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 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.
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.
>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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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)
This strikes me as being at least as big a deal as the NSFW bit.
For 10+ years, imgur has been many people's go-to way of hosting an image they want to post to a forum or whatever. Many of those people will have paid little attention to whether or not they were logged into imgur when they posted each image. In short, it sounds like a lot of image links are about to break.
Isn't this the cardinal sin of an image host? They are partially killing links in a way that wasn't previously communicated. And to make it worse, it directly targets what was previously the primary strength of the site, easy and accountless uploads with only a few clicks. Why would anyone use them as an image host again?
I wonder if they are hemorrhaging money. This decision gives the impression that they simply don't want to be in the business they're currently in. Such drastic steps usually originate with desperation.
Effectively monetizing the hosting of images embedded elsewhere seems like a fool's errand—at best, it's possible to subsidize that usage with other revenue streams. The vast majority of people wanting to post images on forums have never financed their posting and the communities themselves haven't managed to either. Photobucket and Tinypic left a lot of litter on forums that survived their era, and Imgur will ultimately do the same.
This is going to be incredibly damaging to forums, in the same way that Photobucket's deletions were. Old forum posts are becoming a ghost town of broken image links.
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.
This is going to end up being a new Photobucket situation... hopefully Archive Team can try and figure out what images are at risk, especially if they're linked from forum threads and the like, and make sure they're in the Wayback Machine.
This is hardly the first image host that dies. Is there any way to sustainabley fund long term sleek non-ad-infested image hosting? There are some that are donation-funded (e.g. https://abload.de/spenden_en.php) but I don't know how sustainable that is once the service becomes popular enough that commercial usrs might end up using it as free image storage.
Another option is of course to have many smaller hosts, down to personal sites at the extreme. But that only changes the loss from shutdowns from big events to a steady stream of entropy. We really need a much more expanded Internet Archvie that can serve content at reasonable speeds along with browser and forum plugins to automatically redirect old linnks there.
StackOverflow is not just embedding random imgur-hosted images for that though but have a special arrangement with images hosted at i.stack.imgur.com - I doubt this change applies to them.
>"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.
I don't understand why Imgur did the following on https://imgurinc.com/rules , which I'd assume would be vetted by a lawyer...
Caption on example photo of mocking an obese person sitting on a too-small metal folding chair, consequently with a little butt crack visible (maybe at an MtG event):
> This buttcrack isn't intended to stimulate erotic feelings, so it's ok.
Two sections later, this photo itself seems to hit about half of the section:
> No hate speech, abuse or harassment.
Including:
> attacks on people based on their [...] age, disability or medical condition*
>
harassment in the forms of [...] or inciting the community into support or disdain for a person, organization or community*
> content that attacks, bullies, or harasses non-public people
> any image taken of or from someone without their knowledge or consent for the purpose of harassment, [...]
> Posts that might be taken down may include: [...] negative stereotypes, [...] malicious personal attacks on non-public individuals, [...] “fat people hate,” [...] photos taken of a non-public figure without their knowledge to make fun of them
Then this section claims to tend to err on the side of taking down content:
> It's important to keep in mind that not everything that's mean or insulting is hate speech. That said, the line between unintentional and serious attacks is sometimes difficult to identify, so we're likely to err on the side of taking abusive content down.
Yet they're including a harassing image in the same rules page, captioned as "ok".
This seems sloppy to me. And, when it's in the context of a historically risky move of a major NSFW hoster going anti-NSFW, I wonder whether that part has been worked through meticulously.
Kudos to Imgur for surviving this long. I remember when they were effectively Reddit's image CDN, with the norm seeming to be Imgur-served images embedded with `img` elements in Reddit pages. I'd wondered how that worked, financially, and whether there were deals with Reddit, or it was just unofficially symbiotic. Imgur has been an important part of the Web for a long time, and hopefully they've figured out a good/necessary direction for 2023, and will execute well on it.
"harassment in the forms of [...] or inciting the community into support or disdain for a person, organization or community*"
This would cover pretty much every quote tweet ever. Also, how is incitement to SUPPORT a person harassment? Please stop praising me?
They also seem to take a strong ideological position in hate speech where they hint that its fine to stereotype/discriminate majorities but not minorities.
> Also, how is incitement to SUPPORT a person harassment?
