Imgur Updates TOS, Banning NSFW Content | Hacker News Reader

Imgur Updates TOS, Banning NSFW Content

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Tumblr 2.0 incoming?

It's a not-so-unspoken fact that a lot of social media platforms are popular because they have tons of pornography. Reddit, Twitter, OnlyFans (more openly) and (until now) Imgur all have massive communities around explicit content. Even Twitch and YouTube are hugely successful as ways for OnlyFans creators to drive users to their explicit content.

Going to be very interesting to see if imgur drops off the face of the earth as tinypic, imageshack, photobucket and many others before it did. Certainly this was the longest-lasting image host I can think of.

Reddit has also recently announced moves in regards to NSFW content[1] by limiting data access to mature content more aggressively than they currently do. It seems like an area a lot of platforms are struggling with and seem to opt for a complete ban.

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/reddit/comments/12qwagm/an_update_r...

FWIW, Reddit's new limits are about 3rd party use of their data/APIs. As a regular user, it doesn't really change anything (unless you consume Reddit NSFW content exclusively through a 3rd party app, I guess), so a pretty different case than Imgur's change here, which fundamentally shifts their user-base.

3rd party reddit apps rival reddit's own app in terms of popularity, and will be significantly hamstrung by these changes if NSFW content can only be accessed in the official app. Lots of non-porn content is marked NSFW. It may end up having a much larger impact than reddit corporate anticipates.

I think that's intentional. They clearly want to kill those apps because they don't generate ad revenue.

Those apps will now also have to move to a subscription-only model because the APIs will be paid, as the Apollo dev confirmed.

I'm trying to take the most charitable interpretation possible instead of assuming malice on the part of reddit, but it's difficult to interpret it any other way than they have decided to kill 3rd party clients and not be upfront about their intentions.

It wouldn't be so difficult to swallow if the official mobile app was high quality, but it isn't. There are major UX issues with the official app that haven't been fixed for years. The 3rd party app ecosystem is vibrant because of this. Instead of competing and being the best on merit, they have decided to play their platform-owner veto card which is very disappointing, compounded with their dishonesty about the true intent of these changes.

They're a huge company, they could easily acquire five of the third party apps, add ads and keep the developers on payroll to maintain the apps. Banning apps that don't show ads of course.

A main reason people use those apps is to avoid ads. Also to avoid the reddit company's decisions about how stuff should work.

I use Boost because it's far superior to the Reddit app and to Reddit's website (even old.reddit.com), despite Boost having ads and despite me being able to avoid ads on Reddit due to having an ad blocker.

So at least for me, using a third-party app is well worth it despite seeing ads.

[1] - https://boostforreddit.com/

I have leared to ignore any promoted content i.e. ads in my reddit timeline, mostly because they are irrelevant. The app is regardless slow as hell. The Dawn app in comprasion, is extremely smooth and a pleasure to use. I'd guess the difference is the amount of tracking and analytics the official app is trying to do, I'd guess it is also not a native app.

The last time they did that they managed to wreck it so badly in six weeks that it's userbase imploded.

Reddit's management simply have awful UI instincts.

I hate when I’m hovering my thumb on a comment for a millisecond when scrolling the comments sections and accidentally collapsing a thread I’m reading, how can they not test their app with users to catch these simple usability issues?

Seriously. Makes Me feel like my scroll behavior is weird or something. Or like an idiot because I didn’t know a word and wanted to define it by tapping “Look up.” sigh

Yeah try to look up a word and collapse comment thread every. single. time.

This is what you get without a competent UX team unfortunately

One way to do that is fix their own mobile app so it's not a pile of trash. I wouldn't mind seeing the ads if the app was as good as Apollo.

"reddit corporate"? Like Steve, who was the original founder and is the current CEO, or Alexis, another original founder, who is the executive chairman?

There is absolutely zero way they're unaware of the impact and I guarantee you they have thought this move through thoroughly.

Fair enough, in that case this is Digg v4 levels of arrogance. Tons of moderators depend on 3rd party apps to moderate [1]. These people are providing free labor on an industrial scale to reddit and it might be wise not to frustrate their work.

[1] https://old.reddit.com/r/reddit/comments/12qwagm/an_update_r...

Reddit moderators are, by and large, terrible people. If they quit, as the guy in your link is threatening to do, they can be trivially replaced. It is not a thing that requires much skill.

There is no shortage of people who would volunteer for something like this. The replacements might even be less terrible, both at the job (reddit is stiflingly over-moderated, as documented on r/undelete and r/redditminusmods) and in their dealings with users.

You mention it like they haven't done a ton of user hostile releases, like the constant UX dark patterns to push you to a mobile app, etc. This argument is so strange, should we refute anything against Meta with "but the original founder is there, there's no corporate"?

I think the argument isn't that Reddit isn't corporate but rather that the original founders have thought it through a lot and have still decided to make this decision.

I'm sure Mark Zuckerberg thinks through all his major decisions a lot too. If you think a lot and your result is dark patterns, does that matter so much?

You seem to be assuming that if one says "they know well what they are doing" that's a defense of their actions, but I'd think it is much more often a denigration of them...

Exactly. I'm pointing out that what gp says:

> It may end up having a much larger impact than reddit corporate anticipates.

Is unlikely. I'm not adding an opinion on whether or not this is a good move, or a user-friendly move.

Given in the announcement thread they got wrong about it affecting third party apps at all and then on calls with third party devs do not seem quite sure if it will effect NSFW content or not, that does not seem to be the case.

Indeed, it seems to be a chaotic mess, as most of Reddit's "throw shit at a walk and hope something sticks" development methodology is.

It's a problem on mobile, because old-reddit isn't mobile-engineered and there isn't uBlock for iOS. The go-to Reddit app for iOS is Apollo, and they're going to be affected.

https://www.reddit.com/r/apolloapp/comments/12ram0f/had_a_fe...

> old-reddit isn't mobile-engineered

Eh. I exclusively use https://old.reddit.com/ on both Desktop and Mobile, and never felt inconvenienced.

Our cell phones are large enough today to use 2008-era websites without any additional bells and whistles.

But, of course, people who are already used to whatever UI they chose are going to suffer. Alas.

Yeah. I use old. mainly because I prefer it on mobile.

I also use old.reddit all the time but come on, you seriously can't mean it's a good mobile experience. The text is tiny and you need to zoom in and out all the time just to be able to read anything. It becomes exhausting reading a comment thread by all the zooming. The image posts also don't have the actual image embedded, which makes it a really bad experience on mobile when you have to go to another URL just to look at it.

I'm with the above commenter, I used the old reddit on mobile for a decade+ and always enjoyed it. Also, there used to be i.reddit.com which was great for mobile - but it looks like they've gotten rid of that.

I've stopped using Reddit now. I liked the freedom of speech and the curiosity of the users. Freedom of speech had been eliminated totally. Curuisity can presumably be found in some niche subreddits - but even the niche subreddits I used to frequent have fallen.

I agree, yet old.reddit is still 100x better to use than the main Reddit site, which really illustrates just how awful and user hostile their main website is (especially on mobile).

Definitely. I don't use main reddit at all, but on mobile there are no good alternatives now when i.reddit.com is gone and third party clients being restricted. Saying "just use old reddit" is not sufficient for me at least.

The new reddit is so bad I'm sort of shocked it still exists. I really wonder what goes through people's heads when they build these things that are universally hated.

Contempt.

You generally don't make an ad-supported business if you respect your users as human beings, but the old -> new Reddit redesign is something really special - going through with it, and then sticking to it for so many years now, pretty much requires seeing your users as cattle.

My college professors in economics / business taught me that customers and employees are numbers from which I must extract the maximum amount of value for the minimum amount of input. People are more like cow nipples in capitalism driven societies.

>I really wonder what goes through people's heads when they build these things that are universally hated.

Oh, they aren't universally hated.

Most of reddit users have only seen the "new" interface, so they don't know what they're missing.

And when they find out, they're already conditioned to use the "new" UI, so switching is difficult.

$$$$

The new UI enforces age gating via sign-in (switch to the old UI, and you can get away with "Continue"), which is better for engagement.

The new UI is mobile friendly, which is WAY better for engagement. (Most users are mobile users, even though mobile devices are worse than desktop PCs in every way except convenience.)

I honestly think you might just be "holding it wrong"... instead of zooming in on the text, can you try just moving your phone closer to your head and see if that helps? I honestly use old.reddit.com on mobile because the font size is better: I am not zooming in and out, and I appreciate being able to see more of the thread at once. The "mobile optimized" version of the site feels like I am being forced to have tunnel vision and it makes it really difficult to read anything.

At least on desktop the old UI has a bug in narrow browser windows, but besides that I also use it 99% of the time. The new interface simply doesn't bring any noteworthy value in comparison while being more annoying to use.

They've also relatively recently killed off i.reddit.com (the .compact view that looks like really old iOS). That was good for mobile when old-reddit was too wide.

I'm still so pissed about this. It was so information a dense/clean.

easy fix: switch to Android, a platform that allows users to chose what they want to do with the hardware they bought.

I would if said choices included “an os as polished as ios”.

I wonder how many people are so reddit addicted that they would spend many hundreds of dollars to keep using it?

It's not that different from browsing HN on mobile.

> As a regular user, it doesn't really change anything

It absolutely does. There is tons of normal content that is tagged as NSFW for various non pornogrpahic reasons, and consdering 'regular users' includes the millions of people that use apollo, Rif, etc , thats a huge amount of the user base negatively effected.

Indeed! Just one example in /r/Diablo_2_Resurrected/ screenshots of very good, very rare items are marked NSFW because they're considered "disgustingly good" and because having to do an extra step to reveal the item provides a "rush" similar to gambling.

I often use spoiler formatting for comedic effect, etc.

It's a recurring joke in /r/AoE2 (Age of Empires II) to label screenshots of particularly aesthetic base/farming layouts as NSFW.

For context, normally you are placing 3x3 tile farms either around 2x2 tile mills or 4x4 tile Town Centers, so you end up with a "pinwheel" at best. But the Poles can build a 3x3 Folwark (like a mill but makes your food come in faster if the farms are close enough) leading to some very satisfying ways to use building space efficiently and aesthetically.

joke's on you now. Looks to me like people were misusing a feature so bad consequences are not entirely a surprise...

And already now they force you to log in to an account to view NSFW content, unless you go to old.reddit.com.

When you can go to old.reddit.com to view it, they're not actually forcing anyone.

If you know about it, and for as long as it exists. It's also not adapted for mobile.

This is one of the only reasons I use a chromium android build with desktop extensions enabled so I can have the old reddit redirect extension.

Could you please share any resources on this chromium android build with desktop extensions enabled? I've been looking for something similar. Thanks!

Check out Kiwi Browser: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.kiwibrowse...

And yet it is much more pleasant to usenet on an iPhone than reddit.com... maybe "adapted for mobile" is overrated?

