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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
HN thread on the above article: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34480479
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!"
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/reddit/comments/12qwagm/an_update_r...
For now old.reddit.com works to get rid of all this guff but when that goes, so do I.
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!
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)
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
No shitty middlemen that need $$$ for server lettuce?
Nah; not retarded enough.
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)
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.
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.
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.
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.
"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.
Anyway, a good trigger to make a donation I guess.
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.
I suppose it has lasted longer than anyone expected.
[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/reddit.com/comments/7zlyd/my_gift_t...
>"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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
Looking back a decade from now, we'll notice that many of the unicorns will have been founded in 2023.
With the same business model, you'll get the same problem.
What's new on this front? >$2/mo subscriptions and advertising? Meh.
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.
The HN crowd is mostly safe from such attacks so this is a real blindspot.
But doesn't all NSFW content just expand the range of what you have to detect and process?
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.
When has it been not grotesque? It's just that “American” “norms” are actually starting to “progress” to the mean.
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
Broadly, the biggest pushes have been to limit exposure of highly-sexualized content to those 18+.
This i guess is another move away from image content for imgur. Dunno.
Looks like the shadow theatre has a captive audience
> 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?
The usual answer is that advertisers don't want their ads appearing next to it.
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.
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.
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
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.
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 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.
“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.”
I do not agree with throwaway accounts. They should go away entirely.
You are being just as "toxic" in your motives.
That's the cause for these changes.
no thanks
Let's see if that violates these new "guidelines."
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 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.
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.
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.
Of course, some of them use NSFW tagging for spoilers …
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.)
Now this, interesting to see a site from day 1 coming up and (probably) going down.
Tech companies deciding to not allow any vulgar content is seriously a bizarre "value" to uphold in the age 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.
Does anyone know what may be happening?
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.
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.
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.
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.
And porn is the most interesting aspect as it's morality is much more debatable than hate speech, doxing people, etc.
I actually feel like it makes the title of the submission inaccurate and my point still stands there.
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?
Does this also apply to posts which are not posted as "public", but can be shared as a link?
> 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...
edit: They sold to Medialab in 2021. That's what's changed.
Imgur stopped existing in 2021 and it became part of Medialab. (Medialab also own kik and whisper)
Because porn sites profit off CSAM, sex trafficking and revenge porn, why would Coca Cola or Disney want to be associated with that?
