will change the world.

You're doing god's work.

Your pro membership is the first pro membership I've ever purchased for a website, it's awesome!

I've been looking around for a long time to find a site that will easily let me post images, titles, and short blog-like captions and descriptions and all the other photo places are just too cluttered.

Keep it simple, keep it clean, and keep it fast/easy and I'll forever be in your debt, thanks!

That's really great to hear! I'm glad you like it

So about the Imgur mascot...

We have a 3ft wooden giraffe in the office and are working with two different designers to figure it out. It's coming soon.

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You're welcome! Glad it turned out well.

Do your staff get in trouble for being on imgur too much?

Nah, you're even allowed to look at Imgur NSFW content. For testing of course.

Do you get annoyed when people complain that imgur is down?

I do. Mostly because I'm already working on it and it just adds fuel to the fire.

1. What is your most embarrassing awesome drunk story?
2. When do you foresee needing to go to 6 character URLs for the pictures? If my math (and supposition) is correct, there's only room for 916.13M 5 character urls. Also, how do you come up with the urls (is it just a character randomizer or something like that)?

Also, thank you so much for creating the most user-friendly photo hosting website ever. You're amazing.

1. NO REGRETS
2. Probably within a couple of months. There are actually a little over 700M possibilities, and we're already at 200M images. They are just randomly generated and then it checks if the generated one exists or not.

I like your style, sir.

That fast? I'm guessing if you started with single character urls, I can see where that growth rate (plus with the rising popularity of the site and growing userbase) would necessitate longer urls. Also, the system you have in place is very fast and efficient. I like it.

Thanks for the reply!

It's always been 5 characters, and the 6th is a thumbnail suffix. We'll be increasing it because the time it's taking to pick another random one is getting too long.

Are you thinking of putting a part of Imgur up that makes it so all the Imgurians can post their own images without having to go through reddit to make it to the front page?

Working on it right now. Should be 3ish months...

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APNG is already supported.

Can you go in more details over the stack you run on? Server infrastructure, etc.? Would love to hear more about the hardware and software you run on.

It's actually fairly complex now, but I will attempt to do it all from memory.

Backround info: Imgur is on Amazon AWS and we use Edgecast as a CDN.

Everything is grouped into clusters depending on the job. There are load balancing, uploading, www, api, image serving, searching, memcached, redis, mysql, map reduce, and cron clusters. Each one of these clusters has at least two instances, each one on it's own availability zone. However, most have more than two instances because of the load.

A typical imgur.com request goes to a load balancer which run nginx and haproxy. The request first hits nginx, and if there's a cached version of the page (each page is cached for 5 seconds unless you're logged in) then it will serve that out. If not then the request goes over to haproxy and it will determine which cluster to send it to, in this case, the www cluster. This cluster runs nginx and php-fpm, and is hooked up to the memcached, redis, and mysql clusters. Php-fpm will handle it if it's a php page. If the request needs info from mysql, then it will check if the query exists in memcached. If not, then mysql will send the data back and immediately cache it into memcached. If the request is for an image page, and we need the amount of times the image was viewed, then it grabs that info from redis. The request then goes back out of php-fpm, through nginx on the www server, and back into the load balancer where it will most likely be cached by nginx, and then out to the user.

Most of the clusters use c1.xlarge instances. The upload cluster handles all uploads and image processing requests, like thumbnails and resizing, and each instance is a huge cluster instance, cc1.4xlarge.

All image requests go through the CDN, and if they're cached, then they just go right back out of the CDN to the user. If it's not cached then the CDN gets the image from the image serving cluster and caches it for all additional requests.

That's about it. Anything you'd like to know specifically?

Interesting.

• Can you explain why you went with Edgecast and not, say, CloudFront (since you're on AWS to begin with)?

• How many EC2 instances total?

• Isn't it about time to get a rack and switch some stuff over to it? EC2 is very expensive. Even a not so beefy server with some tricks like using a GPU for the thumbnails/resizing could probably handle the load for a fraction of the price. (You can mix this stuff so EC2 is just for 'overflow' and redundancy)

• What kind of bottlenecks did you have to deal with as imgur grew unpredictably? Any cool war stories? :)

• Edgecast is much cheaper.

• At peak times there are usually around 60.

• EC2 has been really nice. There are no plans to move off of it. Our image processing software doesn't even use GPUs (GraphicsMagick -- they say it's not needed), but even if it did, EC2 has that option.

• The biggest bottleneck is with the database. MySQL has always been a pain in the ass. It's great software, but if I knew what I know now when I created Imgur, I would have chose something different.

How much are the server costs? Also, thanks so much for the awesome site! I really enjoy the community and the pictures on there.

Unfortunately I can't tell you how much things cost or how much Imgur makes :(

Who are the people that care about facebook likes? advertisers?

Advertisers, investors, reporters, anyone looking to know more about the business and how big we are.

Just an idea but I think it would be worth considering Facebook apps as a way to accept entries to your photoshop competitions, that way you can promote the page through asking people to share the page without being too up front

Thanks for the idea! That's not bad at all.

Do you have plans on buying a horse?

a boat

do you hash and store only one copy of duplicate images?

Believe it or not, we don't. All the images only use up about 3TB of storage space, so it's not really a big issue.

Answer this please, Where is Cagg?:D

We don't know :(

We tried contacting him but got nothing.

When you first created imgur, did you have any idea that people would be pronouncing it in so many different ways?

heh, I guess, but that wasn't really on my mind.

I've noticed with things like the gallery that you're positioning yourself to be an "independent entity", for the longest time imgur was just an image host and now (in both functionality and branding) it exists as a site people visit.

