Discontinuing Support for NSFW Imgur r/subsections Associated with Reddit
blog.imgur.com
blog.imgur.com
But images are still hosted there and I presume new images are still added e.g. https://i.imgur.com/nZHfzdV.jpg (mildly NSFW but in a NSFW reddit).
From a desktop browser the first link will show: "As of Oct 2019, Imgur will no longer display NSFW Imgur r/subsections associated with Reddit subreddits. No Imgur content has been deleted or moved, and is still available at its original Imgur URL. As an alternative, you can browse the visual contents of any subreddit using third-party tools such as https://www.redditery.com and https://redditgrid.com."
Opening the same URL by copying and pasting it to the address bar shows the image without needing to sign in.
What I found was that if the page referrer was Facebook, you got nothing, the imgur site attempted to redirect you back through to their galleries, but if you used the link directly you'd get the image.
I never figured out exactly what's happening, I used a code snippet that stripped out the referrer info and everything started working.
But even in my own APIs I check for referrers to make sure they are actually coming from my site so I assume this will break some pages.
^1: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/smart-referer...
So long as you can load images on reddit itself I don't see the problem
A. Creating a super-simply image host that isn't full of crap and watermarks like Photobucket or Imgur will yield a profitable business.
B. A is in fact not profitable, and adding crap and watermarks is part of the normal evolution of an image hosting business once you gain moderate amounts of traction that starts to stress your finances.
https://www.reddit.com/r/interestingasfuck/comments/ag2vpg/a...
I once posted some random photo on Imgur to share with a larger group of friends, and I guess I left the display option set to the default of public. Next thing I know, I get a comment from an Imgurian who found it through the Imgur image listing saying something like "What is this? Why did you think I would care about this?"
If you browse imgur's New gallery you see images posted by mistake all the time.
So this is making the Reddit -> imgur experience more crappy for people browsing Reddit.
Imgur has been on a trend of walling off their garden, first deprecating the Mobile Web experience in favor of their frigging app, and now this. I can understand why they want to reduce their footprint for NSFW image hosting, but if you just wanted to look at an NSFW subreddit to see some images, this is going to make things more annoying.
Not only is this a hindrance to users but it actively blocks archiving.
imgur rewrites them so they can serve you adverts, and modal dialogs telling you to install their application.
imgur started out well, as a fast and simple image-host, but like all the others it tries to recoup money by serving adverts and getting up to increasingly shady things.
Soon it will be time for the cycle to repeat and a new host launch itself; no doubt with a cute tagline saying they'll even host nsfw content.
I didn't realise they had a traffic-based condition that did this, too. Wow.
They've been pretty hostile with this sort of thing for a while. Look at this behaviour:
# Mobile UA
$ curl -v -H "Accept: text/html,application/xhtml+xml,applciation/xml;q=0.9,*/*;q=0.8" -H "User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Android 10; Mobile; rv:68.0) Gecko/68.0 Firefox/68.0" https://i.imgur.com/6WAZZpN.jpg
< HTTP/2 302
< retry-after: 0
< location: https://m.imgur.com/6WAZZpN?r
# Desktop UA
$ curl -v -H "Accept: text/html,application/xhtml+xml,applciation/xml;q=0.9,*/*;q=0.8" -H "User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:71.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/71.0" https://i.imgur.com/6WAZZpN.jpg | file -
< HTTP/2 200
< last-modified: Wed, 18 Sep 2019 20:45:26 GMT
< etag: "21d323ddb1c1926ab0d7a5bb9786c996"
< content-type: image/jpeg
...
/dev/stdin: JPEG image data, baseline, precision 8, 2250x1500, components 3
Notice that they redirect mobile users to https://m.imgur.com/6WAZZpN?r. I've noticed they do this in order to serve them ads, encourage them to install their PUP on their device (as you mention) and break their ability to zoom on the image (the image embedded is thumbnail size).They use UA sniffing to disguise this behaviour from technical users on desktop. They also detect if you're using curl and spoofing a mobile UA (which sends Accept: * / *), in which case this dark UX pattern is disabled.
Birth, awesomeness, turns out to be expensive, somewhat less awesome, "no, really, this shit is expensive please give us money", kinda sucky, "hey, we need to monetize, get this porn off of here", really sucky, "Oh, crap, 95% of our use cases were porn. Ooops.", death.
