Imgur's community was in revolt(404media.co)
404media.co
Imgur's community was in revolt
https://www.404media.co/imgurs-community-is-in-full-revolt-against-its-owner/
164 comments
I was an early Reddit user. Very early Reddit was a popular spot for programming discussion because it was mostly tech people using it.
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.
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.
> The early days were characterized by a feeling that anything goes as long as it wasn’t illegal or too extreme to defend.
Q: Wouldn't most of us want to defend the right to publish content that's "not illegal"?
Q: Wouldn't most of us want to defend the right to publish content that's "not illegal"?
On your own site or services? Of course.
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 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.
This is a prisoner’s dilemma situation. You don’t want to host that content, which is your right. And neither does anyone else. So every place that does try ends up swamped with the undesirables and either stops trying, goes bust, or turns into a poisonous swamp. And thus all the “yes but not here” people collectively end up enforcing a degree of censorship beyond what the law actually requires, or (in other cases) effectively erasing opinions that a fair part of society does hold (thus effectively forcing that part of society to turn into a poisonous swamp).
(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.)
(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.)
> started requiring appointments
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.
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.
That type mostly only wants the most shrinkwrapped and commercialized experiences.
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.
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.
I would submit that many essential things are shrink wrapped and commercialized (fantastic phrase, by the way).
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.
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.
It seems like you view free speech as "everyone should be provided a platform to speak their mind", more or less. With that view, what you speak of is arguably a problem, sure.
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.
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.
I’ve never understood the “everyone is entitled to have their voice heard by the masses” idea.
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.
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.
> effectively erasing opinions that a fair part of society does hold
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.
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.
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On the other hand, the presence of that kind of content in other subreddits functioned as a highly-effective anti-normie filter on the rest of the site. It kept the kind of people who shit up Twitter away.
I was there and I couldn't disagree more.
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.
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.
That's what he said: anti-normie.
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No. I think plenty of us recognize that the law has to have rigidly defined lines that don’t always line up neatly with morality. A great example is the “jailbait” subreddit that was talked about above. It makes sense that it’s technically legal, but I’d rather not be associated with the site that hosts it or the people who frequent it.
Reddit’s eventual livelihood would be based on selling ads, so legality is not the line they were aiming for.
A right to publish it? Yes. An entitlement to a platform that will handle the publishing for you? Only if the owners of that platform freely agree to do so.
That's a popular equivocation when this topic comes up, but that's not quite what's going on (or at least not quite what happened). I'm sure that Reddit's current owners _do_ support censorship, and plenty of it, but the early Reddit owners, admins and even moderators did strongly oppose it. They were pushed into it by heavily implied threats of legal action if they didn't.
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.
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.
Sadly, no, not most of us. Not even a lot of us.
I didn't have an account at the time, but I tried to like Reddit when it was one of the new link aggregators on the block. The minimalist functionality appealed to me and there were no subreddits at the time. Unfortunately I give up on it after a few weeks because most of the links/discussions were usually about evenly split between Emacs, Ruby and magic mushrooms. None of which I ever got around to trying.
Perhaps its too late but mushrooms are totally worth it. The other two will destroy your brain and leave you a raving lunatic.
Perhaps it's too late but Ruby is totally worth it. The other two will destroy your brain and leave you a raving lunatic.
Perhaps its too late but Emacs is totally worth it. The other two will destroy your brain and leave you a raving lunatic.
(Thank you, MisterTea.)
(Thank you, MisterTea.)
You can read a lot more about this on Wikipedia, most would be surprised at just how bad parts of it were -
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Controversial_Reddit_communiti...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Controversial_Reddit_communiti...
Some that come to mind to me from the old days (some less old than others):
- "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.
- "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.
> 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.
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.
I'm pretty sure Gamergate was a Russian shitstirring test case. Seriously. All I ever saw was two groups of people talking past each other, talking about completely different things, until things started to settle down... and some new account would roll a flaming tire into the thread and keep it going. Over and over, across the web.
It certainly fits the “it doesn’t matter what the truth is I’m acting out here and I have feelings about girls and video games” kinda vibe.
Alexis's mom had cancer. He wanted her so see him succeed, so they sold it in the first year to Conde Nast (the published of Wired magazine). Conde had a popular blog called Webmonkey, and there was a reddit feed in the sidebar.