They stopped that recently i noticed. you get prompted to confirm youre over 18 without logging in required. They also got rid of that annoying "Continue this thread" linking and let you expand replies with a plus/minus icon without going to another page. It also seems like they fixed the way images are resized/shown in a post, because since the redesign i noticed you had to click 2 or 3 separate times to actually get an image without cropping or resizing, which felt so clumsy and annoying. As well as making a thread be overlayed atop with an "X" to close link at the top. That is gone for me also. Now it's actually usable like old.reddit.com is. I have no idea how they actually let that first redesign roll out it was terrible. Feels fixed now.

Twitter does this too - you need an account in their frontent but the content is still accessible via API or whatever the yt-dlp ends up using.

Which is super annoying because a lot of non-porn things are also marked as NSFW.

It would be more of an issue if there was ever a reason to not use old.reddit.com. The new Reddit is worse in every way, so it's an easy choice.

There are user preferences accessible only through new reddit. That's the only reason I can think of to use it.

Reddit has been increasingly awful like this. Limiting scroll on mobile before forcing you to log in. Constant nags to install the app. Forced login or redirect to the app on mobile or on 'new' reddit for any nsfw content.

For now old.reddit.com works to get rid of all this guff but when that goes, so do I.

I recently discovered libreddit and nitter and couldn't be happier. Good UI and loads super fast without restrictions. I recommend to self host though as the public servers can get overwhelmed.

It is hardly a panacea considering it uses reddit's API, which is about to become a paid feature.

All the efforts by reddit that I've seen along these lines are just to use NSFW content as a lever to try and get people to use their stupid app.

My uninformed impression is that Tumblr users were relatively unique in how freely they mixed pornography consumption and non porno. There are some Twitter users who do this, but Twitter is public enough that most people are wary of doing that or get caught by follows, likes being public. My anecdotal experience is that I don't see porno comments or submissions from most reddit users either, but that's obviously skewed by the reddits I'm in.

I also know that Tumblr has norms against "horny on main", so maybe Tumblr users were very diligent about using alts and the other sites make that too frictional

People on Reddit will often have an alt account for porn. I have seen people say things like "oops, posted from my nsfw account" plenty of times before. I assume Twitter is the same. Both platforms freely give out plenty of accounts.

You sure? Twitter is notoriously known for asking for users phone number in every account, its practically impossible to have an active account without adding your phone number.

I don't know about you, but I personally have 5 Twitter accounts and 20+ Reddit accounts (sometimes you want to have different perspectives on an issue, have different front pages, or maybe manufacture a consensus). Only the main Twitter account has been asked for a phone number - I think they actually know about alt accounts and don't mind you having them as long as you don't do anything crazy with them. Don't worry dang, this is my only HN account.

I had a dozen Twitter accounts, but they were made in a different era, nowadays they make it harder to sign up without a phone number tho you can still add bot secondary accounts to the main one.

"Manufacture a consensus"?

A SFW way to say "manipulate opinion", I guess.

I think it's a adaptation of "Manufacturing Consent", to sound less rapey. But yes, it's a euphemism for manipulating other people's opinions.

It's pretty common to use alt accounts to upvote and comment on your own posts - I used to do this when I cared. Some people take it really far and have their alts also repost their content to get multiple shots to "go viral." Some people also make down vote networks to silence comments they don't like.

Recently, I have used these accounts to get answers to questions: post the question with one account and ~3 bad but assertive answers with other accounts, and that's usually enough to get at least one response from someone who knows the right answer and wants to prove they are smart. All of this can now be done very easily by ChatGPT, too - it used to take effort.

This is the "dark" part of social media marketing that nobody talks about but a lot of people engage in.

Why do you do it?

It's common among trolls, not among the vast majority of users.

Not just trolls, there is a giant incentive for marketers (or even just TikTok-ers) looking to make something visible.

Tons of accounts reposting content from ~2 months ago to create a long, legitimate-looking post history and high karma score. They then use those accounts to complain about Product X or love Product Y -- and they don't look like a shillbot. Ditto for political actors, propagandists, et al.

Trolls, professional marketers, reputation management firms, social media "influencers," and even just social media "power users" who don't rise to the level of "influencer" are all known do this. This is a vast minority of users thanks to the Pareto principle and power laws. However, I suspect that the majority of posts you see on the front page of pretty much every social media app have had some degree of "help" from things like this.

One Reddit user, Unidan, was famously banned for doing this with 12 accounts, and in retrospect, this sort of scheme may have "made" his success - his replies showed up as the top comment a lot (even when they were not insightful) and it got him significant name recognition.

A lot of morally dubious people, maybe.

OP is probably confusing it with "Manufacturing consent", a book by Noam Chomsky.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manufacturing_Consent

Adapting it. "Manufacturing consent" is a good book on the phenomenon, but sounds kind of odd (given how we use the word "consent" today).

The word consent can be used in many contexts, not only sexual. I see nothing odd about it.

Consensus is a different meaning. Going by how odd "a consensus" sounds I would simply assume the writer mixed both or misremembered, and I do not read further intent. Just my opinion.

Oh, I was the OP you are responding to. I don't like the words "manufacturing consent" to refer to astroturfing, mostly because of the link to sexual consent, but also because they lack precision (Chomsky's book talks a lot more about propaganda as a tool of "top-down" media rather than "bottom-up" media). A lot of other people who talk about the phenomenon also use "consensus" instead of "consent" when referring to specifically using social media this way.

See also: https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300251234/manufacturing-...

Oh. In that case I must admit you know better what you intended to say :P

> maybe manufacture a consensus

You're running a one-person troll farm? Please reconsider your choices in life.

Not that I'm defending the practice (and certainly don't have enough skin in the social media game to do it myself), but it is extremely common to have alts upvote/repost each other on social networks, or downvote brigade someone when you're losing an internet argument.

I doubt that even 1% of people using Reddit are using alts to upvote themselves or downvote brigade others. If you have any data to the contrary I'd be happy to hear it.

It's still a solid sign of a sad life.

Or a small business, but I wonder how much money there is in that.

> Or a small business, but I wonder how much money there is in that.

They call it "hustling" and "growth hacking", and I suppose there might be good ROI on this when you're just starting up and trying to do some "organic advertising" in a niche community/subreddit. Those couple extra upvotes may be the difference between drowning unnoticed vs. staying on the front page long enough to gather initial interest, and spark a discussion that keeps it up for a day or more.

I still believe it's unethical behavior, though.

For some values of "extremely common", because I'm pretty sure most people don't have the patience and energy to do bullshit like that. But a small fraction of people do it a lot.

Or manufacture controversy for engagement? For example, I posted the 4 comments above all from accounts I own (/s)

This is actually more useful to me today. If you want a good, well-researched answer to a question from an expert, you are much more likely to get it on reddit if there are a few "idiots" with wrong answers available for that person to dunk on.

>You're running a one-person troll farm? Please reconsider your choices in life.

how else do journalists write this articles on internet hate mobs?

Infamously u/Unidan, a very popular figure on r/askscience posting high-quality answers to biology questions, was banned from Reddit when it was revealed that he used alt accounts to upvote himself/downvote those he was arguing against. Such a shame that he felt the need to resort to something so stupid.

It wasn't stupid. It's quite likely that he would have been stuck down in the noise like so many other high quality Reddit posters except that he realized early on that just a handful of early upvotes makes all of the difference to Reddit's algorithm. The Reddit algorithm is seemingly designed to snowball content, so if you want to rake in the worthless karma reliably you need alts.

I’m not so sure. Many other "household names" on askscience seem to be highly upvoted, apparently without shenanigans (but who knows?!) Even I have several 1000+ karma answers there, and many more 100+ ones and I’m a nobody. There’s also simply not that much competition on askscience! If you’re consistently able to write good, a-few-paragraph answers to questions in a particular field, and are also available for discussion and followup questions, it’s not that difficult to become commonly recognized and reap a lot of karma there without having to compete against others.

I think you may be underestimating the effect of this. With time, you can get several 1000-karma posts, but I bet you also have a bunch of 1-10 point things. Literally every comment and post that u/Unidan made had 100+ upvotes. He could comment about birds on a quantum physics page and get 100's of upvotes. As a result, everywhere he posted, people would see all of his comments "organically," and that kept all of his posts outside of the 1-karma hell that consumes a lot of amazing insight. That's the effect of bot usage.

With twitter I've found emailing support to verify you're a human has a decent success rate (and without sharing any PII)

Twitter literally lets you log in to multiple accounts from the same session. You can reuse the same emails & phone numbers too.

So contrary to what you say, the practice of having "alts" is pretty much encouraged.

Their help page technically says you can use the same phone number on up to 10 accounts, but that hasn't been the case in 4–5 years or more. It's more like 2–4 accounts per number allowed in my experience, and there is a few week cooldown on reusing a number even if you've already removed it from all accounts.

I don't think you can use the same email on multiple accounts at the same time, but using address extensions or creating new emails is easy.

This obsession with banning sexual content is bizarre to me. "It's because payment processors yada yada", I don't care. It's fucking weird and unnecessary and tiring. We all want porn. Why does a single culture get to push its insane puritanical values on all of us?

There's a reason why MindGeek (the owner of all the major porn sites) is based in Montreal.

Which "single culture" is that? I disagree with censorship and morality policing as much as you seem to but opposition to porn is the norm worldwide across nearly every culture.

A 2019 Gallup poll found that 61% of American respondents believed pornography was "morally unacceptable." That's nearly twice the share that thought smoking marijuana was immoral, and higher than abortion. Somewhere around half of American women support banning it altogether, as well as a not insignificant share of men: https://ifstudies.org/ifs-admin/resources/lehmanfigure2-w640...

(IFS is a biased source here, but the surveys they cite are not)

And probably 99% of those 61% watch porn. Polls aren't worth anything in regards to some topics.

> Which "single culture" is that?

Obviously, USA-ian. The poll you quoted and linked deals with what Americans think, which is kind of reinforcing GP's point: the current treatment of pornography around the world, especially on the Internet, is in large part a US protestant/puritan cultural export.

The sexual instinct has been the hidden drive for almost every major adoption of any new service/social media platform. Whether its porn or hookups, young people be horny, and young people are always the necessary early adopters of any new platform.

As we all know, Microsoft Windows got popular because of sexy Bill Gates: https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/teen-beat/

Wow how am I seeing this for the first time. This is great hah

I feel like this is the secret reason why Mark Zuckerberg thought VR would be such a hit, which makes me think more about Mark Zuckerberg the person than I’d like.

If this is true, it's certainly not manifested in the development direction the Zuckerverse took. It has that corporate nothing-artstyle that I wish I hated because then it would at least evoke some kind of emotional response. ASCII art seems like a more viable medium for porn than that.

this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teledildonics ?

I’m sure Snapchat is foaming at the mouth to get this Metaverse SnapVR sexting chat app ready to go to dominate the market fueled by raging hormones.

I assume the nsfw users are less interesting to the advertisers, but more demanding to their file servers. From that perspective it could be a money saving measure, at the cost of growth.

Imgur has been lousy for a while, redirecting direct image links to their awful js-heavy reddit clone site. They've been due to be replaced for a while but this will definitely accelerate that.

Also, the irony of the Tumblr comparison is that Tumblr has become my default social image hosting provider now that they allow soft porn and have a paid ad-free subscription. The tables have turned!

