Hacker News Reader

Comment by mjr00 | Hacker News Reader

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.

View on HN

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.

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.

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.

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

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

> 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.

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

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

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!"

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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...

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.

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...

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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...

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.

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.

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.

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.

> 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...

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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)

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.

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?

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

> maybe manufacture a consensus

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

>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?

"Manufacture a consensus"?

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.

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.

Why do you do it?

A lot of morally dubious people, maybe.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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"

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.

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.

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

The economics of image hosting are absolutely brutal.

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.

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?

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)

> 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.

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

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

Reply on news.ycombinator.com