Imgur's community was in revolt
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Which begs the question: What the hell was reddit doing that they didn't immediately implement an image hosting feature to keep users on the platform? Imgur rose to fame because it was the darling image host of reddit users, and it wasn't long before imgur needed to pay hosting costs and started sucking users away from reddit and into their own "imgurian" sharing hub.
I guess the internet back then was still in the "Open effort to make the internet awesome for everyone" phase, and hadn't yet gotten to the adversarial "Capture users and never let them leave" phase.
The problems are like you stated. We even see this happen with invalid dcma complaints in moderation-heavy environments. There are certainly safety rails such as rate limited reports per user, etc., but then you need some moderation anyway.
But if the legal requirement is, "take down media if the fbi comes knocking", maybe it's just easier to deal with it that way if there is no budget for moderation.
But the biggest impediment by far were internet transport costs. I mean, they're still onerous for a lot of media-heavy sites, but it was much worse at the time. Offloading that to third parties made an incredible amount of sense.
It's actually kind of bizarre that there is an Imgur "community". I know the operation ran at a massive money-losing proposition for quite some time.
They broke the social contract of being a trusted host, that's the biggest change.
Maybe partly because it wasn't Imgur that added image hosting to reddit it was more reddit always had images they were just on ImageShack, PhotoBucket and there was another reddit darling one who's name escapes me before imgur which I think added ads or started deleting images that caused Imgur to be created.
So Imgur was more just the most successful in a long line of image hosts and the only one to successfully transplant reddit users to their own thing.
ImageShack removed images that became too popular, which created maximal outrage with the most people, just as content was going viral. Images hosted on ImageShack would randomly get corrupted, and it'd be difficult to reach support to fix this. ImageShack was annoying. You'd try to go directly to the .jpg URL and it'd load the HTML website with lots of ads. In order to upload to ImageShack, you'd have to register an account and potentially pay money.
Imgur was a breath of fresh air. They didn't do any of those things. It was just the simple reliable free image upload service people wanted. So it took over ImageShack's role almost overnight. Imgur eventually rolled in their own exploitation, but they did it a lot more moderately than ImageShack.
Reddit was a hub for illegal porn so presumably, they didn't want to face a crackdown for hosting that kind of content. It still is, but nsfw posts are banned from /r/all now.
They also had a lot of severely creepy subreddits involving underage children or adult photos talents and shared with consent.
It was really bad. I left the site for years because that type of content was everywhere.
That quickly flipped, as /r/NSFW became the most popular subreddit. You could avoid it by browsing as a guest or by curating your feed, but porn was everywhere.
Early Reddit also had a strong attitude about minimal moderation. The early days were characterized by a feeling that anything goes as long as it wasn’t illegal or too extreme to defend. Combined with the popularity of porn on the website it created strange situations where a lot of subreddits were focused on things like legal-enough photos of underage children. There were also a lot of weird alt-right and white supremacist forums. There was an unofficial (if I recall correctly) “Subreddit of the Day” that attracted controversy because it actually highlighted one of the “jailbait” subreddits and even a white supremacist subreddit.
So if you were there at the time, it was obvious why Reddit wasn’t going to host their own images: It would have been a legal nightmare with all of the porn (copyrighted material), the creepy underage stuff, and white supremacist memes
Reddit did a decent job of containing this stuff out of view of the average user and later removing it from the site. It took many years.
If you peeked at /r/all or browsed new during the early days it would have been clear why image hosting would have been out of the question at the time.
Q: Wouldn't most of us want to defend the right to publish content that's "not illegal"?
Did you know that movie ratings aren't based on any law? There's no law on any book, anywhere, that prevents theaters from allowing children under 18 to view R-rated movies. Instead, the MPAA and the theaters enforce a fairly rigid soft-censorship regime to avoid what would definitely be a legally mandated, government-run censorship regime.
So, while you are _strictly_ correct and Reddit is legally "allowed" to choose its current heavy handed censored approach, they were never really legally "allowed" to avoid it, either.
I don’t want to host that content, though. That’s also my right.
As I discovered on the early days on Reddit, I don’t even want to be on a site where content is a free-for-all because you could go from scrolling through programming topics to encountering sexualized imagery of minors by scrolling if you weren’t careful.
This is the problem with every hardcore free speech platform: They attract the people who only come to post that content, while everyone else who doesn’t want to see it starts leaving. Then after some time, the majority of your content is catering to those niches.
I see more parallels between the people who thrived in the early Reddit cesspool era and the same people who are spreading culture wars, misinfo, and other garbage on Twitter.
The early days of Reddit were a haven for culture war and misinfo people.
(Neutral example: at some point in the past the clinics around me started requiring appointments to come in for doctor-prescribed tests. Recently, the closest one did that too, saying that they were the only one remaining and ended up being overloaded with all the people who wouldn’t or couldn’t make an appointment. And thus we’re all worse off now.)