The obvious example would be a propaganda image to garner support for Adolf Hitler, in a way that doesn't fall under harassment of other groups. It's (probably intentionally) worded such that it can apply to any controversial figure that Imgur's administration dislikes, though.
The reference being someones ass crack having a picture taken without their consent and posted for millions to see, which is why the OP of that time got banned temporarily i think for that. Its pretty hypocritcal of imgur to use that image , and somewhat ironic to use it in this TOS update
This is a fantastic time to be alive and prepared to start the third generation of internet companies. You've got Google in a panic against OpenAI, Meta is imploding, Twitter is imploding, Reddit can't help but drive users away, and now least of all Imgur also deciding to follow them off the cliff; I genuinely feel blessed to watch these companies tear themselves apart.
Like in all things; we, the data hoarders, the open source community, the hackers, the archivists, were here before them; and we'll be here after them. Like watching pigs roll in the mud.
Also, lots of top tier talent is being laid off, and many others are well-capitalized and eager to flee to fully remote companies, or to start their own companies.
Looking back a decade from now, we'll notice that many of the unicorns will have been founded in 2023.
The pendulum has clearly started to swing back to sexual repression. Society has started to see sexual freedom and expression as grotesque. Now the only question is how far it'll swing.
I think it’s more likely that hosting sexual content involves having to deal with loads of abusive material which is hard to detect and process, and which requires great haste in dealing with.
It’s hard to have an army of dirt cheap outsourced moderators sort out regular porn from revenge porn.
If you take too long dealing with regular spam, not much happens. If you take too long dealing with this kind of content, you get cut off from payment providers and advertising.
living in a midsize French city, this has not at all been my experience. Could be due to sampling bias (I'm basing this off of people I know, who are probably not representative of the population as a whole), but most people here seem pretty open sexually.
You can assume that any comment on internet culture is from an American point of view. As a European, I only find a percent of a percent that resonates with my offline world - although the dominance of American internet companies still enforces their culture online.
I would say it's more male sexuality (primarily hetero) and female sexuality that is seen as threatening and uncontrolled that is categorized as grotesque. Things like OnlyFans has never been more normal.
There's plenty of sexual progression online. Imgur's decision has little to do with society as a whole. It's one company wanting to get off the porn train so they look better to potential buyers.
We really ought to update Napoleon’s quote about malice and stupidity to something like “never attribute to moral preening that which can be explained by financial incentives”
But the people I know are more sexually free than ever. This seems more about repression and Puritanism in government and investors that doesn’t match the populace.
I think we live in an increasingly neo-victorian age. It's not just sex. It has become toxic to express a wide range of opinions. For example, the systematic deplatforming of conservatives. (I am a liberal, and my need to state that to be taken seriously is further evidence of all this.)
Agreed. I can also agree to some degree to couple other comments that people are more sexually open than ever, but the "accepted" modes and diversity of thoughts and opinions are reducing quite uncomfortably fast.
People aren't systematically deplatforming conservatives. People are systematically deplatforming hate. That that happens to affect one political party more than others is a condemnation of that party, not of the practice of deplatforming hate.
Post all the conservative political opinions you want. As long as you stay away from posting hate, personal attacks, and similar, you're not going to lose your Twitter account
Personally, I think it’s fine for people whose only goal is to be assholes to others or to spread disinformation to be deplatformed by private services. If that happens to primarily center around conservatives, then that sounds like conservatives should do some soul searching.
At some point imgur built a front page. Initially it mirrored reddits front page. And then it diverged, and very strangely for an image hosting site, most of the content on the front page was text. Often about current events, engaging in a superficial way (so, falling into the traps that HN is set up to avoid) but sometimes just tweet screenshots.
This i guess is another move away from image content for imgur. Dunno.
What's the problem with NSFW? Why discriminate and demonize this kind of content?
> We don't want to create a bad experience for someone that might stumble across explicit images, nor is it in our company ethos to support explicit content, so some lascivious or sexualized posts are not allowed.
Hey Imgur! By banning NSFT you've create a bad experience for me and now I'm stumbled. Happy?
Readit News
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
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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.
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Dead Comment
https://wiki.archiveteam.org/index.php/Imgur
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.
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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
Dead Comment
> 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.
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