Which was fascinating. You wanted to keep independent. You were competing with bigger companies, right? Or do you not think that, that it was not I just wanted to grow a really big business.
I thought in order to do that Well, then I thought in order to do that we needed more money. This is also now in around or , when the world is clearly moving mobile. I wanted Imgur to be the next big destination for Yeah, on a phone. We had, I think, 12 people at the time. Yep, this was We were late to the mobile game. Out of all that Yahoo stuff, we actually met a guy names Johnny Greenglass who helped us put together the materials to raise 40 million dollars from Andreessen Horowitz.
After that, we start building up the team. Then always with different teams, you need different GA functions, you need HR, you need finance. Just from them. Only did one round because you were making money already. What was your hope to do that, was it just use this money to build that out, right?
We went from 12 to, in a year, I think it was around What I really am fascinated by your company is that every company like yours gets bought, gets taken up, or gets either bought or run over essentially. I want to talk about where, first, where photos are going and imagery is going and how it moves. Then, where you think the new trends are going towards it.
Imagery or GIFs or memes? It turns out that people can express themselves better with an animated GIF or with an image than they can through almost any other means. I could show you a GIF of There used to be a peanut butter, it may still be around, that was Jif, and it was a J on the Jif, right? It was a J on the Jif. Tell me about the different people that are doing this, Instagram for example.
You are sharing the highlight moments of your life and in order to make your life look quite good. You know what I recently did on Instagram? I was publishing and posting pictures of horrible things in San Francisco, it disturbed everybody.
It was all unfortunate pictures, like it was a bag of urine in my yard and this is, yeah. That bag, of course, yeah. But it was really, I was trying to make a point that I was showing ugly things and it disturbed the entire Is that right? And so you keep on coming back to it.
The entire purpose of the company is to solve that problem that I believe these other social giants are creating. Wait, I remember there was, I want to go to an opposite direction. Now, that was a big deal for a while. That was a lot of imagery like sharing Cheezburger, right? They tried to move off just the cat. Tried to move off the cat. They moved to squirrels. Imgur, however, because of the platform, you create a post and a post can consist of one or multiple images, GIFs, videos with sound, and it really lets you create a story so it has a little bit more depth, a little bit more community, a little bit more discussion than just the bare image of the cat and the cheeseburger.
How do you look Is that We do view Imgur as a community-powered entertainment destination because the internet at large is creating these fun posts for people to see. Oh yes. Yeah, exactly. We, however, have a large community of users putting together this content. I think one of my favorites now, one of my all-time favorites I think would be Scumbag Steve.
It became one of the most popular memes on the internet. Like the dancing baby , remember that? But I think even like Blake Boston got someone to manage him and his, these memes Same with Success Kid, are you aware of that meme? I do money-earning so they could buy the phones to do the memes, but go ahead.
And Success Kid actually, his family went on to license out the real Success Kid. Yeah, they did. They had him around, they brought him to San Francisco and I declined to go see. Yeah, I declined to go visit Grumpy Cat, I passed on that journalistic My very relatable moments that everybody can connect to and it just expresses it so well in an image. Where does it go from here?
Because right now, in the next section I want to talk about where the internet is going and a big sense is that things have become so toxic and so ugly and stuff like that. These GIFs, I got to totally change my point of view.
Where does it go with these folks, these viral photos? They will be integrated into everything, and we see that now. We see that Google just acquired Tenor, not too long ago, and now GIFs are built into the android keyboard, you can search And in Asia they are very big on the emoji, and I kind of think that the GIF is sort of the western emoji. Of course, we have emojis, but just bring on this additional layer of self-expression, maybe just the typical emoji can bring. Can you imagine them completely replacing texts at any point or not?
I think they will always sort of supplement texts, to a certain degree. Although I have had entire conversations with friends only using GIFs.
Does it ever turn In the next section, I do you want to talk about how things have turned really ugly in social media, but does it ever turn badly in these? It can, right?
However, we would just outright ban that content, racist memes and texts and otherwise, they do not belong on Imgur. And Pepe the Frog is just hateful content. Right, absolutely. Right now social media is kind of in an ugly period. Do you think of yourself as that, or not? But social media considers itself entertainment, right? Yeah, we do see that unfortunately on the internet, not so much on Imgur. Tell me about your response.
What do you think your responsibility is? That type of like what kind of companies are these people trying to create, and ultimately, that comes down to the values that the company has and the values that it imposes on its users and then how it then enforces and shapes the behavior of that platform to make sure that it actually lines up to those values.
It does not line up to values of open and transparency and bringing value to users and respect for users. We just remove that content.
One key differentiator for Imgur We do, and you know what? Explain to the people why? How many billions of images go across your site? Billions, right? Billions and billions and billions. We have, yeah. We have a catalog that is in the And so, we have a huge team of moderators located all around the world in various time zones.
Human moderators. It goes from algorithms Exactly, yeah, exactly, automatic nudity detection to just the way that the product is set up from the beginning and that it has the upvote and the downvote, then the community norms, the community rules.
And what is the problem going on in social media? Because it really has created a cesspool. Now they will argue We are a place of positivity on the internet.
That if we have rules somewhere and What do you think has to happen in that area? Because I do Which is Similar things. It is for the moments of downtime. I go on there to laugh and to enjoy these moments that I have and I get kind of sucked into this whole other world of content and people that I am not seeing anywhere else.
It is sort of like a video game. It puts you into this flow of focus and you end up seeing and just swiping through all of this amazing content and you end up seeing these things that are funny or inspirational or uplifting they just make you laugh, make you learn something new.
You know what I was thinking of But it was at first people telling it the way it really was, but they used imagery and graphics to do that, which was interesting.
It was all about feeling bad or telling bad things about people kind of thing, which is interesting. Where do you think it goes from here? Where do you imagine it goes? If you change them to community, commonality, things we have in common, like instead of nationally, you take away national politics today and then you talk about streets and roads and schools, people start to move together. Which I thought was really interesting.
Why is that not happening? So, well, our pillars are value, transparency and respect. And we also want it to be very transparent. But we also want to attract everybody. Obviously Europe has been really strongly starting to pull back content and make them, force them How do you pull it back? Because your vision of the internet was the original vision of the internet as I recall it back in the day when the baby was — it was the dancing friggin baby. It was so great. That baby was the best thing ever.
Let me just say, when you saw that, when you did not see ever have a meme, this was the first meme, it was the most delightful thing you ever want to see. And that was what it felt like at the time and now it makes ,, million memes later. So I can tell you where I would like it to go. See, the internet So my point is that they are absolutely fantastic and they are on every platform. If there is a user-generated platform that exists, it is actively being manipulated right now.
And so I believe that And everybody is also trying to tackle it independently for their platform and so Facebook has their own efforts on how to deal with it, Twitter has their own efforts, we have our own efforts Yeah, Reddit has their own efforts. It used to be called DNA or something like that.
I love it. Presumably, the goal is to bundle together traffic from these properties to sell ads or data, while cutting costs by sharing the work of keeping the sites running. Kik and Whisper were similarly once-hot properties that have since faded from prominence. Imgur itself has had a strange ride as a company. In , Reddit decided to host its own image uploads , and in response Imgur began to form itself into a standalone online community.
It copied various social features popular on Reddit, including upvotes and downvotes on images, comment threads, and focused communities. The site has frequently been compared to other image-hosting services that grew adjacent to larger social media sites, such as Twitpic, but has so far laster longer on its own strengths.
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