Image display web sites

M

mark_j

Quite a few users here post images of screenshots etc to web sites like imgur.com.

I have a big problem with this site. It's a shit-storm of tracking and javascript which I refuse to activate for such a web site. So, if a picture is posted to imgur.com I for one will not and cannot view it.

Here's an example of just some of the junk tied to this web site:
Code: 
amplitude.com - tracking
yieldlove.com - google ad bidding (whatever the hell that is?)
alexametrics.com - web tracker, amazon.
consensu.org - When their opening spiel is "We value your privacy" you know they don't and are about to sell it.
scorecardresearch.com - Web "analysis", aka, tracking.
quantserve.com - web beacons and cookies, trackers etc etc
quantcount.com - see above
adlighning.com - ad server
*.google.com - all the usual "analytics" and tracking crap.
facebook.com - trash.
twitter.com - left and right wing trash.

So, the question is, are there alternatives that, while using ads (which I can block), have minimal javascript requirements and even less need for 10s of trackers and "web analytics (aka spying)"???

If so, I would like to see that be a recommended web site for posting images; should such a rarity exist.
 
So you are looking for a place that will host your (and other people's) images for free, but you are not willing to pay for it by watching ads? Because most of sites you posted are in effect pieces of ad delivery mechanisms, such as tracking and metrics: To know that you are interested in ads for elephant food, someone needs to track that you have been looking at web pages about elephants, and their health and eating habits. By saying that you don't want tracking, you are effectively admitting that you are willing to look at pages that show bad ads (namely those that are put there at random, because without tracking your interests, targeted ads are impossible), and those are not worth very much, because you probably won't look at them. And you are intending to block those ads anyway, and the people who run those know that (they know what fraction of the ads are clicked on, duh).

Sorry, but the economics of that doesn't work. You won't get a free service if you don't allow the people providing that service to make money, by doing something like showing ads, ads that are good enough to be useful to use (so they generate clickthroughs or sales).

Now, another question is: Is Imgur particularly well engineered, are they good at delivering ads efficiently (with minimal tracking overhead), is their javascript clean and well written? No idea. Honestly, to them that's probably not very important. They are probably in a somewhat desperate struggle to find money. I just looked up how much Imgur has been funded by VCs, and it looks like about $100M have been sunk into it, including recently. My guess is their operating expenses are pretty large (probably dozens of M$ per year), but their staff is small (various job hunting sites say a dozen or two people). That's not much for a high-class web service.

If you don't want ads, use a commercial storage / serving account for your pictures. If you don't want to pay, accept ads, and the infrastructure for delivering them. If you want to neither pay nor allow ads and tracking, don't store pictures at other people's sites. Or find people who out of the goodness of their heart are willing to donate money to you (like the people who run this forum). If you don't like javascript, stop using the web as it currently exists, as it is the standard web implementation language.

In a nutshell: TANSTAAFL.
 
ralphbsz said:
So you are looking for a place that will host your (and other people's) images for free, but you are not willing to pay for it by watching ads? Because most of sites you posted are in effect pieces of ad delivery mechanisms, such as tracking and metrics: To know that you are interested in ads for elephant food, someone needs to track that you have been looking at web pages about elephants, and their health and eating habits. By saying that you don't want tracking, you are effectively admitting that you are willing to look at pages that show bad ads (namely those that are put there at random, because without tracking your interests, targeted ads are impossible), and those are not worth very much, because you probably won't look at them. And you are intending to block those ads anyway, and the people who run those know that (they know what fraction of the ads are clicked on, duh).

Sorry, but the economics of that doesn't work. You won't get a free service if you don't allow the people providing that service to make money, by doing something like showing ads, ads that are good enough to be useful to use (so they generate clickthroughs or sales).

Now, another question is: Is Imgur particularly well engineered, are they good at delivering ads efficiently (with minimal tracking overhead), is their javascript clean and well written? No idea. Honestly, to them that's probably not very important. They are probably in a somewhat desperate struggle to find money. I just looked up how much Imgur has been funded by VCs, and it looks like about $100M have been sunk into it, including recently. My guess is their operating expenses are pretty large (probably dozens of M$ per year), but their staff is small (various job hunting sites say a dozen or two people). That's not much for a high-class web service.

If you don't want ads, use a commercial storage / serving account for your pictures. If you don't want to pay, accept ads, and the infrastructure for delivering them. If you want to neither pay nor allow ads and tracking, don't store pictures at other people's sites. Or find people who out of the goodness of their heart are willing to donate money to you (like the people who run this forum). If you don't like javascript, stop using the web as it currently exists, as it is the standard web implementation language.

In a nutshell: TANSTAAFL.
Click to expand...
Wow, anger much?
I said it can have ads, not all the tracking stuff. TL;DR.
 
mark_j said:
I said it can have ads, not all the tracking stuff.
Click to expand...
Yes, but to get the advertising they "need" to know what their site visitors are doing - hence the tracking.

The days of someone giving a site owner $50 to stick a banner advert are over.

There are real-time bidding wars to stick "relevant" adverts in front of eyeballs.

"They" want to track you from site to site so they can figure out who you are and what you like looking at, demographics, blah-de-blah. Then they can sell you to the highest bidder. If they know you are interested in real estate, you'll be sold in real-time to the highest bidder for a "real-estate demographic" spot on a website.

I don't like it, especially seeing as it doesn't really seem to work that well, despite the intrusion. If I search for something for work or a gift for my family, then weeks/months later I'm still seeing adverts for those things I really have no interest in. So random adverts much more "fun".

