> People go with 3rd parties nowadays for the slick web interface
No, they go with 3rd parties nowadays because most home users don't have bandwidth to host their own images.
One of the current top posts on reddit/r/funny has had over 1 million views after being posted to imgur 8 hours ago. The image file is 1.7 megabytes. That means imgur has transferred 1.7 TERAbytes in 8 hours of just that one image. That's an average of about 59 megabytes PER SECOND of bandwidth, or nearly half a gigabit per second.
Less than 1% of home users have that kind of bandwidth, and that's only to host a single image.
If you REALLY think "Oh, people only use image hosts because of the interface", you're not living in reality.
In the times the gp was talking about, you'd set up a cron job to download a 1.7mb file overnight, and be happy if it finished by morning. So yeah, apples and oranges (of the gp).
No, they go with 3rd parties nowadays because most home users don't have bandwidth to host their own images.
One of the current top posts on reddit/r/funny has had over 1 million views after being posted to imgur 8 hours ago. The image file is 1.7 megabytes. That means imgur has transferred 1.7 TERAbytes in 8 hours of just that one image. That's an average of about 59 megabytes PER SECOND of bandwidth, or nearly half a gigabit per second.
Less than 1% of home users have that kind of bandwidth, and that's only to host a single image.
If you REALLY think "Oh, people only use image hosts because of the interface", you're not living in reality.