My view of free speech is simply: the government shouldn't arrest you for publishing most things (with only certain mostly-well-defined exceptions). If there are views which are not illegal but which no platform will let you publish, I really don't see the problem. If enough people share those views they can get together and make their own platform. It's not even hard to make a platform anymore, anyone can buy a domain and set up nginx on a raspberry pi.
Freedom from government persecution on the basis of speech is extremely important to me (again, with exceptions). Freedom to publish unsavoury-but-legal content on other people's platforms is completely unimportant to me.
It’s never been true before, let alone realistic. It’s only with the past several decades of networked computing that humans have been able to so vastly amplify the reach of an individual or group opinion.
Just because it’s easier than ever to publish speech doesn’t make having one’s speech published any kind of right.
There is no widespread opinion that does not have countless corresponding platforms to share it.
I guarantee you cannot find an opinion that cannot be shared on at least one of the major social media platforms right now.
This extinction of free speech does not happen.
I fear we're headed this way generally. There's a kind of person who likes to plan everything ahead of time. As we hit capacity limits (e.g. overtourism), those planners are going to book all the available capacity. We're going to either have to adapt to be like them, or be locked out of experiences.
I'm very not happy about it.
Do something unique, something new, something odd. You won't have any competition from ahead bookers and you can have experiences they'll never imagine.
It’s not just the planners either. It’s the people who are unreasonable and it’s the people who lack any external center of concern. By way of example: it used to be easy to get in touch with my physician. As the practice she works for has grown, they’ve made it all but impossible for physicians and patients to have a conversation privately and without an intermediary, except when you’re in the exam room or a physician places an outgoing call.
As their practice grew, so too did the number of people who believed they should or could (defensibly) go directly to their doctor about every little thing. People made unreasonable demands. So the practice reacted to protect the physicians at the cost of their accessibility to patients, other than booking a visit.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Controversial_Reddit_communiti...
- "Street fashion" subs, where photos were NOTICEABLY of underage girls taken on the street candidly, usually from a long distance (telephoto lens), and everyone talked about "fashion" in ways you figured out pretty fast were not about fashion. There were a number operating at the same time as a sort of redundancy as they would vanish from time to time.
- CSAM investigation type subs, where users who REALLY knew the lingo and details of CSAM talked about how they were investigating CSAM elsewhere on the internet ... like they were amateur police, but it was kinda indistinguishable from them being connoisseurs. They also would tell each other very suspicious stories about their investigations, like something a jr. high student would make up because they don't know how the world works. It was like they thought they were setting up some sort of plausible deniability or something...
- Gamergate and that whole bizzaro world spanned subs but it was absolutely insane how emotionally charged the devotes were about something as inconsequential as ... video game reviews.
There's a good reason the phrase "it's about ethics in games journalism" was used to mock gamergaters. It was so transparently not about that in the slightest. I'm not one of those "gamergate caused trumpism" domino meme people but they are related phenomena. GG was a revanchist political movement based on using the novel organization structures of social media to harass women and minorities out of gaming culture.
Early reddit skewed heavily towards people who make shit online; fitting for a site made by people making shit online.
(Thank you, MisterTea.)
Initial comments of “oh neat!” quickly turned into “oh no!” and the toy site didn’t last long as it was. I think Imgur had some kind of detection (possibly automatic+manual) of illegal material going on, but it (the manual side of it?) would occur some time after posting.
Running an image host takes a lot of effort. You have to deal with removals, content policing, and the other nasties, as well as just having to deal with the sheer volume of data, which was a much larger concern in the 2010 era internet than it is now.
Reddit at the time just wanted to focus on being a link and text post site, much like HN is.
Meanwhile, reddit was a forgotten subsidiary of Condé Nast working out of a corner in Wired's SF office. Jedberg will chime in, but when imgur was founded, reddit's handful of engineers were busy keeping the site from falling over. They didn't have time to build out image hosting.
All of those previous Bulletin Board sites did not host images themselves either.
Similarly over on twitter without any image hosting capabilities let third party sites like twitpic host images for years before evetually developing their own service. Twitpic eventually caved under the load of hosting so much stuff without income and it was good that Twitter was successful enough to take it all on directly.
Image hosting is insanely expensive and they couldn’t afford to do it or were smart enough not to.
Every image host that added paid accounts or ads all over the place had a horrible reputation at the time (see photobucket). They likely wanted to avoid ruining their reputation before going public.
Heck even Imgur caught heat when they needed to start paying the bills.
They'd either die because they couldn't afford the server bills or die because they went commercial. Some left gaping holes in forums etc when they changed.
He’s one of the principals of archive.org, so that makes it less surprising.
What made it bad is that they were using the full high resolution originals, not the thumbnails, which ate bandwidth like crazy.
So I did the referrer-based leech protection and started serving those users a tiny fake error dialog image, which was much more tame than what some people used. It’s funny how quickly those people stopped embedding, even without the image being anything shocking or objectionable.
But when they pulled an image and you're just shown a placeholder "PhotoBucket - image not available", you actually see their name and logo and have repeated negative associations with them. I know when I hear any of those names I just get pissed thinking about all the old forum posts and rotting internet pages I've stumbled across with the images missing.