> redirecting direct image links to their awful js-heavy reddit clone site

Are you perhaps copying the wrong thing when trying to share? I've never had this happen. Even copying an image link from their homepage at the time of this post works as expected

https://i.imgur.com/v052wgb.jpeg (some starwars cartoon) or https://i.imgur.com/VT1B7fn.mp4 (some cat with a pineapple)

Neither of those links are direct for me, they both redirect to imgur.io

Yeah, only works if you've visited that image before.

The problem is not the copying, it's a redirect that happens if someone hasn't seen the page image before, they get redirected from the direct image to the page instead.

Even the i.imgur.com links will redirect when accessed outside an <img> tag. If they don't for you, it's probably due to caching.

Wait, what? How do they even distinguish those cases?

The Accept header tells you whether the browser is expecting a web page or an image.

In fact you can make the page to send you the damn image, and it supposed to be, if you use some extension to modify your user agent and lies to imgur your are using curl something.

Do you know of such an extension? Tumblr and a few other sites do this too and I've been looking for a client side solution for years now

Simple Modify Header

Imgur.com user-agent: Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Yahoo! Slurp; http://help.yahoo.com/help/us/ysearch/slurp)

IMO that along with the Referer header is a mistake or at least the browser should allow you to overwrite that.

Maybe you're stuck in some A/B control group type deal, because the same happens to me and the handful of people I've seen accessing imgur while screensharing.

It's not a new development, I believe this has been the case since at least 2016.

If visiting the page directly, we get served a HTML document with a billion resources that loads the image with a comment section beneath it, and includes a sidebar of "related" and "newest in most viral" content.

Possibly even advertisements, but I wouldn't know, as a good friend doesn't let friends browse the internet without an ad blocker.

Yes there are ads. They do this so that they can serve ads to people.

I've found this to be inconsistent too. Usually I just get the pic but sometimes it seems to go back to the page? And holy hell is that site heavy for something that should just be showing an image, some navigation and a forum thread.

Someone mentioned caching elsewhere, maybe you're viewing a hotlinked imgur picture in the same browser you use to later visit "the page", so it's cached as a raw image.

You could try opening the URL from a different browser? For example my main use case is clicking "Show Original" on Discord, so when it opens in my browser, the first visit is not in the context of an img tag.

I just tested this by loading a couple of images in Firefox, clearing cache and saved sessions in Edge, and pasting the direct URLs of the image files. Both files loaded the image instead of redirecting to the page. So I dunno whether it's in A/B testing, or they're fingerprinting my system in some cross-browser way, or what.

Anyone from imgur here who can just tell us? :D

I get the redirect on my phone but not on desktop browsers.

If I click a link to it, it redirects to the full website. If I go to it directly (or curl it), I get the actual image. Might be referrer-based?

You first link redirected me to https://imgur.com/v052wgb

I have use https://libredirect.github.io/ to get around imgurs stupid redirect nonsesne. It acts as a frontend that can directly load the image on a clean page.

So now I get

https://rimgo.pussthecat.org/v052wgb.jpeg

and

https://rimgo.pussthecat.org/VT1B7fn.mp4

when i click so I can actually load them without all the bs.

Oh, that is weird. I just clicked on the direct links you posted, and it did indeed redirect me to their awful JS-riddled UI. It definitely didn't do that back in the day.

Thanks for the pineapple cat, though. Big fan of that part.

I find peace in text based forums such as this one. There is no chance of me encountering any explicit images.

I mean the site is ad infested and slow as hell to load, such a fall from their former grace when they were seen as an internet darling next to photobucket type sites when options for uploading and hotlinking were limited due to bandwidth constraints.

I think Reddit started hosting their own content or whatever the redgif site is seems to have taken over Imgur for a while now and the images/vids load lightning fast in comparison to Imgur with my ad blocker lighting up like a Christmas tree every time I visit an Imgur link. I would be happy to never visit that site again.

Tale as old as time.

1. "We need a better image host!"

2. Makes new image host.

3. Uh oh, hosting costs money.

4. Ads.

5. Lawsuits because illegal stuff. Uh oh, lawyers cost money.

6. "We need a better image host!"

You'd think that all the recent technological advancements (compression, cheaper hosting etc) would make a difference here.

To me it seems like it's not necessarily budgeting issue but natural greed kicking in. I'm sure imgur people are not tightening their belts over this.

You can't host something like Imgur for free. No technological advancement can get over the fact that even electricity still costs money. And at their volume, they have nontrivial expenses. I have no idea how or where they're hosted, but my hobbyist hosting budget tops out around $20 a month. Beyond that, either pay me or leave.

Take google for example. I think they got big at first for 2 big reasons. 1 their landing page was tiny I think the whole thing was maybe 20-50k on first load and 1k on second. It was fast to load. Then on top of that their search results were better. But that tiny front page made the thing look amazing. Remember this was at a time when their nearest competitors had ad laden bloated home pages that took a minute to render. That also helped them keep their costs wildly low at first. As network/hosts/drives/people costs money. They threw all of that out later on though as they took over the ad network. Starting off with 'fast loading ads'.

I wonder if there's enough demand for a good, free image host that someone could make one that ran completely on community donations. There are plenty of podcasts on Patreon that pull in tens of thousands of dollars per month just from like $5-$20 monthly pledges. That should be enough to not only cover costs but pay devs. Could even give some perks to backers if it was some incentive.

That's a pretty simple solution: if some service inevitably deteriorates in quality when run for a profit, then run it as a non-profit! I mean, isn't that how imgur actually started? The Reddit team wanted a decent image hosting so they made it and just accepted that running it would cost them money so they'll have to finance it from the profits of their main business. But then apparently profit-optimization kicked in...

There are quite a lot of examples in the past (all the way to the Roman empire) of rich people spending their money on community projects just because they wanted some things to exist, not to make even more money.

Rich people and companies will typically stop doing that once the costs explode and eat all their income. Unlike governments, they can't exactly print money...

There is a huge graveyard of image hosts - it's not for lack of trying. There are all the pomf.se clones that are community supported (like catbox.moe) which don't even break even from patreon.

The problem I see is that once you get even to the scale of a 10th of size of imgur your hosting bills (storage + bandwidth) will cross into the 10s of thousands per month, which would require you to be in the top 1% of Patreon users. I don't think you'd find people lining up to donate for such a service, especially given there are so many copycats.

Well I was going off what the above parent comment was saying, that recent advances in compression + cheaper hosting should make it more viable. I don't know much about what any of those costs cause I've never run anything that needs a lot of serving costs at scale. So I'm guessing even with that it's still too expensive?

On the other hand, I think Imgur also pushed way more traffic upon itself by trying to make itself into another social media site. Like, if it just stayed an image host it probably could have stayed more niche and wouldn't have had thousands of casual internet users scrolling through images all day at work.

As a pure image hoster, you don't earn much money, and if you're any good and fast, your traffic will go up and eventually eat up any amount of donations that content creators can muster. Content creators won't chip in more as your bills rise, because all those views don't necessarily translate to sales, and eventually something will give. And if you start to charge, and your price exceeds the cost of self-hosting, content creators will leave.

Just staying niche doesn't really solve the problem? That just means any "niche" host that finds itself growing will be forced to shutdown, not much better than what is happening to imgur here.

Patreon isn't the most reliable income source either. They suspend accounts all the time because someone reports that they were able to find incest, gore, or similar content from the creator. Credit card processors won't give you time of day either. There is a concerted effort from activists to shut down all forms of payment for immoral industries, and they have been very effective at influencing credit card companies.

I think Imgur tried to become a social network in its own right. It seems like the owners had ambitions beyond just serving advertisements.

I think that was more because places like Reddit just linking directly to the image meant they couldn't serve ads to pay for it. So they needed to make an incentive for people to directly visit the site, and the most obvious way was to just cut out Reddit as a necessary component to a user discovering more images.

The image hosting part is half the story, "having a community that was predominantly fun" was the other half. But they've gone out of their way to make sure the site's a hellscape shithole without adblocking with every possible action getting gamified. So ironically the only thing that's left of the original pretty great website is the image hosting part. EULA notwithstanding (because as much as people yell, NSFW makes up barely any of the front page content, so clearly the site's own community doesn't care whether it's there or not)

> because as much as people yell, NSFW makes up barely any of the front page content

This is a really important point. From what I can see, Imgur doesn't have a porn community, it just has a lot of porn because it's used as an image host by outside communities. Porn is probably a net drain on profit for them, since they make their revenue off of people who use Imgur itself, not from servicing direct image links posted on Reddit.

the site is ad infested and slow as hell to load, such a fall from their former grace when they were seen as an internet darling

This is the cycle of a lot of ad-driven businesses. They start out sleek and quick to load because they’re ad-free. They grow insanely fast and burn runway. Then they begin loading the site down with ads to monetize the users. This leads to a gradual exodus and eventual death (or death in the star-like sense of eternal irrelevance).

It seems to be an unstable equilibrium. If you want to stay on top in terms of users and actually make money you’ve got to have a lean and highly optimized site with non-intrusive ads. On the other hand, if you give in to the temptation to take any ad who wants you then you doom the site in exchange for a short term profit.

I wonder: if you know this, and expect it will happen, is that kind of company still a good investment?

It could be that Imgur has already more than paid back its acquisition price to MediaLab[0] and now they are willing to risk killing it in order to not have the NSFW hassle with their banks.

Or not, but it seems like this happens enough that the money people should understand it by now.

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28674883

Enshittification [0]

[0] https://www.wired.com/story/tiktok-platforms-cory-doctorow/

Some like Facebook still manage to claw their way back into a happy mediocrity.

Instagram is victim to this trying to follow every trend and turning themselves into another WeChat that has every feature ever.

I'm not sure if Facebook is in a state of happy mediocrity. Nobody I know who uses Facebook does so because they like Facebook even because there aren't better alternatives in terms of functionality.

People use Facebook because its network effects are effectively impossible for alternatives to overcome.

How much did you founders profit from Imgur? never saw a figure anywhere.

This trend has been previously described as "enshittification": https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/

HN thread on the above article: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34480479

> whatever the redgif site is

People were uploading lots of porn to gfycat, so the gfycat people basically cloned themselves and split the adult content off onto another domain in order to keep it separate.

This strikes me as the obvious solution to me.

>the images/vids load lightning fast in comparison to Imgur

You must be joking.

I have been a user of imgur since it was create by mr. grimm ... I have had a paid account for ~10 years...

v.reddit and i.reddit are absolute garbage by comparison.

Now, that is to say, I use imgur very specifically - I have my own albums (and the album management system on imgur is trash and almost unusable) -- but the ability to just use something like greenshot where I do a snippet with PRTSC key and have it auto-upload to my imgur, and then copy the imgur url immediately to my clipboard is dope... but the album management UX on imgur does suck.

Being the image host for Reddit has to be a lot less lucrative when Reddit is their own image host now.

Frankly I'm surprised they haven't dropped off already. I revisited them recently and it's now 90% self-fellating political posts.

Yeah, the content took a HARD turn to the left in the last few years. I don't remember it being anywhere near as political even as recently as 5yrs ago. That suggests either a dramatic change in audience, or some algorithmic change that pushed that content more. I'd love to know what actually happened.

