The Imgur Apocalypse Is Going to Break Large Parts of the Internet
vice.com
vice.com
Imgur was good for serving as a quick cut and paste to share images. It was not good for being Reddit or image sharing and discovery. It filled a need better than anyone else and now it doesn’t.
I don’t see the value in creating an account to upload an image to share it for two people to see it. It’s just an extra step. It’s not just the hassle, it’s that I don’t want a profile of all the images I’ve ever shared.
I was always surprised by how gracious imgur was and wondered how they made money but assumed their costs were super low. And I suppose it was fun while it lasted.
This also makes me really appreciate my $30/year shared web host that’s run without problems for almost 20 years (knock wood). Images posted there never go down. Or at least I get to choose when they go down.
I think everyone would be better off by just paying $50/year for a random host that ran email, cloud storage, images, etc and could be easily ported to any competitor by copying some files and changing DNS.
SaaS ultimately lets you down.
I thought about doing it myself, but as the article mentions, there are "Legal realities, such as copyright removal and the risk of CSAM imagery".
Building a web app for uploading and viewing images is easy. Connecting to a payment processor so you can have some sort of "premium" account isn't too difficult. But having to deal with copyright claims and preventing/reacting to CSAM is an absolute oil tanker of worms if you reach the scale that Imgur has. If you choose to allow porn, you have to deal with claims of porn being posted without the permission of the subjects (ie, revenge porn). You can't automate those claims, or you'll end up with the current fuckery of YouTube where legit content creators get their content taken down or demonetized from fraudulent claims.
As far as Imgur itself goes, I knew this day would come. I'm surprised they still allow direct linking of images, as that results in their bandwidth being used for free.
What's interesting these days is how Discord allows direct linking. Waiting for that to go away some day.
My thought is the only way to fix this is charge users to upload their content, at a rate of ~$2.50/GB. Stick it in the Internet Archive and give them $2/GB (their cost per GB for perpetual storage [1]), and front it with Cloudflare with the other 50 cents (assuming requests for all content eventually trails off theta decay style). Someone has to not be the object store of last resort, but also the wallet. The Internet Archive already has Patron Services to handle DMCA and illegal content moderation of content/items, but would probably want some extra funds to not overburden staff with this task (which is entirely reasonable imho).
Or use u/stavros' imgz.org [2].
I would happily donate a few terabytes, and a fat internet connection.
I don't really understand the niche that Imgur is serving. Past a point, it makes far more sense to have it on your own server (local or cloud), your own CloudFlare account in front of it etc. This weird middleground where people aren't making money off of their content, but still want to share it, but don't actually get that much traffic is a weird one.
Why not just stick some ads on it if you're getting that much traffic or stick it on someone else's ad-supported platform? And if it's porn, why not go through a porn site and monetize legitimately? Surely all legitimate and consensual pornography wouldn't have a problem with that, and they would get more traffic on the ads/subs, and thus more money.
Cloudflare has a feature that can notify you of CSAM as far as I know, won't eliminate the problem but certainly helps.
Or, is there some kind one way mask that could be applied to the image such that the FBI could mask their CSAM dataset and release it and people could train detection models on the masked data, then just mask inputs during inference?
I feel like being extremely aggressive about detection and removal is scalable solution here.
I wonder if you could use an off the shelf API like Google Cloud Vision or AWS Rekognition to detect both underage images + nudity and use that as a rough detector of CSAM.
On mobile at least they've got a dark pattern to fix that. Direct links redirect to imgur.io with the same ad-filled infinite scrolling hell the linker tried to save you from. The best method around it I've found is to edit the url before going there to be imgur.lurkmore.com instead of imgur.com. Hopefully mentioning it doesn't get the site killed. It seems like nitter for imgur. I keep telling friends to stop using imgur but some of them are weirdly stubborn. I use a variety of free image hosts when I link them stuff, never imgur, and yet they refuse to put in even a fraction of the effort in most cases.
What are the odds that archiveteam.org can make it work? The continual desire to censor naked pics on the internet so replicates the behavior of various idiots censoring literature and art over the ages.