I think at this point it has all but died down, but there still seems to be a bit of extra-racy content (which could also just be due to the new AI moderation being worse), and more large files (generally videos with "intergalactic quality" in the title).
And when they opted to actively break large parts of Reddit by deleting nsfw images I kinda new the party is over even in its very tangential utility role
I use imgur to share stuff with friends, sometimes I forget to mark it private and users will vote and comment. I didn't notice until I got a dog and started posting pictures the community cared about.
They community is also extremely naive about everything. I tried to follow their little revolt, and they are absolutely oblivious to the fact that running Imgur is probably crazy expensive and that they, as a community, is pretty much impossible to monetize. Almost regardless of how MediaLab was going to attempt to turn a profit, the community would act out in anger. I'm not suggesting that MediaLab handled everything correct, but I also believe that they are running out of options, you can't monetize Imgur without destroying the community.
It fills the niche imgur originally did (i.e. no bullshit image host) but uses a community funding model instead. I'm pitching in $20 every month to keep it from turning into imgur. If you were thinking of putting something on imgur, please just put it on catbox instead and toss a couple bucks their way once in a while so we can continue to have nice things.
Sadly, that model is often not sustainable for various reasons. The site recently lost a significant income stream when Patreon rugpulled their account.
It was originally started to fill a pretty specific niche for a specific type of community, but has since grown way past that, to the point that it's quite a lot slower than it used to be due to the increased bandwidth usage. If you want it to survive, I would honestly advise against advertising it.
The community rallied in response to that and support poured in. Their funding needs are currently met by the community. What matters is that people actually give enough of a shit about it to pitch in. We can have nice things!
Anyway, install the Kill Sticky bookmarklet, it gets rid of all the incompetent webdev crap like popups and those stupid sticky headers/footers: https://www.smokingonabike.com/2024/01/20/take-back-your-web...
It's still weird to me that a whole community exists on Imgur that uses it directly (instead of say using reddit threads to comment on the images like its initial use) and somehow sustains the site. I suppose it was always on a slow degradation path for like the last decade.
Then it became all of that on steroids except with a comment section and a weird community that didn’t realize they were living in the plumbing of other platforms like Reddit.
(looks like that sub is private now in protest of API changes but I'm sure you can find some old content hosted other places)
Once Imgur stopped being a dedicated image hosting service, you had to go out of your way to lock down your posts if you wanted to use it as a dedicated image hosting service. Which I can see being confusing for both sides of the party.
It was plumbing. And then a community formed inside it and wondered why things kept randomly showing up from above.
It’s actually pretty amusing and you sort of proved my point.
On the flip side, it's a real shame so many sites/pages removed comment sections... I had hope for a while that a browser extension for some sort of social media could fill the gap. There was a "free speech" one that had the feature, but the community itself was pretty bad, and there was no comments/shares on the rather technical sites I tend to visit.
Need some sort of cohesion to fill the gap in some way. I saw a bluesky implementation for comments, that used the social media itself in a shared post's replies as comments, which was interesting.
I'm impressed they ever managed to turn it into something.
World Star is run by a bunch of AI bots. That's hilarious. World Star!
And then of course, you add in VC-investments, and suddenly you have external parties forcing you to start extracting as much value from users as you possibly can.
Basically, the same story as with every other enshittificated company that happened so far.
We had no idea, until one day we stumbled into it by accident. It was very much like discovering a family was living in your closet.
But I remember one day being at a friend's house and she was asking me about something I'd sent her, "oh did you see that in Imgur she asked?"
"What do you mean did I see it on Imgur? I saw it in Reddit, it's just hoisted on Imgur."
And she was like, "What's Reddit? I love Imgur, I scroll on there every night."
I couldn't believe it, I went and checked and there was indeed a whole community, leaving contents and voting on things and doing all the rest, and many of them never heard of Reddit
You're right, it does feel strange, there's somehow something very uncanny about it.
Imgur itself was created due to the previous one, er, imgbucket maybe, being terrible. Which in turn...
I can imagine anything of value, both culturally and technologically, is just being squeeze for any possible penny.
(And some owners are more greedy than others)
It's the same with AI chatbots/API costs, heavily subsidized now and much more expensive in the future.
https://www.forbes.com.au/news/innovation/medialab-bought-up...
The company has bought up a bunch of web properties and proceeded to reneg on paying out. Absolutely scum behaviour right there.
This is a very true statement, but to me the degradation started many years ago.
Now the site can’t help but show you some tacked-on TikTok style video or animated gif underneath the image you actually wanted to view.
To me, the article is saying it started in 2021, but I think it started well before 2021.
And with the official app constantly trying to push posts from random subreddits into people's feeds, you constantly get comments from people who have no idea of the concept of a subreddit, and leave stupid comments cause they don't know the context the post was made in.
OTOH, I had previously posted often enough to get in on the IPO, and that made up for a lot of the annoyances.
Once they pull the plug on that I'll be finally done (though I'm already so inactive it won't make a difference really)