It was always rather left but at least it was clever left. Now it may as well be copied from some octogenarian's Facebook profile. "Like THIS if you think Donald Trump should be in JAIL!"

Frankly, hearing grade-school versions of my own opinions parroted back at me ad nauseum is more annoying than if the posts were coming from other end of the spectrum. At least you can make a useful comment on something you disagree with. Now Imgur is all echo chamber all the time.

I've said for a long time that it's much easier to discredit an argument by ^^^ than it is to be persuasive.

My own turn to the right came from discomfort with the IFLScience and NowThis set

> IFLScience

"Religion for people who are atheist's"

Five years ago I wasn't as left-leaning as I am now. Perhaps a majority of the users got older and followed a similar path? I wonder if it could've been subreddits like The_Donald being banned that caused an exodus, potentially driving away many or most of the right-leaning users who would get posted to /all.

Imgur changed hands, new owners took a more heavy handed approach with moderation policies, which removed NSFW-ish content, partly because they were deemed sexist, partly to appease advertisers and to make Appstore folks happy. This ultimately fostered the emergence of an insular, far-left leaning community.

Reddit has been all over the spectrum politically over the years. It started out with techno-libertarians, then edgy internet atheists, then was arguably the home of donald trump's alt-right campaign (and similar r/european), and then when they got banned some of them spread into other subreddits, so some are surprisingly right wing political, and some of them went off to voat and truth social etc.

Hopefully also more people just hosting their own tiny static image servers, RasPi's, VM's, etc... maybe.

P2P?

No shitty middlemen that need $$$ for server lettuce?

Nah; not retarded enough.

Probably not P2P as people could not embed images to it. I think it would need to be a simple web server that can do HTTP and SSL. Maybe NGinx or Apache and certbot to get HTTPS working.

The economics of image hosting are absolutely brutal.

Imgur will also be deleting images that aren't associated with a user account. https://help.imgur.com/hc/en-us/articles/14415587638029/

This strikes me as being at least as big a deal as the NSFW bit.

For 10+ years, imgur has been many people's go-to way of hosting an image they want to post to a forum or whatever. Many of those people will have paid little attention to whether or not they were logged into imgur when they posted each image. In short, it sounds like a lot of image links are about to break.

Effectively monetizing the hosting of images embedded elsewhere seems like a fool's errand—at best, it's possible to subsidize that usage with other revenue streams. The vast majority of people wanting to post images on forums have never financed their posting and the communities themselves haven't managed to either. Photobucket and Tinypic left a lot of litter on forums that survived their era, and Imgur will ultimately do the same.

It seems a bit like they're saying: "ohhhhh, did you people think we were an image hosting site? Heavens no, we're an SNS and always have been. We'll update our rules to clarify this".

Which seems... aspirational?

Yeah. As aspirational as thinking you can fly and jumping out of a cliff

Let's see how it goes

They were image hosting for reddit. Once it was obvious reddit would kill their only use case soon, they became a social media platform. A better idea than simply dying. Every platform now has its own image hosting so their service was rapidly becoming irrelevant.

> Every platform now has its own image hosting

The big ones do. There is stil the long tail of forums and legacy chat platforms that don't do hosting or have extreme limits. That is what will be most affected by this change.

Being an image hotlinking service for legacy forums and IRC is not a viable long term business.

Right, it probably shouldn't be a business at all. But it is something valuable and neither "legacy" forums nor IRC will be going away any time soon.

Isn't this the cardinal sin of an image host? They are partially killing links in a way that wasn't previously communicated. And to make it worse, it directly targets what was previously the primary strength of the site, easy and accountless uploads with only a few clicks. Why would anyone use them as an image host again?

I wonder if they are hemorrhaging money. This decision gives the impression that they simply don't want to be in the business they're currently in. Such drastic steps usually originate with desperation.

If they want to monetize that old stuff, couldn't they just serve up an ad instead of an image for those ancient images, then display the full image if you visit the actual imgur page by deleting the .jpg extension?

Or they could do what Facebook used to do (still does?), and put them on Blu-ray disk cold storage, then load them into one of those giant jukebox-esque machines that grabs the Blu-ray disk whenever someone click an ancient link and spend 60 seconds serving the image up or whatever.

Hell, write all the images with their URLs to magnetic tape and donate them to the Internet archive, and let them figure out what to do with them if/when they eventually have the funds.

Literally anything would be better than outright deleting those old images.

TIL about FB Blu-ray disk cold storage. Thanks.

https://www.datacenterfrontier.com/cloud/article/11431537/in...

The blog post has a link to video from FB itself from 2014 and it has no audio. its not the first old FB video I came across that had no audio. Wonder if the cold storage has something to do with it.

https://web.facebook.com/Engineering/videos/1015212866009720...

I wonder if this is actually cost effective.

In my data hoarding days (as a consumer, not FB scale), I found burning media an archive tool to be much more costly (and less reliable and more physical space) than simply using multiple hard drives.

Now, it could very well be that FB is able to buy burnable media at a much cheaper rate than consumers (i.e. perhaps there is more margin in media that massively bulk purchasing can reduce and the type of HDs that FB would buy would be more expensive than consumer drives, it could also be that actively used burnable media would be more reliable than actively used hard drives. while it's cold storage, its not frozen storage that is rarely used, with that said, the jukeboxes are probably expensive and suffer more reliablity issues than the hard drives), but on the consumer level, it just didn't seem to be a doable thing.

Ex: 8TB HD could cost $120. That's ~ 400 25GB single layer blurays. Now, 400 disks of optical media no matter how efficient one can store them will take up a lot more room than a single 8TB HD. For the 400 bluray blanks to be cheaper than the HD, they would have to be less than 30cents a disk. Glancing at amazon today, the cheapest I see for 25GB BDR blanks (and dual/triple/quad layer blanks are more expensive per GB, i.e. a 50GB blank would be $1.6 a disc) is about 40cents a disk. At that price level, you are better off just buying/copying to multiple disks for even better disaster recovery and it wont really cost you more than to store everything once on optical media.

anyways, if anyone could point out flaws in my assumptions (or why at FB scale the answers are different) I'd be interested.

I'm also curious on how this could work and actually be more cost effective. I just can't see the robot being a reliable method and the cost savings being there. It almost sounds like some one's pet project. The only really interesting property of bluray is that they supposedly can last a very long time unlike other media, but I'd think you'd still want some redundancy at which point hard disks seem like the way to go.

At scale, you would need to factor in the durability of the media. [0] suggests that some types of bluray disks can last 20 to 50 years. Hard drives typically struggle to last 10 years. So if you need to replace hard drives 5x more than bluray disks, maybe it changes the economics.

That's a random study I found on Google, of course, I'm sure Meta has more accurate data on that.

Besides, you need to build the same kind of redundancy in both cases, so that shouldn't influence the choice.

[0] https://www.canada.ca/en/conservation-institute/services/con...

> At scale, you would need to factor in the durability of the media. [0] suggests that some types of bluray disks can last 20 to 50 years. Hard drives typically struggle to last 10 years. So if you need to replace hard drives 5x more than bluray disks, maybe it changes the economics.

Also consider the economics of actually retrieving and indexing the data. If you have to spend 2 hours looking for a blu-ray/DVD with the data you need, then maybe it changes the economics back to HDDs, which can look up a file within 20 TB of data almost instantaneously using an NTFS Journal.

They recently changed something - if you follow a link to an image it now loads their page containing the image, and not just the actual file

Presumably this was done to show ads on the page

I've seen them do this in some capacity for like a decade

Strange - I'm pretty sure I used to be able to directly link to an image, and that would be the only thing that loaded (had to 'open image in new tab' after uploading to find the direct link)

Possibly they did different things for different IP blocks?

It's somewhat related to Referrer in the headers, AFAIR

The cardinal sin of an image host is existing as inherently not a profitable venture. They keep sponging off the initial investment or VC rounds or whatever, but in the end they devolve into ad infested garbage, like those domain squatting pages.

>it directly targets what was previously the primary strength of the site, easy and accountless uploads with only a few clicks.

I stopped using imgur several years ago precisely because I couldn't upload anything easily, account or no account.

Mobile in particular couldn't upload period, the feature(?) simply wasn't even there.

I've since moved on to using Discord, specifically a private "server" I made for the purpose, for my image hosting needs. God knows how long that arrangement will last.

All this to say imgur has been useless garbage for many years, its decline to irrelevance is long overdue.

May I ask what you use instead?

I frequently use Imgur because of its built in support in various tools such as Greenshot.

Like I said, I just use Discord for image hosting now.

I can upload by just pasting into the client, and it works anywhere Discord works. I can access images from anywhere by using/sharing the direct links.

If I can easily and simply upload and access images, that's all I want out of an image hoster. Everything else is signal noise.

That function always struck me as an oversight rather than a feature, since the rest of the product is oriented around only being available "in the app".

Personally I am running a mediagoblin server on a Droplet but I have a feeling that only works as long as nothing I make ever goes viral.

Yup!

I have used imgur numerous times thru the years when posting Stack Overflow questions, new feature pull requests on open source apps, troubleshooting reddit posts etc. Very sad to think all that visual context will be lost.

This is going to be incredibly damaging to forums, in the same way that Photobucket's deletions were. Old forum posts are becoming a ghost town of broken image links.

This was already happening (as early as 2019), but on a forum-by-forum referer ban for hotlinked images.

Imgur support wouldn't respond to forum owners.

https://forums.nasioc.com/forums/showthread.php?t=2912540

I've used imgur to host many images over the years, never once have I bothered to make an account. Goodbye, old forum post contents.

This is incredibly vague

"We will be focused on removing old, unused, and inactive content that is not tied to a user account"

What is old, unused and inactive?

That could be 10 year old images or 10 month old images. I have no idea.

Is an image getting regular hits going to be deleted? Who knows...

I guess many will still be on archive.org if someone is late to the party downloading a backup.

I think it's pretty clear. They are making no promises at all for storing anonymous content. It's at their discretion.

Several screenshot apps upload to imgur without an account too

I wrote a command line screenshot tool that did exactly that years ago...

This is going to end up being a new Photobucket situation... hopefully Archive Team can try and figure out what images are at risk, especially if they're linked from forum threads and the like, and make sure they're in the Wayback Machine.

This might be naive, but couldn't they just hand over the images they want to get rid of to Archive?

Anyway, a good trigger to make a donation I guess.

It'll be another swathe of the internet that just has no images again, just like when photobucket deleted old images.

It's the bigger deal IMO, or at least _for me_.

One of imgur's selling points was you opened imgur.com and hit cmd+v to paste the screenshot, or dragged the image over, and bam! You had a sharable version. No muss, no fuss.

The number of times I have used this to share something on a forum or troubleshoot something is uncountable.

Yeah this is the death of trust for Imgur. Bye bye

Or should I say death knell

And to think that StackOverflow is using Imgur for image upload!

StackOverflow is not just embedding random imgur-hosted images for that though but have a special arrangement with images hosted at i.stack.imgur.com - I doubt this change applies to them.

currently when uploading an image to stack exchange it is stored in imgur. I wonder if they will move to another host.

