Why is it so slow?

Hmm, what aspect is slow for you? The memechat application should be pretty instantaneous as long as you're not on a 3G or otherwise megaslow internet connection.

The only thing that isn't instant would be email notifications, if that's what you're talking about. We wait a couple hours to send those so it's not a constant barrage of emails and so there's time to check them on Imgflip before seeing them in your email. The rest of social media websites seem to want to harass every ounce of sanity out of every one of their users in the name of "increasing engagement", aka increasing advertising revenue.

The whole thing tends to be slow, when I click on the envelope it loads for up to two minutes, then when I click on a chat I get the loading circle, and going from a chat to my profile from the dropdown menu has crashed my device multiple times. I don't use email notifications

That sounds like you might just have a very slow phone and/or very slow internet. The Imgflip website is generally extremely fast and lightweight compared to most popular sites on the internet. Practically zero third party scripts, and no 3rd party bloat at all.

Clicking on a chat only takes 50ms (basically instantaneous) for the slowest 1% of users on our servers. Anything slower than that is likely from your internet connection.

There are really only two things that provide weight to Imgflip browsing: 1) Images, obviously Imgflip is all about images and there are tons of them, and images take a lot of bandwidth, 2) Advertisements, but only on pages that have ads and only if you are not a Pro user. Ads are slow and crappy but they are a requirement for us to make money. Buy Pro and they go away :)

hmmmmmm, ok

Speaking of the slow...

Ahem

After the violent racist hate-stream “safespot” was deleted by you guys. this stream popped up in clear violation of the TOS
https://imgflip.com/m/based
with this pro-racism description (quote) “A stream for the very best edgy and based White Nationalist, Fascist and National Socialist memes.”

Featuring violent murder of an Asian girl in its first meme:
https://imgflip.com/i/4z3gwe

The owner of the stream is this troll
https://imgflip.com/user/Hedgewik

And we all know he is the alt for a formerly banned troll named “WhiteNationalist” that for strange reason you mods won’t delete now even though you delete Purgeboi when he pulls the same crap and comes back. Shame, shame cowards. Embarrassing for the site when we have to do the job you lazy enablers won’t do.

the introverts thank you

but how come memechat is real-time, yet comments & featured images aren't? is it simply because memechat is a newer feature, so y'all were able to add it, or is comments just more complex?

Haha, the technical aspects are all trivial to implement. If something has been one way for a long time despite requests to change it, then there is often a trade off. Featuring of images is sometimes delayed because images must be scanned by moderators first. What specific slowness are you talking about with comments and featuring?

I mean how when you send a message on memechat, if you're on it out will show up immediately without having to refresh imgflip. But when you post a comment or upvote an image, you'd have to refresh the page or go to notifs & back to see it.

Ah, yea we don't update the rest of the site without page refreshes. It's just more of a necessity for chat, whereas seeing things moving around and being added while your page is just sitting there can interfere with what you're doing. It also requires more server and network resources, which are probably not too insanely expensive, but must be weighed against how useful the feature actually is. We also weigh new features against other potential new features because implementing one thing means we are not implementing another one and vice versa.

oh ok.

I see how comments & meme submissions shouldn't be up to date, but what about upvotes?

at least it's somewhat real time, unlike comments