Do you have a long term plan to become more independent and (basically) become a better r/pics? I guess a better way to ask it: what's your long term plan with imgur?

I believe I was one of the first few imgur pro members (back when you did the original appsumo promotion). It's great to see how far you've come, I still use imgur today for hosting all my images, which can't be said of most services that I've used over time.

We're focusing on the entertainment aspect now. Long term, I'd like Imgur to become a destination for interesting images on the Internet.

What was your inspiration? Who/What gave you the idea?

I got the idea because you couldn't reliably post images to reddit without them being taken down for consuming too much bandwidth.

Simple and elegant services and designs give me motivation.

Does it ever cross your mind that you have significantly changed the history of the internet and file sharing altogether?

Have you thought of donating money to charities on behalf of imgur?

Congratulations on your success

Someone once told me that Imgur is a staple of the Internet. That hit me pretty hard, and I love it.

That's been brought up from time to time, but no real plans yet. What's your favorite charity?

How are you going to mail us our stickers if you don't have our addresses?

You were supposed to email your address.

I've noticed that imgur seems to be molding into a Reddit in some ways. You have entirely separate user accounts, comments, upvotes and downvotes. Here is an example of what I am talking about

I can even browse all of the images in /r/funny by going here.

Is the above functionality designed to compliment the average redditor's experience, or is it designed for an entirely different set of users?

What separates the users that browse www.imgur.com/r/funny from those who use reddit's /r/funny?

What separates the imgur.com experience from Reddit? What, in your opinion, have you improved?

It's supposed to be complimentary to reddit. If you like reddit's r/funny, then you can easily scroll through the r/funny content that was posted on imgur.

The upvotes and comments are only in the gallery, and only if you aren't coming from reddit. This functionality is separate for people who browse the gallery.

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1. This is a bit more of a question than I have time for, so I may come back to it. However, we'll be talking about that at SXSW hopefully. You can vote for the panel here: http://panelpicker.sxsw.com/vote/2294

2. Two proxy servers in front, running Nginx for caching and HAProxy as the load balaner. Then all requests go to the appropriate cluster (image, upload, api, www) which all run nginx and php-fpm. Any cached image requests are served straight from the CDN. MySQL is the main db, but there's also memcached and redis clusters to help with the DB load.

3. Still bootstrapped all the way.

Is it true you guys are going to make an Imgur store? If so, any exclusive details you could give us? :D

We are. No details as of yet, but we're working with a couple people to help get it setup.

First, thanks. (Include all you want in it)

Second: what's the secret with all the american Internet success stories (Like Imgur, Google, etc...) College? Idea? Money?

I'd say it's the secret is identifying a problem that you're having and making a solution that's better than any of the current ones.

Any plans to go into video or are you happy with sticking to just pictures for now?

Imgur is really great, thanks for making it.

Nope, we're pretty happy in the image business.

I just wanted to say thanks for the absolutely horrendously stressful/horrible but ultimately hilariously funny day you gave me when imgur started responding with random images (often NSFW ones) and everyone thought it was RES's fault.

I'm being serious here - it was a really rough day with people freaking out on me, sending me hate mail and threats, etc... but in retrospect it was absolutely hilarious and one of the cooler/funnier things I can look back and laugh about... so thanks for that, even if it wasn't on purpose ;-)

Also thanks for continuing to improve imgur and its services, and for letting RES be a bastard leech off of you every time I ask you "are you sure you don't want me to do something to at least let you inject your own ads or something?"

Keep on keepin' on, MrGrim.

For my question: What exactly happened with that random image fiasco? And are you willing to add something like that to the API? People are asking me to do it in RES and I can't really think of a good way to do it without just testing random URLs and hitting your servers unnecessarily.

Oh man, I'm really sorry to hear you got hate mail from that. It was definetly one of the funnier bugs that have ever popped up.

There was a typo in the line that pulled the image from the DB. This isn't exactly it, but think along the lines of:

select * from images limit 1;

vs

select * from images where id = 12345 limit 1;

Do you have any secret? It's incredible that 45 million people per month use your site.

Well if I told you it wouldn't be a secret anymore. http://i.imgur.com/6DdDc.gif

Thanks for the really, really, useful service for a start.

Questions: 1) Did you have to learn new skills and information (load-balancing, similar) when the site started to grow? 2) How is content policed / how do you deal with problem content? 3) What language did you code imgur in?

1. I learned just about everything as I've needed it. I've always been pretty good at PHP, but all the backend and scaling issues that came up were learned on the fly because I either had to find a solution or the site would go down.

2. It doesn't need to be policed thanks to the safe harbor laws. If we're notified of something then we take it down.

3. It's all done in PHP.

Are you planning to make an official iOS version? There are many clients using your API but either of them is good enough.

It's in the works right now. Tony is almost done with all the designs.

My girlfriend's sister went to school and was friends with Breanna. Something along the lines of she was gonna give her our number so when you were coming to SF you could crash in LA with us of you wanted but forgot too. Then much later she said she(bre) was dating some image guy that went to OU. I put 2 and 2 together and was sad I never got to buy you a beer.

That's my creepy story.

We're still together.

You're a good guy; I like you and the things you do.

Thanks! You're not too bad yourself.

Is it true about the stickers?

Yes! We have 2000 emails so far, but all will get stickers. I think it's like $900 in stamps, lol.

What sort of legalities do you have to deal with when it comes to illegal content, like CP & stuff? Do you have to proactively patrol the content at all, or is it enough to just include some sort of "report this content" link?

Thanks to the safe harbor laws, which is what the whole SOPA and PIPA thing was about, we don't have to police the content.

Once we're notified of it we have to take it down.

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Almost 200 million right now.

My favorite image changes almost daily. The gallery has some really great stuff.