This is hardly the first image host that dies. Is there any way to sustainabley fund long term sleek non-ad-infested image hosting? There are some that are donation-funded (e.g. https://abload.de/spenden_en.php) but I don't know how sustainable that is once the service becomes popular enough that commercial usrs might end up using it as free image storage.

Another option is of course to have many smaller hosts, down to personal sites at the extreme. But that only changes the loss from shutdowns from big events to a steady stream of entropy. We really need a much more expanded Internet Archvie that can serve content at reasonable speeds along with browser and forum plugins to automatically redirect old linnks there.

How far have we come from "My Gift to Reddit: I created an image hosting service that doesn't suck."[0]

I suppose it has lasted longer than anyone expected.

[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/reddit.com/comments/7zlyd/my_gift_t...

Time for someone to create an image hosting service that doesn't suck part 2?

More like part 2,000,000. It's an unsolveable problem. To Imgur's credit, it lasted longer than I thought it would.

It might still last; Tumblr is still there, albeit in a lesser form. And as other posters mentioned, the pushback against NSFW content isn't just Imgur.

something something blockchain

Or rather bittorrent.

It is not unsolvable.

People with the money, time, and luxury just are not capable of solving it, as they exist in ivory towers far away from real problems, and can not fathom investing in people outside their circles with solutions.

So what you are saying is it is easily solvable as long as you have an infinite source of free money.

Heck, I'll solve it for half that much!

That is not what I'm saying at all.

I'm saying the solution to many "unsolvable" problems might just be in the brain of an unknown person operating within the drudges of wage slavery, like a Subway worker for example [1].

There are countless unqualified people wielding an "infinite source of free money" already. Why should they, while others are left to rot? Why are we all okay with their autonomy to use "free money", players winning in a made up game they created, while others are crushed by the weight of survival?

Most people don't need infinite money. They just need enough to survive and be happy, while also have a direct stake in the fruits of their labor instead of having to turn over all their fruits to people who have free money. An exchange of survival for someone's life work is not an exchange worthy of even considering.

This suppresses innovative solutions across the board. It saps away the energy and motivation people have to contribute their solutions. It is an underlying mechanism to a modern dark age.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yitang_Zhang?wprov=sfti1

The solution is to keep building new image hosts that show user growth and then sell the company to a greater fool that thinks they can monetize that user base. Rinse and repeat.

You jest, but Nikita Bier has made millions of dollars with this formula

It was cynical from the beginning: the author made the same post on Digg also, it just didn't take off there.

Do you have link/source?

This is an often repeated myth, from the creator:

>"Yes I did" [create it for Reddit] There's some conspiracy theory going around that I actually created it for Digg. So, here's what happened. I posted it on Reddit, Digg, and a couple forums that I frequent at the same time. The server actually ended up going down and the Reddit post got spammed with "It doesn't work!!". So, I deleted the thread, corrected the problems, and posted it again the next day. I didn't bother deleting the Digg thread; that's why it has a timestamp one day before the Reddit one. I'll try to update this with links to whatever proof I have, but I don't have time right now.

https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/9tlwi/im_the_imgur_gu...

You seem to confirm what GP was saying. The myth seems to be a separate discussion about which was first.

I don't understand why Imgur did the following on https://imgurinc.com/rules , which I'd assume would be vetted by a lawyer...

Caption on example photo of mocking an obese person sitting on a too-small metal folding chair, consequently with a little butt crack visible (maybe at an MtG event):

> This buttcrack isn't intended to stimulate erotic feelings, so it's ok.

Two sections later, this photo itself seems to hit about half of the section:

> No hate speech, abuse or harassment.

Including:

> attacks on people based on their [...] age, disability or medical condition*

> harassment in the forms of [...] or inciting the community into support or disdain for a person, organization or community*

> content that attacks, bullies, or harasses non-public people

> any image taken of or from someone without their knowledge or consent for the purpose of harassment, [...]

> Posts that might be taken down may include: [...] negative stereotypes, [...] malicious personal attacks on non-public individuals, [...] “fat people hate,” [...] photos taken of a non-public figure without their knowledge to make fun of them

Then this section claims to tend to err on the side of taking down content:

> It's important to keep in mind that not everything that's mean or insulting is hate speech. That said, the line between unintentional and serious attacks is sometimes difficult to identify, so we're likely to err on the side of taking abusive content down.

Yet they're including a harassing image in the same rules page, captioned as "ok".

This seems sloppy to me. And, when it's in the context of a historically risky move of a major NSFW hoster going anti-NSFW, I wonder whether that part has been worked through meticulously.

Kudos to Imgur for surviving this long. I remember when they were effectively Reddit's image CDN, with the norm seeming to be Imgur-served images embedded with `img` elements in Reddit pages. I'd wondered how that worked, financially, and whether there were deals with Reddit, or it was just unofficially symbiotic. Imgur has been an important part of the Web for a long time, and hopefully they've figured out a good/necessary direction for 2023, and will execute well on it.

It’s a reference: https://www.huffpost.com/entry/his-butt-crack-photos-at-magi...

The reference being someones ass crack having a picture taken without their consent and posted for millions to see, which is why the OP of that time got banned temporarily i think for that. Its pretty hypocritcal of imgur to use that image , and somewhat ironic to use it in this TOS update

We don't know who the person was. We have no interest in forensically doxxing them. The person stands in as a proxy for any person. Neither the person's life, livelihood, reputation, nor dignity are tarnished in any way by the posting of this image. No person has the "right" to not be photographed in public. There is no evidence the posting of this photo resulted in the financial gain of the poster.

Where there is no harm, there can be no foul.

This is a lot of assertions of fact, almost all of which either don't match my understanding of the situation, or are things that I don't understand how could be known so definitively.

Also, this is speaking in a way that might sound like some referencing some legal standard, or being an exhaustive or overwhelming philosophical analysis. But, even were these assertions true, I suggest that the argument is missing the issue raised.

Specifically, the image used as an example of 'ok' in one part of the Imgur policy document arguably hits all over the specific language of the harassment section of the same document. See quoted parts.

It seems an incredibly poor example to choose, and it's arguably a renewed instance of harassing image posting by their own definitions.

"No person has the "right" to not be photographed in public." Maybe in your country, not mine.

yeah, that'll be another real problem eventually...

Rights aren’t limited by geographic distinctions, if you’re a human you have rights (or don’t, as is the case here).

They absolutely are. "Right" is just a name for "freedom or protection some people decided they like a whole bunch". There's no absolute, certain standard for what they are. Absent laws and/or norms protecting them, they do not, in any meaningful sense, exist.

(yes, yes, I'm aware of the concept of "natural rights", I've read the Second Treatise, blah blah—it's a pretty idea, but it's weak, to put it mildly)

Maybe when you “blah blah” someone’s whole argument, that should be a sign you aren’t engaging in a great way…

Engaging with what, the several sources (not "someone's whole argument") I was encompassing in that "blah blah"? Have you engaged with sources related to this topic? If you're aware of some strong argument for natural rights that I've missed, please, point me in the right direction.

AFAIK they can stand up, kinda, if you have some foundational rules at the bottom that you're taking as divinely-revealed and unquestionable. Otherwise, not so much.

They're a good rhetorical tool and a nice shorthand for "thing we care about a lot", but I'm pretty sure it's a mistake to treat them as for-real real, to any greater degree than anything else we guard with laws and norms. Again, if you've got info that might change my mind, do share—it'd be really handy if they were real.

So by this logic it's okay to post non-consensual up-skirt photos of women as long as their faces aren't visible?

"harassment in the forms of [...] or inciting the community into support or disdain for a person, organization or community*"

This would cover pretty much every quote tweet ever. Also, how is incitement to SUPPORT a person harassment? Please stop praising me?

They also seem to take a strong ideological position in hate speech where they hint that its fine to stereotype/discriminate majorities but not minorities.

> Also, how is incitement to SUPPORT a person harassment?

The obvious example would be a propaganda image to garner support for Adolf Hitler, in a way that doesn't fall under harassment of other groups. It's (probably intentionally) worded such that it can apply to any controversial figure that Imgur's administration dislikes, though.

ArchiveTeam are in early discussions about how to save all that stuff to archive.org.

https://wiki.archiveteam.org/index.php/Imgur

This is a fantastic time to be alive and prepared to start the third generation of internet companies. You've got Google in a panic against OpenAI, Meta is imploding, Twitter is imploding, Reddit can't help but drive users away, and now least of all Imgur also deciding to follow them off the cliff; I genuinely feel blessed to watch these companies tear themselves apart.

Like in all things; we, the data hoarders, the open source community, the hackers, the archivists, were here before them; and we'll be here after them. Like watching pigs roll in the mud.

Also, lots of top tier talent is being laid off, and many others are well-capitalized and eager to flee to fully remote companies, or to start their own companies.

Looking back a decade from now, we'll notice that many of the unicorns will have been founded in 2023.

And it'll all be thanks to tightening monetary policy!

Which is lighthearted, but not a joke. Economic theory says that the economic cycle helps to free up misallocated resources.

Isn't it also what misallocated those resources in the first place? Wouldn't it be better to never encourage people to just throw money away on subsidized BS business models that seem to mostly empower monopolies whose main barrier to entry is "has so much cash they can put any business that is wasting time trying to have revenue out of its misery"?

The way the theory goes, people need to be encouraged to take risks. To gamble it all on a crazy new business idea that might not work out at all. Risk is the source of all new value. You can do this by making money very cheap and giving very few other otherlets for risk-free dividends.

People will create all manner of crazy businesses. Some will be duds, some will be frauds, and some will be the future. Then to sort out which is which, you have to turn off the flood of money.

>prepared to start the third generation of internet companies.

With the same business model, you'll get the same problem.

What's new on this front? >$2/mo subscriptions and advertising? Meh.

Meanwhile, archive.org might get killed off by a lawsuit.

The pendulum has clearly started to swing back to sexual repression. Society has started to see sexual freedom and expression as grotesque. Now the only question is how far it'll swing.

I don't think is the case. I think we are even more sexually open was society.

I think the issues here is the US money is over and now the big investors are from countries that porn is banned like China and Arabias.

I think it’s more likely that hosting sexual content involves having to deal with loads of abusive material which is hard to detect and process, and which requires great haste in dealing with.

It’s hard to have an army of dirt cheap outsourced moderators sort out regular porn from revenge porn.

If you take too long dealing with regular spam, not much happens. If you take too long dealing with this kind of content, you get cut off from payment providers and advertising.

This is the thing entirely. So much of the NSFW content is abusive.

The HN crowd is mostly safe from such attacks so this is a real blindspot.

That's why I only use OnlyFans these days. The industry that produces free porn for pornhub etc is incredibly abusive.

Disintermediation here removes a lot of scumbags

Props to you for looking into more ethical means of consumption. It's a real tragedy that the taboo around sex prevents more meaningful discussions in public live about this stuff.

Personally I got so sick of it all that I have up pornography completely about 4 years ago. I'm not saying everyone else should follow suit but I count it as the single best thing I ever did for myself, my mental health and my real life relationships.

Now just go one step further and cut out the parasocial pathetic relationships with onlyfans creators and you'll be good!

Yes, tech bros are safe from others wanting them for anything outside of their minds.