The Archive Team "only" organises the scrapping as far as I'm aware (volunteers run some servers, write code to scrap the service, etc) and then other volunteers run the VMs that do the scrapping. Then they upload the content to the Internet Archive and this imgur backup will end up on the IA's Wayback Machine.
According to the project tracker[0], 4TB or 3.55M items have been saved so far (15 hours), over 40M in waiting, but according to their IRC[1] more URLs will be added later.
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[0] https://tracker.archiveteam.org/imgur/
[1] https://webirc.hackint.org/#irc://irc.hackint.org/imgone
The solution is to pay for the storage you are using and store files on your own domain, one that you are willing to pay for a lifetime and/or even have a contract with relatives to maintain it if you want that content to survive you.
I have an imgur account, and I have uploaded some images as anonymous as well. I've always treated those as throwable content. I would never publish anything that I deem permanent in a third party server or gloud service.
Cool URIs don't change: https://www.w3.org/Provider/Style/URI
Some info on this Wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Help:Using_the_Wayback_Machine
Random example: https://i.imgur.com/t8UbDz1.jpeg can be redirected to https://web.archive.org/web/202304id_/https://i.imgur.com/t8...
Looking at the URL:
- The base domain for the Wayback Machine.
202304id_/
- 202304: the year and month the archive was done (2023, 04). It will redirect you to the copy closest to that date instead of showing the latest, which might be a good backup or not (eg: a 404 page). - id_: shows the file as it was saved, no wayback machine toolbar, can be hotlinked.
For pages, instead of "id_", either don't use it and you'll get a page with the toolbar or use "if_" as it corrects the path to css/js/etc without displaying the toolbar.
But more viable option is to pay for the hosting of the image, either by hosting the files directly or by using a storage solution. A 6$/TB s3 storage from Wasabi seems like a good start.
I was eternally grateful for that direct linking option, very useful on forums etc and even paid for an account. Then they removed the pay option years ago. Never understood it. I want to give you money! They had their reasons and it simplified some things but whatever.
Someone mentioned reddit buying them, yeah that should have been on the table from the start when reddit started hosting their own images, but I guess someone shot it down in the name of independence.
The kind that doesn't have to bear the consequences of the decision. The CEO is fine, he has a golden parachute no matter what happens. It's the employees who are out of work and unable to find work who end up suffering.
Some of this was "adult". Quite a bit of it was deleted. I stopped used Tumblr.
What I'm trying to say is: "adult" doesn't necessarily mean "porn", at least not according to Tumblr's definition (which is fine, it's their site and they get to set the rules).
And then you realize that millions of women and men around the world don't even know how a human body really work, potentially take wrong decisions, live an unfulfilled/disappointing sexual life all this because of lack of access to information and an history of myths and obscurantism.
It is a much bigger problem than kids looking at tits and genitals really [1]
[1] which they eventually manage to do anyway regardless of all adults efforts.
Also, I very much pity whoever is in charge of trying to turn a profit by setting fire to such a big chunk of the internet’s history.
You could do it via an account, in which case you could easily manage your images after the fact.
Or you could upload anonymously, in which case it would give you a magic delete link, which you could use later to delete the image. Of course if you failed to save that link at the time of upload then you lost all control of the image.
Both were possible. From my understanding only the images uploaded by anonymous account are taken down. Imgur still exist as an image/video social media.
What’s the issue with removing old unused and inactive content? Some people used imgur for sharing one off pictures or screenshots. The porn thing is not an issue either as imgur is more of a friendly community of genuine people. It will do just fine.
$$$
I imagine there's probably a LOT of images that were uploaded, viewed by 1 or 2 people, and then never viewed again, and never WILL be viewed again. But they still have to store them, and that storage costs money.
Speaking of old content. That's a massive issue for everyone. Most forums depend on external services for sharing images. This will kill tutorials, progress diaries and close to most images in forums. It's like purging all movies from music predating 1990. It will have a major impact.