With the 2015 launch of Sponsored Post ads still gaining steam, Imgur lacks deep pockets like other social networks that can throw legions of product designers and engineers at new features.
And after being bootstrapped for five years, it’s only raised one funding round of $40 million in 2014, led by Andreessen Horowitz.
Office chat meme full#
Imgur is full of power users, with 82% spending over 3 hours a week on the service as of last year. Unfortunately, the chat feature feels a bit half-baked in ways that could be problematic when unleashed on such a massive community. That could put it more directly in competition with social networks like Facebook. We’ll see if Imgur eventually offers a feed for consuming posts by people you follow. Notifications are a clumsy way to browse content at higher volumes, though. If there’s a particular GIF wizard, story teller, or meme aggregator you love, you’ll know when they post something great.
For the many Imgurians who’ve built long-distance online friendships on the site, chat will draw them deeper into the service rather than forcing them out onto some other communication tool.įollowing allows people to select their favorite Imgur accounts and get notified if one of their submissions gets enough upvotes to hit the “Most Viral” page. It works on mobile where users get notifications and can share text, links, Imgur posts, and GIFs - which have been the most popular in beta testing. Rolling out today, chat brings true instant messaging to Imgur. And you had to proactively visit someone’s profile to see what they’d recently shared.
It was really more like a bare-bones internal email system. There’s long been basic private messaging, but it only worked on desktop with no notifications, and didn’t support rich media like GIFs. Yet until now, staying in touch or consuming a specific user’s content was tough. Sarah, sister of Imgur founder Alan Schaaf, downplays the racier bits, saying “One of the things I’m most proud about is that despite the massive scale, Imgur has managed to stay an overwhelmingly positive place.” She sees its purpose as three-fold: to help users discover new things, geek out on what they love, and share with like-minded people. Though the site prohibits outright pornography, sexed-up cosplay and lists of adult film stars still get massive attention. There’s also a smaller, seedier side, where contributors who reach the front page request people send them nude photos, and users comment with an unassuming “.” to bookmark erotic content they call “research material”.
Users recently donated frequent flier miles to send 20 needy “Imgurians” home for the holidays, and 20,000 have signed up for its annual Secret Santa gift exchange. There’s the hatred of reposts of old content, enthusiasm for introverts scoring little wins in work or love, and the deification of Imgur’s curly-haired community manager Sarah Schaaf. Inside jokes and emergent behaviors reign. Imgur has always had a remarkably strong and supportive community, driven by the fact that everyone is united by the same homepage of top content, rather than seeing personalized feeds like on most social networks. The question is whether Imgur can keep these private channels from turning into sewers. These could make Imgur even more sticky, recentering it from the images you find to the people you share them with, even if you’ve never met them in real life. The content discovery site where 150 million monthly users upvote the best memes, GIFs, science tricks, and sob stories today launched chat and following features. Maybe “Carson’s Law”, named after Johnny Carson, the king of chit-chat on late night TV. There should be a term for how, given long enough, every social app adds a chat feature.
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