Indeed, the rates of revenge porn and AI deepfake targeted towards men is considerably lower than that against women.

I'd be more sympathetic to the abusive/revenge porn argument if these companies didn't keep applying the same rules to drawn images.

Why? Aren't you falling victim to false equivalency? One argument can be valid in certain cases but not in others.

It's that I don't believe it's the motivation of these companies, even though that argument is valid in a vacuum.

That's true, broken clocks are sometimes right and all that.

> abusive material which is hard to detect and process

But doesn't all NSFW content just expand the range of what you have to detect and process?

The other repliers have mentioned possibly "why"s. But your "what" stands regardless.

But the people I know are more sexually free than ever. This seems more about repression and Puritanism in government and investors that doesn’t match the populace.

There's plenty of sexual progression online. Imgur's decision has little to do with society as a whole. It's one company wanting to get off the porn train so they look better to potential buyers.

I think we live in an increasingly neo-victorian age. It's not just sex. It has become toxic to express a wide range of opinions. For example, the systematic deplatforming of conservatives. (I am a liberal, and my need to state that to be taken seriously is further evidence of all this.)

Personally, I think it’s fine for people whose only goal is to be assholes to others or to spread disinformation to be deplatformed by private services. If that happens to primarily center around conservatives, then that sounds like conservatives should do some soul searching.

Who\What is deciding who these "people whose only goal is to be assholes to others or to spread disinformation" are?

Platform owners, I guess.

People aren't systematically deplatforming conservatives. People are systematically deplatforming hate. That that happens to affect one political party more than others is a condemnation of that party, not of the practice of deplatforming hate.

Post all the conservative political opinions you want. As long as you stay away from posting hate, personal attacks, and similar, you're not going to lose your Twitter account

Is this a satirical comment? One of the big issues is how incredibly loosely defined 'hate' has come to be by a significant number of people. This is not without precedent in other areas, look at the differences in what is considered obscene in say, Sweden, vs the US to see how loosely defined such concepts can be and how dangerous it is to say things like 'as long as you stay away from [loosely defined and extremely political topic] you'll be fine'.

I wonder how the upvote ratio would look on HN if someone posted about wanting to decrease taxes on entrepreneurs?

That;s a pretty standard Conservative position that I think would be well received here.

It's weird how people will sea lion about how "conservative views are being deplatformed" while refusing to admit that the "conservative views" that are in question are their beliefs that entire groups of human beings shouldn't exist.

Exactly. Conservative opinions like "unions aren't an unmitigated good" or "people should have more of their money to spend as they see fit rather than paying it in taxes" or "governmental options are less efficient than private alternatives" are perfectly reasonable things to argue about and evaluate. I genuinely think it's a shame that positions like those that would make for interesting discussions and considerations are being drowned out by people whose identity revolves around attacking others.

The trick is that "hate" can be defined to be whatever opinions one desires to censor.

Replace 'hate' with "things I don't like" and you'll see why your comment provides no insight. Hate is subjective and political.

Some things are objectively hateful. "This class of people should not have rights" is objectively hateful. "This class of people is subhuman and we'd be better off if they died" is objectively hateful. "This event that killed dozens of people was good, actually" is objectively hateful. If we can't agree on things like those then we have no common ground. If we can agree on those then it's just a question of where the line is, rather than whether a line exists.

Just because it isn't a perfectly bright dividing line doesn't mean it's entirely subjective. It is also to the benefit of a side regularly spewing hate to also argue that it's subjective.

(And to be clear, none of those things short of imminent threats should ever be considered punishable by a government; that has far more negative outcomes than positive ones. But they absolutely should have consequences by individuals and groups who choose not to associate with such things.)

Agreed. I can also agree to some degree to couple other comments that people are more sexually open than ever, but the "accepted" modes and diversity of thoughts and opinions are reducing quite uncomfortably fast.

Your downvotes prove your point.

Genuine question, what does deplatforming conservatives have to do with Victorianism?

It's a narrowing of the Overton window, not any one specific topic being accepted in public discourse.

Despite the fact that the Victorian era was quite conservative? So your point doesn't make a lot of sense to me. We're moving to a neo-victorian(more conservative/prude) era that is also shutting down Conservative speech?

It's not about the content, it's about the restrictions to a dogma

Yes, it has absolutely nothing to do with the exact ideology and everything to do with a narrowing of what is publicly acceptable. For an example, compare any hollywood comedy from 10 years ago to one from today. So it's neo-victorian in the sense that we have become quite prudish about what we allow in public, but nothing to do with exactly what we allow, which of course, would have made the actual Victorians blush.

living in a midsize French city, this has not at all been my experience. Could be due to sampling bias (I'm basing this off of people I know, who are probably not representative of the population as a whole), but most people here seem pretty open sexually.

You can assume that any comment on internet culture is from an American point of view. As a European, I only find a percent of a percent that resonates with my offline world - although the dominance of American internet companies still enforces their culture online.

I would say it's more male sexuality (primarily hetero) and female sexuality that is seen as threatening and uncontrolled that is categorized as grotesque. Things like OnlyFans has never been more normal.

By which metric?

Broadly, the biggest pushes have been to limit exposure of highly-sexualized content to those 18+.

We really ought to update Napoleon’s quote about malice and stupidity to something like “never attribute to moral preening that which can be explained by financial incentives”

Only in America, the most puritan developed nation.

>Society has started to see sexual freedom and expression as grotesque

When has it been not grotesque? It's just that “American” “norms” are actually starting to “progress” to the mean.

At some point imgur built a front page. Initially it mirrored reddits front page. And then it diverged, and very strangely for an image hosting site, most of the content on the front page was text. Often about current events, engaging in a superficial way (so, falling into the traps that HN is set up to avoid) but sometimes just tweet screenshots.

This i guess is another move away from image content for imgur. Dunno.

There's this weird world of people who get their memes from Imgur directly and don't know about reddit or their other sources

Looks like the shadow theatre has a captive audience

A lot of the Reddit posts they're reading a xerox of are just tweets. A copy of a copy!

Ah yes there are multiple levels of indirection

I've seen reddit posts of screenshots of Twitter messages containing screenshots of Twitter replies.

We're this close to prints and scans, like grandpa.

Imgur is how I found Reddit, but that was a long time ago

What's the problem with NSFW? Why discriminate and demonize this kind of content?

> We don't want to create a bad experience for someone that might stumble across explicit images, nor is it in our company ethos to support explicit content, so some lascivious or sexualized posts are not allowed.

Hey Imgur! By banning NSFT you've create a bad experience for me and now I'm stumbled. Happy?

> What's the problem with NSFW? Why discriminate and demonize this kind of content?

The usual answer is that advertisers don't want their ads appearing next to it.

turn them off on NSFW posts?

Tumblr tried that. No NSFW voluntary tagging nor automated detection is ever perfect, so many advertisers treat it as all-or-nothing.

how about showing nsfw ads next to nsfw content?

NSFW ads are never 100% reliably detected or voluntarily flagged, and it only takes one screnshot of Wholesome Brand™ next to someone's penis for it to be a PR issue.

Free hosting for the masses of porn on the internet is a low interest rate phenomenon.

Many years ago I did an analysis on how fast Imgur grew on Reddit: https://minimaxir.com/2017/06/imgur-decline/

Reddit adding its native hosting effectively kneecaped it, however, although from Imgur's perspective it's hard to say that's a bad thing since they just lose money on bandwidth. Since then, Imgur has been strongly pushing non-direct image links where they can show ads.

I'm still waiting for the day when people will stop being absurdly neurotic about sexuality and just let people share their stuff as long as it's age flagged appropriately. It's so absurd that the most normal thing on earth is put into the same moderation category as harassment or hate speech.

That’s what happens when you deal with companies from the US.

Amen. Sex is bad but violence and the weekly mass shooting circuit are great and good for the kids. God bless America.

When you have lobby groups like the NRA, but no lobby group for the porn industry, this is what happens.

The porn industry has lobby groups. The main industry one is the Free Speech Coalition, but the Adult Performance Artist Guild, the porn actors labor union, does lobbying (sometimes in conjunction with FSC where their interests coincide), too.

They don’t have nearly the resources, grassroots base, or supply of Russian money the NRA has had, OTOH, neither is in the degree of legal mess the NRA is currently in, either.

As another poster pointed out, it's not just the US, though with the US's economic dominance it's a huge factor. China and middle eastern nations don't like sexual content either. Basically, the governments in these places want you to concentrate on the state-sanctioned religion instead of relieving your biological urges with porn. So in the middle east, they want you thinking about Islam all day long. In the US, they want you thinking about Jesus n' Guns. In China, they want you thinking about the glory of Xi and the CCP. I'm pretty surprised actually that Russia hasn't cracked down on porn yet.

> I'm pretty surprised actually that Russia hasn't cracked down on porn yet.

That's just not how Russia rolls. Simple things like low fuel prices, alcohol and porn are what prevents the population from complaining.

Russians highly value internal peace and will not actively go against anything that helps to secure it.

That's your view, but actually most of the world doesn't share it. India, china and the middle east aren't found of sexual content.

Their moralistic and/or overly religious governments aren't fond of it. The vast majority of young people under 30 likely don't give a shit.

No, but their people most certainly are.

And what's your proof of that?

It was revealed by people familiar with the matter.

Not buying it, especially that these people have their own political and monetary incentives to say so.

I'm waiting for the day when we collectively realize we can engineer ourselves out of this situation...

> just let people share their stuff as long as it's age flagged appropriately.

Sure, you can do that on Twitter already, plenty of depraved porn on that platform. Imgur doesn't have to allow that. It's not like there is a lack of places on the internet where you can post porn.

You have petabytes of porn available with incredible ease, every interst and fetish you can imagine

A terabyte of new porn will be generated while you are reading this

You can go your whole life consuming porn for hours a day and never see the same content twice, for free

Not sure what your complaint is

Unfortunately we can't have this discussion until we talk about the larger issue of society catering to people's made up fairy tale religions, which is the root of this puritanical anti-sex behavior.

If I said that Earth was at the center of the solar system, up is down and the sky is green you would tell me that I'm wrong and misinformed, but if I said that I believe in a magical man in the sky who can walk on water and will send everyone to Hell for eternity for looking at porn then suddenly my "faith" has to be respected and everyone else has to change their behaviors to accommodate it. It's utter nonsense.

Utter nonsense is people wanting to promote degeneracy in society and all of the media allowing the propagation of perversion onto children to the point that sexual exploitation and objectification is just an accepted part of life. More than faith, modesty is a value that those without it perhaps can never realize the wisdom of it.

With this change and Reddit removing NSFW content from the API, at the same time. I think both sites will be way less used. And another competitor will appear quickly. Look like they want became irrelevant very quickly. Tumblr and Only Fans tried and falied. one became forgotten and the other had to say sorry was a mistake.

> removing NSFW content from the API

Like at all or just for anonymous requests?

I’m building flingup.com, but I never thought about allowing nsfw communities. Perhaps I should rethink and welcome this type of content.

I wish imgur would go away entirely. It’s such a toxic community of people. If you are not aligned with their doctrine you get spammed with downvotes and some of the most hateful replies I’ve ever seen. You report it but it stays there.