"Ready normal people! Ready! Ready! Ready!" <song starts> "The Internet is for porn ..."
Countdown until someone creates the next "image host that doesn't suck" in 5 ... 4 ... 3 ...
'Modern Major General' from HMS Pinafore might fit.
Edit: The internet is for porn and has everything that's sexual.
From web cams, sex tapes, phat ass, big jugs, erotica homosexual.
And if you find a kink absent.... You're one fked up individual.
Edit2: Repeated lyrics repeated. (I'm sure Lennon and McCartney didn't get it right 1st time).
Anyway, the muse struck, so you got a verse out of me (see edit on prior post).
One difference is that Pixiv requires you to be logged in to see NSFW content, much like the new Imgur changes, but I suspect this is for other reasons. I haven’t checked to see if doing that actually shows different things in terms of advertisements.
OTOH, I’ve never heard of any advertisers pulling out of an entity due to pornographic content in Japan.
I haven’t tried OAuth on Pixiv but they have a fairly good engineering culture and would be surprised if they are asking for your Google password.
Edit: I just tried. The password it’s asking for is the one that will be associated with the Pixiv account that is created. Whether that is how federated login should work is arguable, but it’s a fairly common pattern.
A more reputable company just might not want their ad displayed on a site that might have porn or questionable content. Look at how YouTube ads and monitization have changed in just the past few years. There were real issues with major ads getting displayed on popular but questionable videos.
We're heading into a much bigger issue of call-out culture. We're seeing academics, programmers, CEOs, authors and comedians being told they need to resign from positions or be ousted for single political comments or a single donation to one cause made years ago. Then people go back through history and pull up every questionable thing that person has done or said.
I don't think it's tangentially related; and that it's affecting the business of Internet advertising.
Their logic is weird, too - it's not like NSFW subsections make Imgur less "fun and entertaining". Quite the reverse! And it's not as if you could stumble across these - you basically had to type the URL in by hand.
The only realistic option is to host media on the same service that's consuming it or hosting the media on a decentralized service that you don't have to worry about being shut down in the future.
e: this is mainly interesting because it demonstrates that there are people willing to donate storage/compute/bw to p2p nsfw image hosting, not because the underlying tech is particularly revolutionary or should be used as a model for future systems
I have a feeling there was a lot of internal push back and fourth, but they were either losing too much money or only getting advertisers they weren't comfortable with.
It's more complicated that just advertisers expectations.
https://www.fastcompany.com/90304153/seven-weeks-after-nsfw-...
If the only way to save your platform is to reform society, then your platform is already dead.
In the long run though, I expect reddit to ban porn. It might be a few more years, there are a lot of factors in play, including the patience of their investors and whether or not an influential media company decides to do an exposé on reddit hosting amateur pornography without vetting peoples' ages and/or hosting professional pornography in violation of copyright law.
Mastercard have a huge list of arbitrary rules.
Visa and Mastercard charge significantly extra to process adult payments.
But as you say, adult content isn't the only high-risk business but payment processors seem to care much more about it than others.
My guess is that it's just exactly what it looks like - a squeamishness to be associated with activities that culture targets as "non-respectable". "If people pay for porn with Paypal, then they'll think of Paypal as a porn payment provider and not want to use Paypal to pay for normal things".
A prophetic comment in OP:
[–][deleted] 21 points 10 years ago Anyone can make an image hosting service that doesn't suck. But tell me in a year or two if you're still around and not sucking. Then I'll consider it.
That's extremely dramatic to say. Did you even read the full post? They aren't doing anything unreasonable, compared to say Tumblr, and what they did. All they are doing is putting NSFW content behind a login. Nothing is getting deleted, or not allowed anymore.
It all sounds complicated.
This is a constant source of work for these providers, but complicated this is not.
I don’t know how they make money. Ad rates aren’t that great and bandwidth isn’t that cheap.
Are they going to manually identify NSFW images? Scrape known-NSFW subreddits? Look at the Referer header?
Can just see folks on Reddit using its own built-in image upload functionality. Imgur has been largely redundant since this was launched (and offers an increasingly poor, ad-ridden UX full of dark patterns), to be honest.
Email me: mshahi.biz@gmail.com
Thinking about if this effects my usage of Imgur?