And don't talk about the auto-run noisy videos or the sites with MULTIPLE noisy videos that all fire up at once! :mad:
 
imgur.com has been broken for me like forever. I am not entirely sure if my browser itself or one of the plugins i use to strip out garbage is the reason for breaking their giant heap of javascript but in any case i can't view whatever gets posted there as don't see why i should jump through hoops just to view something as simple as webpage with a single image on it. Alternative image hosters being used is therefore something i'd welcome a lot - even before getting into any discussion about tracking at all.
 
I tend to rent a cheapish throwaway server where I can just scp images onto a HTTP served directory and link to that.
Then you don't need to deal with the "modern" web (and all the broken dumb crap that comes with it).

If you want to pay nothing, that is still possible just create a new dedicated GitHub account and make a repo full of images. Sure, Microsoft are incompetent but I am at least 73% sure they can manage to serve images without screwing things up. Otherwise GitLab and Bitbucket are competing companies that might fair better.

If you ever find yourself on a machine without svn or git, you can still add things using the ad-free (tracking blockable) web interface.
I pretty much use throwaway GitHub accounts like people would dropbox. I almost get satisfaction misusing the service. ;)
 
kpedersen said:
I tend to rent a cheapish throwaway server where I can just scp images onto a HTTP served directory and link to that.
Then you don't need to deal with the "modern" web (and all the broken dumb crap that comes with it).

If you want to pay nothing, that is still possible just create a new dedicated GitHub account and make a repo full of images. Sure, Microsoft are incompetent but I am at least 73% sure they can manage to serve images without screwing things up. Otherwise GitLab and Bitbucket are competing companies that might fair better.

If you ever find yourself on a machine without svn or git, you can still add things using the ad-free (tracking blockable) web interface.
I pretty much use throwaway GitHub accounts like people would dropbox. I almost get satisfaction misusing the service. ;)
Click to expand...

If it's just to have a place to dump pictures this can be had for seriously cheap. Just get one of those NAT/IPv6 only VPS offers (what are those? like <5$/year?) and stick Cloudflare's free reverse proxy in front of it to get IPv4 connectivity. The obvious downside is Cloudflare being involved but at such a price range one really can't be that picky.
 
That isn't a bad idea. That said Cloudflare is completely broken and can't work with useful technology like Tor (captchas every refresh almost) so I really don't want to contribute to that kind of thing and make the web even worse!

Is there perhaps anything you have come accross which is similar to Cloudflare's free rproxy but more... inclusive?
 
kpedersen said:
Is there perhaps anything you have come accross which is similar to Cloudflare's free rproxy but not... criminally sh*t? Haha
Click to expand...

There is actually a couple of those reverse proxy services but as far as i know most don't offer any kind of free tier or don't even openly display pricing at all. https://ddos-guard.net might be worth a try. I have no personal experience with them but at least they have a free 1 domain package it seems.

Edit: A quick websearch also came up with https://cloudlayar.com/ but i have never even heard of them before.
 
The problem with the throwaway options is that if someone is looking at these forums a year or two later trying to find a solution for their issues, the helpful images will potentially be gone. And a picture is worth a thousand words and all that.

So an option that is looked after by someone else and will be around for a few years is better in this context.

Hardly the end of the world, just sayin'.
 
richardtoohey2 said:
So an option that is looked after by someone else and will be around for a few years is better in this context.
Click to expand...

I do agree but I suppose it matters if that "someone else" is competent or not ;)

The verdicts still out on Microsoft in terms of competence but I don't forsee the GitHub approach ever really failing.

For forums I would recommend uploading it to the forums server itself. I know loads of free image websites are quite happy to remove images after a year or two. Makes the web in general look really broken!
 
FreeBSD debugging (from normal desktop user to kernel developers) doesn't need pictures and screenshot. Only logs, config files and stream from std[in|out|err].
Thus the simple solution: FreeBSD Forums has to remove "Insert image (Ctrl+P)" button. I'm completely fine with that.
 
anonymous9 said:
As a Harvard student said after he used Tor to send a bomb threat: "You stand out like a fucking glow stick."
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Absolutely true, I am not exactly hiding from these guys (the UK government only really cares about video piracy anyway rather than anything vaguely important). However it does eliminate tracking from pretty much all web companies and these are the arrogant twits I do not want to deal with.

Since I will be using a socks5h proxy for everything anyway, it might as well be a Tor one.

Plus, I am under the impression that if enough of us start glowing, soon it will be too bright to find anyone ;)
 
anonymous9 said:
Interestingly, Tor was mostly created from US governemt funding along with the US Naval Research Lab. It was also hacked by the FBI four years ago. I'd wager the FBI, CIA, and especially the NSA have compromised it today. And anyone can create a Tor node to collect data and IP addresses.
Click to expand...

You need a bit more than a single node to collect anything interesting. The assumption of Tor being bulletproof would be awfully naive though. I still think it's pretty useful.

kpedersen said:
Plus, I am under the impression that if enough of us start glowing, soon it will be too bright to find anyone ;)
Click to expand...

Tor traffic isn't as unusual as one might think. I am glowing like a christmas tree and so do a couple of my servers while doing perfectly nothing interesting. I've also seen some of my neighbors glow while on a non-switched network.
 
As a general rule, the ads ecosystem is a nasty mess. To make it slightly less nasty, I generally recommend the Cookie Autodelete, NoScript and uBlock Origin plugins. You can ignore tracking (cookies are deleted when you close the last open tab to a website), malicious JavaScript doesn't load (you generally have to permit the domain, so there's some risk there, but it's lower) and even in-video ads are blocked.

Combine with a DNS trash filter such as the No Tracking lists running through DNS Crypt Proxy and you've got a reasonably good defense against a fair portion of the junk.
 
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