And still you return?

No. I haven’t been there since 2021. It got worse during covid so I just deleted my account.

The users on Imgur is incredibly protective of their little cornor of the internet, but as you point out also extremely toxic, making even Reddit look half-way decent. I wouldn't recommend Imgur, sure some of the images and comments are fun and lighthearted, overall though, it has become a dark place. The frontpage is overrun by US politics, everyone is depressed, have some sort of mental disorder or disability and work minimum wage jobs.

When Imgur was created I doubt that much thought went into why it's so difficult to build a good image hosting site. There's no profit in it. You need to add a social layer, or some other hook that make people stick around and watch ads. As storage and bandwidth has become cheaper, it makes sense that a site like Reddit just went ahead and did their own image hosting. Imgur has become disconnected and needs to find its own audience, which is has, it just so happens that their audience is terrible. 4chan looks downright cheerful compared to Imgur.

Maybe they managed to carve out a niche? One that could be profitable if they get rid of X amount of storage, hence deleting NSFW content and older anonymous uploads.

I'll never understand people who actively use Imgur as if it's a social network.

A few years back someone posted this comment about the imgur “community” which I thought was apt:

“They are like rats living in a sewer. They feed off of the shit that gets pumped through it but have no concept of the fact that it’s simply a piece of infrastructure for a large city above them.”

Imgur was wonderful as a stable image host that didn't mandate accounts and allowed hotlinking. Just open the site and drag the file.

I couldn't care less about their discussions. I remember some years ago taking a look there and it was super eerie, because the people where discussing images posted to reddit without having any context whatsoever.

Well the userbase seems to largely be edgy teens and those that failed to grow out of that mindset. It's all very capitalism-bad america-bad libs-go-fuck-themselves behead-landlords socialism-right-now and also children need to be beaten when they don't function right, which is when I got off that train.

Yes, anything we do not agree with should go away entirely.

I do not agree with throwaway accounts. They should go away entirely.

You are being just as "toxic" in your motives.

Imgur stopped existing in 2021 when it was sold to Medialab AI. Medialab also own kik and whisper, genius and worldstarhiphop.

That's the cause for these changes.

Isn't worldstar full of controversial content, like streetfights?

They said they didn’t want people stumbling on NSFW content. Then I clicked on the explanation on their TOS and stumbled upon NSFW content.

No bullshit image hosting from https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=stavros : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21627714

Been using this for a while now, good service!

paid-only

no thanks

I don't have an opinion about the service, but that's why image hosts always die or end up like this. They have ongoing costs and almost no one wants to pay.

The best option for that would be a more broad platform generating its revenue from multiple means, and then offering an image hosting service as a loss leader.

Aren't there some distributed, peer-to-peer networks that could be used for this purpose?

I'm not aware of anything that is reliable and works directly on the browser that doesn't cost money to run.

If the images go away when the user stops paying it doesn't solve the problem very well, though.

If I expect a typical image to be 1MB and get 10000 views, I could prepay 30 years of cloudflare R2 hosting with one penny. That's the kind of model I'd want when ads aren't an option. But it's really hard to build something around microtransactions like that.

Is this their tumblr moment?

It effectively is for large Reddit communities, as most of them rely on Imgur to upload NSFW content. There aren't many free image hosting sites as "generous" as Imgur (unlimited bandwidth, large sizes, no visible compression, "permanent") so it'll be interesting to see where they move to.

You can just post directly to Reddit now.

You have to wonder how long that's going to last, though, as Reddit is in the same situation of quietly tolerating pornographic content while not explicitly promoting it.

The worst possible outcome for Reddit is that this move shines light on how many porn communities exist on reddit, which causes media scrutiny, which causes advertisers to bail or threaten to bail, which causes Reddit to ban NSFW subreddits, which spells the end of Reddit.

more like it will be mastercard that bails. I wonder how many redditors that upload thtemselves have a form 2257 on file.

I wouldn't imagine 18 USC 2257 applies to people posting themselves to Reddit. Among other things, subsection a(2) requires that the content be mailed or shipped in interstate or foreign commerce, or intended to be. In other words, the law targets commercial pornography.

Reddit tolerates porn because the customer base for their ads product are overwhelmingly no-name companies that aren't in a position to dictate content standards.

>which spells the end of Reddit.

This would probably be a good thing for the world, except for the loss of the NSFW subreddits. All the "normal" subreddits are cesspools.

nah, there are some good ones. The mechanical keyboard and ergomechkeyboards ones are fun to browse, bodyweightfitness is generally good, and I've started exploring the music production one recently, it looks nice.

> All the "normal" subreddits are cesspools.

How dare you say this about my /r/DaystromInstitute

Haha, I recently discovered this sub after a decade+ of being off reddit. Good god.

Not on NSFW subreddits. Unless this changed recently, you have to upload your image elsewhere and then submit the link to NSFW subs

that is only for images in comments. image submissions to subreddits are still ok. A lot of communities have imgur-only rules due to other image hosts having lower retention or invasive UX.

Best I can tell, you can't create image posts on NSFW posts via the New Reddit Desktop Site. You can via the mobile app.

This is also my experience.

As best I can tell, Reddit's limitations on posting NSFW with Reddit hosting the image or video are implemented client-side, and unevenly across their first-party clients at that.

Reddit NSFW communities have already started their mass migration to redgif.

redgifs is the porn section of gfycat (old links redirect to redgifs)

It looks like redgifs may have split from Gyfcat (according to wikipedia). Interestingly gyfcat is owned by Snap[chat].

They moved ages ago. Imgur massively limits bandwith for NSFW images.

To test this in practice, I just went ahead and uploaded an image of Michaelangelo's "David" which has been a topic of recent controversy.

https://imgur.com/a/aTiH5lk

Let's see if that violates these new "guidelines."

Did you post that as a public post (listed on the front page)? I think it is possible to read the ToS in such a way, that they only apply to public posts.

Nope, that requires an account, and I have no interest in letting imgur have more info on me than they need :)

The guidelines have an example of a nude art statue and says it is okay.

>No content that condones illegal ... activity

How does that work? Illegal where I live, illegal where they are or illegal anywhere?

Further if I'm pro abortion, is that condoning 'illegal activity'? What about smoking weed, which is illegal in certain states but legal in others. If I talk about crossing the road not at a crossing which is legal in my country, would that be banned? Do I now need to read up on US business law to find out where they're incorporated and or where the servers are sited to find the applicable state to then find the applicable laws? Are their moderators also going to be trained to this standard?

I'm surprised imgur still exists. It's been years since reddit started doing their own image hosting, and that was basically the only thing anyone used it for.

Isn't Imgur a fairly popular social media in its own right similar to Reddit? According to this https://blog.gitnux.com/imgur-statistics/ it has 300 million active monthly users, and if you go there and click around on a few images it seems to have as many comments as Reddit does.

I don't really use either sites, but isn't Reddit mostly a collection of links to content from other places? Whenever I needed to share an image online over the years, I tended to use Imgur without an account after bildr.no shut down, but I did only use those services if it didn't matter that the image disappeared after I'd shared it, and now that you can copy-paste images into basically any messaging service on basically any device that sort of need has disappeared.

Almost no generalization if Reddit will ever work, as it's closer to a forum host than any other social-ish media. I read many subreddits that are predominantly text-only selfposts.

Of course, some of them use NSFW tagging for spoilers …

> Isn't Imgur a fairly popular social media in its own right similar to Reddit?

Yes, to my knowledge, you are correct. It was a surprise when I first learned it but apparently there are users that visit imgur directly without using reddit.

> Isn't Imgur a fairly popular social media in its own right similar to Reddit?

Not really. Even the most popular posts on the imgur front page average around 1,000 upvotes (compared to 40,000 for the reddit front page with default subs) and most are only getting 300 upvotes with 20-30 comments. That's about as popular as a middle-tier subreddit, of which there are thousands. Which I guess isn't "dead" but those certainly aren't numbers that are going to get the VCs opening checkbooks.

Measuring active users for imgur is tricky because a massive proportion of those users are just using it as an image host and not "engaging" in the community. And even a lot of that engagement is just being driven by Reddit rather than coming from imgur itself.

So no, I think calling imgur a popular social media site is extremely misleading: it's an extremely popular image host that happens to have a social media site that a small community uses attached to it.

I'm both surprised and not, given how much user blocking they already employ.

For months now, I've been unable to view photos on Imgur. Only recently, I finally realized their "over capacity" error was their cop-out for "we don't want to serve your IP blocks". (Yes, I am primarily on VPN.)

Wow, I remember reading the post of the creator of imgur that he made it specifically for reddit use. Then at some point they made it into this social platform and removed directly linking to images (or at least made it quite hard).

Now this, interesting to see a site from day 1 coming up and (probably) going down.

I don't know if any evidence exists anymore to properly back this up, but I've heard that the creator first went to Digg with the same claim about making it for them.

RIP imgur

Tech companies deciding to not allow any vulgar content is seriously a bizarre "value" to uphold in the age of the internet.

Imgur sucks, viewing images on their website requires whitelisting an obnoxious amount of javascript that simply shouldn't be necessary to view an image. They weren't always so bad, but what's past is past. If this move kills their business I won't be sad to see them go.

How much do we wager this is an internal decision, versus how much do we think this is a result of external forces? Have various assorted governments just made life a total pain I the ass, or is Imgur no longer interested in being the image server of the internet?

This feels like yet another recent chilling case where Barlow's Declaration of Independence of Cyberspace should probably be rolled out. Where shitty governmental fear mongering trash again just makes being online in authentic & dirty ways harder & harder.

Tons of image tutorials from Reddit will probably be destroyed. This reminds me of when Photobucket wiped tons of contents which were used on old forums.

I've been seeing more and more "fringe-content" websites having billing issues currently, with card processors declining their business due to "safety" concerns (really, a blanket term for "I don't wanna do business with you for whatever reason, but I'm not going to say").

Does anyone know what may be happening?

I wonder what triggered this - legislation? Their payment processor? The ad network they get their revenue from?

In my experience, this kind of change happens much more often for money reasons than for moral reasons.

I think Tumblr's TOS change happened because their credit card processor became uncomfortable at them being essentially "in the porn business" - and indeed, seeing how much smaller Tumblr's business was post-change, the card processor was technically right.

> I think Tumblr's TOS change happened because...

https://www.salon.com/2019/08/16/did-banning-porn-make-tumbl...

> Porn was banned from Tumblr soon after the social network was removed from Apple’s App Store. Child pornography was found on the site, one consequence of the site’s relaxed content moderation approach. Instead of banning specific sites with child pornography, all not-safe-for-work content was banned.

I don’t see how someone could have that many uploads a day without child porn slipping through - especially when child porn is defined as porn of anyone under the age of 18.

probably AI porn fears

And more and more legislation against revenge porn. There have been so many subreddits dedicated to non consensual intimate media and most of their content was hosted on imgur.

People are framing this as an attack against sex but in reality our automated moderation tools can't know if consent sas given by the models and human moderation is too costly.

The rise of AI porn is giving more power than ever to people who wish to hurt women.

There are still plenty of places to share NSFW content but they're moving towards models of consent verification like PornHub.

