Hacker News Reader

Comment by flashman | Hacker News Reader

> It bans nudity, porn, and hate speech

Ha! Imgur is awash with pornography. They could automatically remove a large amount of nudity and porn by looking at the contents of /r/nsfw. As a second gate, they could use Microsoft's image classification service, which has a 'racy' flag.

Imgur is lucky that there aren't powerful rightsholder bodies for images the way there are for music and video. That's the only way the massive copyright infringement happening there every day goes unchallenged. Sure, they have DMCA safe harbor, but so did many other video and music startups who ended up slapped with lawsuits.

View on HN

Yeah, imgur's primary raison d'etre was hosting porn from nsfw subreddits -- including the worst of the worst like jailbait and creepshots.

Pictures are currently being policed by the right holders but I think that there isn't a big why would right holders really care unlike Music and Movies/TV Shows have a strong financial argument.

Pictures seem to be the opposite effect with individual copyright holders caring about if their pictures are stolen and big media only caring if they are liable or not.

And, while "hate speech" is in the eye of the beholder, I've stumbled on far more misogyny, racism, and general assholery than I'm particularly comfortable with on imgur--particularly when it comes to sharing images hosted on imgur with friends on facebook (it now redirects links from facebook to the community discussion page for an image, if there is one). It may or may not be worse than reddit in that regard, as reddit varies wildly based on the moderation policies and practices of the subreddits. imgur seems to have no "safe space"...you can stumble on a shitshow at any moment, and a seemingly normal conversation can go shitshaped at any time.

I understand that the community part bans those things; when you upload an image, you choose whether or not to submit it to the imgur community thing

How does that work exactly? I'm on Imgur daily and never heard of such a thing. On the other hand I've never understood what "usersub" is either.

Browse "User Submitted" by "Newest First" and you'll see the raw firehose of stuff people are submitting to the main gallery. If you're especially brave, do this at work.

That's the default view at imgur.com, isn't it?

I hit that page a couple of times a month and haven't even seen any porn....

Aren't all images on Imgur user submitted? Who else would upload stuff?

Images from the front page of reddit are autopromoted to the front page of imgur.

One of the reason I like imgur: it's Reddit without the Reddit UI or redditors.

One of the reasons I like Reddit: It's Imgur without the Imgur UI or "imgurians".

Fair enough. If Reddit is what works for you then rock it. Regarding the imgur community, I personally think they are a little too tryhard and silly, myself.

But I don't go there for the community. All I want are the best of the funny, amusing and interesting images the Internet can generate, served up in a never ending stream. After a long day of reading, coding, emailing, and everything else, the last thing I want to do is navigate yet another wall of grey on white text.

Imgur is pure brain candy in that sense. No thinking, no real discussion, no need to look at comments or interact with the users. Just flip awww, kitty flip hey boobs flip neat!

> If you're especially brave, do this at work.

People keep saying that, but have you actually tried it? I feel pretty confident that I could browse user submitted, newest first and mature filter off at work and the biggest problem would be "browsing Imgur at work". There's practically no nudity or other offensive stuff. It's actually quit impressive.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com