> AI porn is giving more power than ever to people who wish to hurt women

How do fake nudes hurt women?

edit: i'm guessing you mean using someone's likeness without their consent to create porn, something that was easily doable prior to AI.

AI "gives those people more power" as you put it, but it also gives defenders more power. AI safetyism (aka pantywaistism) is a joke.

Yes, I have already seen women be victims of these false-likeness AI pornographies. I know that HN sits in a safe bubble and will gloss over the dangers because it's "not real" but the damage done is real. The effects on the victims are real and have real world consequences for these people which can potentially be fatal.

I know that technology is often a double edged sword. I can be in favour of auto-transport, for example, while still supporting research into seat belts and crumple zones.

> AI safetyism (aka pantywaistism) is a joke.

I don't know what these are, sorry. I feel like I'm making a valid point based on my observations and you're attempting to discredit that by associating my view with more extreme groups.

you're echoing congress woman eshoo.

Again, I don't know who that is, sorry. I'm not in the US so I don't follow American politics so closely and I'm unsure what point you're making or how to respond.

I'll be more clear:

eshoo's argument is that there are photos of Asian females being beaten generated by Stable Diffusion posted to 4chan and thus the NSA needs to step in and do something to stop Stable Diffusion.

These arguments are ridiculous. These are fake images generated with an algorithm. Real images are more concerning because it means real people were harmed in the real world.

Fake images means someone's ego was hurt and they have a legal battle to attend to if they want the fake images of themselves removed from the internet. Those same fake images could be generated with Photoshop. AI just makes it easier. Banning AI doesn't solve the problem. The time and resources spent debating and attempting to ban AI should be diverted to real issues. The fear surrounding AI is misplaced and makes people who embrace the fear look weak and foolish. The people sowing the fear have the most to gain from public compliance.

Additionally, you implied that I am exhibiting some sort of Hacker News group think, I am not. But perhaps this site draws a certain type of personality. I am against government regulation and intervention, and I am VERY against the nanny-statism influence of the UK and others that is being pushed on the US.

> These arguments are ridiculous.

These arguments aren't mine. You're attempting to colour my words by associating them with someone else's who they apparently "sound like."

> Real images are more concerning because it means real people were harmed in the real world.

Yes, they are. I hope real images of abuse are treated with the gravity they deserve.

> Those same fake images could be generated with Photoshop. AI just makes it easier.

Yes, many of the things we achieve with me technology could previously have been achieved with more effort using earlier technologies. Airplanes are still world changing, though, even thick we already had cars.

> Banning AI doesn't solve the problem.

This is a strawman.

> Additionally, you implied that I am exhibiting some sort of Hacker News group think, I am not.

I simply meant that HN is a predominantly male space and that men are less likely to be victims of faked pornography, so the discussion here will inevitably take a more detached and theoretical point of view on these matters than if potential victims were more included in the conversion.

> These arguments aren't mine. You're attempting to colour my words by associating them with someone else's who they apparently "sound like."

I didn't say they are. You stated you didn't know what I was talking about, I explained. No one is attempting to color your words as anything. You made a statement regarding the harm AI is doing to women and I'm saying that it echos the sentiment of a congresswoman who I deeply disagree with.

> This is a strawman.

no, it isn't a strawman when that is literally the issue on the table. Congresswoman Eshoo as I stated wants to use state power to ban Stable Diffusion, and she's using the same argument you're using. The entire world is in a moral panic and it makes me embarrassed to share the same oxygen as these people.

> I didn't say they are

This started when you said I was echoing her.

> no, it isn't a strawman when that is literally the issue on the table. Congresswoman Eshoo...

I am not Congresswoman Eshoo. I said nothing about a ban. I was making my own points from my own perspective and you've begun arguing against something that someone else has said and put me into their camp by saying I'm echoing them.

i really don't care. this conversation is going nowhere.

Safetyism is for the weak, AI safetyism even more-so. "Think of the women" is a stupid argument.

With Stable Diffusion + controlnet, it is pretty damned easy to make nudes of people - and if they're wearing something tight-fitted, it's probably quite accurate as far as overall body shape.

Of course, you can make a model of someone with ~30 images and have them wearing and doing whatever you want.

On the flip side, that means if your real nudes are leaked you have plausible deniability. What might have been a career ending incident can now be dismissed as someone generating those images instead.

> On the flip side, that means if your real nudes are leaked you have plausible deniability

indeed, that's the way i have seen it as well. political blackmail can become a thing of the past. makes no sense to ban or restrict.

I've been using https://catbox.moe/ which is kept alive by donations. One interesting thing they do is their sister site, https://litterbox.catbox.moe/ which does temporary hosting: an hour, 12 hours, a day, or three days. So the user can choose whether they want it kept around forever, and the site can save money on hosting.

I bet an enormous amount, maybe 99%, of imgur content is stuff that users only meant to share once and wouldn't care if it were deleted. But the other 1% is of tremendous value -- even if an image gets no hits in years, that's no guarantee it's really useless (e.g. an instruction manual for an obscure piece of hardware or software). And it's hard to know which is which.

This is web 4.0, also known as WWBWW. World Wide Bubble Wrap Web.

Can we please stop using “NSFW” as a euphemism for porn? I feel like I’m going crazy today between this and Reddit. The standard for something to qualify as NSFW is much lower than straight up pornography. It was originally anything you wouldn’t want your boss to see you looking at if he walked up behind you at your cubicle. The use of the term is incredibly vague. If you’re banning porn just say you’re banning porn Jesus Christ.

If you actually clicked the link before posting it specifies more than just porn.

And porn is the most interesting aspect as it's morality is much more debatable than hate speech, doxing people, etc.

I did click the link after writing that knee jerk comment. I think their page does a great job of explaining that pornography is banned but other content that would be considered “NSFW” is allowed but must be marked as “mature”.

I actually feel like it makes the title of the submission inaccurate and my point still stands there.

I use NSFWWIBM (NOT SAFE FOR WHEN WIFE IS BEHIND ME). Because I work by myself NSFW doesn't apply.

Lots of people have spouses that are fine with them consuming porn.

Bait and switch: get popular with user-friendly terms, then pull the rug from under your users and use your conned popularity to serve advertisers.

The internet is becoming much more puritan than broadcast tv or cable tv.

It's disgusting.

I guess at least the large sites, anyways.

What is the new imgur that will take imgur's place? Anyone know if there's something new?

> These rules apply to all community aspects on Imgur: all parts of a public post (title, description, tags, visual content), comments, links, and messages.

Does this also apply to posts which are not posted as "public", but can be shared as a link?

Many social networking sites (YouTube, Twitter, Tumblr, etc.) prohibit sexual content, racism and unauthorised use of trademarks in their terms and conditions, but in practice they've mostly left it alone, so I doubt Imgur will be so thorough.

It's usually enough to CYA with the TOS, but then operate strictly on a complaint basis. Like your typical cops do.

Twitter [0] explicitly allows sexual content:

> You can share graphic content and consensually produced adult nudity and sexual behavior content within your Tweets, provided that you mark this media as sensitive.

But since we're on the topic, one social media service that you didn't mention is TikTok. I haven't seen anyone write about this and find it a bit fascinating. Although TikTok claim that sexual content isn't allowed, a lot of adult sex workers continuously skirt or outright ignore the rules. Some sex worker's strategy seems to be to continuously create multiple new accounts, as new accounts have a time period and size limit where growth and reach is really easy in order to get creators initially hooked. Two trends I've encountered are women flashing their vaginal lips through a see-through dress with a backlight and women flashing their breasts on reflective background items while seeming to engage in some mundane activity. But even the sex workers that don't engage in blatant TOS violations clearly create content to lead you towards their OnlyFans page. A breakdown of the evolution of the sex worker advertisement meta on TikTok is a YouTube video waiting to be made, especially as TikTok dies off and the strategies no longer remain viable as a vehicle for growth. A modern-day version of Aella's classic "Maximizing Your Slut Impact: An Overly Analytical Guide to Camgirling" [1].

[0] https://help.twitter.com/en/rules-and-policies/media-policy

[1] https://knowingless.com/2018/11/19/maximizing-your-slut-impa...

I think it wouldn't be too hard to offer the image hosting but I'd be deathly afraid of moderation: imagine someone uses my product to host CSAM. That's horrifying. So it sounds like a hard problem to deal with.

Makes sense. Not exactly advertising friendly content for them to monetize.

That's been true for the past 10 years. What's changed?

edit: They sold to Medialab in 2021. That's what's changed.

For a long time now, imgur simply hasn't worked for me unless I whitelist JS for medialab and a bunch of other 3rd-party domains. Even direct image links get hijacked back to the tracking-infested page. Good riddance, imgur, you won't be missed.

The redirect is geo dependent FYI. Never had it in Germany (tested without ublock a while ago, might have changed without), but I've read of US users having this happen years ago

Your edit is the most illuminating on this entire thread. We have some notion that websites are static bodies that don't change, and look for outside societal reasons for some unexpected change where it's often the most commonly found cause.

Imgur stopped existing in 2021 and it became part of Medialab. (Medialab also own kik and whisper)

Why do advertisers shy away from porn? It's not like iPhone owners don't watch it so what's the problem with Apple putting their ads next to a pair of boobs once in a while?

> Why do advertisers shy away from porn? It's not like iPhone owners don't watch it so what's the problem with Apple putting their ads next to a pair of boobs once in a while?

Because porn sites profit off CSAM, sex trafficking and revenge porn, why would Coca Cola or Disney want to be associated with that?

is there a legal issue with AI generated NSFW?

(like https://twitter.com/search?q=stable%20diffusion)

I found a pretty lax new social site that doesn't seem to have a problem with NSFW uploads.

https://qwurty.com

the “find out” phase, for imgur

Has no one at Imgur heard of Tumblr and what happened when they tried this? Why do they think this will turn out differently for them?

Probably wants to get out of the threat of regulatory crosshairs for revenge porn laws via AI generated images.

Unrestricted image hosting with direct linking is a crucial tool for the internet, but not a business model.

Is it time for a decentralized image host, where images are actually stored on users devices?

rule of thumb: media sharing startups gladly host porn when they're early, small and growing. Then once they mature, get big enough, the Adults Take Over, they then ban the porn. Seen this sequence happen a dozen times from afar over decades.

I thought the ban included any image from unregistered accounts. Is this not the case?

Is the affecting THT (Thigh High Thursday)? I’m just asking…for a friend.

Hold up, is anyone hosting anything other than non-nsfw content on imgur?

I'm kinda upset i never ever saw nsfw ever on imgur. But then i generally link-in from reddit and that's that. I didn't even think of it as a 'thing'.

I actively avoid imgur anyway because of the insane amount of JS

You'd think capitalism would lead platforms to support porn.

This is what I don't get. Having tons of NSFW content makes me want to invest in reddit/imgur once they do an IPO much more than if they get rid of it.

Maybe it will take down a lot of Reddit traffic as well.

Why now? Is there any context about this decision?

what is the motivation behind this step?

Damn, they went full Insta.

et tu, brute?

Slack integration

Good, this site is full of content for children, the right move by Imgur

I believe that companies have a responsibility to create safe and welcoming environments for all users.

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