Early reddit skewed heavily towards people who make shit online; fitting for a site made by people making shit online.
Early reddit skewed heavily towards people who make shit online; fitting for a site made by people making shit online.
Just to give you an idea of just how hands off Reddit moderation was at the start there used to be a /r/sexwithdogs subreddit. That was not fun seeing in /r/all one day.
Years ago, someone on r/datahoarder made a toy website that showed a “waterfall” of the newest images being posted to Imgur.
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.
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.
I was a mod of a few semipopular subs back then and this is accurate. Understating it even.
One of my favorite early-reddit memory is a guy sharing his S3 bucket over a holiday. People were uploading and downloading so many things... I don't even want to know what that guy's bill looked like.
Also the old days of image hosting (and maybe now) was kinda unprofitable ... Reddit didn't have to do it / spend money on it when others were happy to lose money on their behalf.
/r/programming circa 2008 was full of interesting links and discussions, i can testify that
> What the hell was reddit doing that they didn't immediately implement an image hosting feature
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.
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.
Tinypic maybe? I know we used it a lot on Gaia back in the day.
Might've been Minus
Yeah, that's it! I remember Min.us because they had a larger file size limit so you could actually post GIFs there where longer ones wouldn't upload to Imgur.
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Imgur was created because ImageShack was what everyone used and they'd gotten increasingly terrible. In the beginning, ImageShack was good. But images were expensive to host in the 2000's. So they moved very quickly into the exploit phase, and they exploited it hard.
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.
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.
Once you start hosting images, you open up a whole bucket of worms for moderation, separate from handling storage, bandwidth etc. I can see plenty of rationale for deferring that, knowing that you can always add it later with an easier to use UI than going to a third party site.
One of the other reddit admins will likely have a better answer, but at the time I worked for them (10-11), the answer was it was a complexity the reddit team didn't want to have to deal with.
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.
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.
My guess would be cost. I don’t think Reddit had much, if any, revenue at the time and images would likely require orders of magnitude more storage.
Yeah, when imgur came about reddit was 99% text on the site. Hosting images would have been a huge step up in cost considering the user count. Then of course people realized that if imgur can make money on ads thanks to reddit's traffic, reddit could potentially make even more and it has been all down hill from there.
Not to mention the liability of hosting users' media, which would have needed costly moderation to ensure nothing too illegal made its way in.
How much protection do platforms have against user media submissions? If you implement a dcma/illegal report button tbat instantly takes the media down, maybe even logically, is that sufficient?
It might, but then you’ve created a whole new set of problems: if anyone can take down anyone else’s content with one click, they’ll do it against anybody they dislike just for the hell of it (this was the case on Tumblr for a brief period: the Report button almost automatically banned the user, until they immediately realized this was unworkable). So if you don’t want everyone to ban everyone, you need a moderation team anyway to handle false reports, and you’re right back where you started.
Agreed. I was mostly asking about any legal issues.
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.
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.
fyi it's DMCA
Nowadays just hosting text can get you in trouble if it is too pornographic in nature.
It’s probably now a lot easier to detect porn and automatically reject it. Set the filter to lean towards rejection for edge cases. You will lose out on racy bikini pictures, but maybe that is an acceptable compromise.
Reddit was a link aggregator till the recent shitty redesign. So image posts were just a post with a URL. You needed RES if you wanted to open the image inline with the post and comments.
Isn't storage cheap? Telegram advertises as free unlimited storage.
Storage multiplies and becomes more expensive once you're replicating across regions, backing up into an eternally growing corpus, and so on.
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.
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.
Storage and bandwidth were way more expensive in 2009.
And yet imgur, with no revenue at all, managed to fill that gap.
They made hotlinking increasingly difficult, turned the site into a social network and sold ads against content. It is no longer a "image hosting site" the way it was back then, it was going bankrupt as well.
It still is the same old imgur for making posts. One button to upload, you get served your album link, right click image for direct link. Same as its been for 15 years. Just used it as such last week.
Imgur deleted a huge number of old reddit posts when retroactively banning nudity.
They broke the social contract of being a trusted host, that's the biggest change.
They broke the social contract of being a trusted host, that's the biggest change.
> What the hell was reddit doing that they didn't immediately implement an image hosting feature to keep users on the platform
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.
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.
I don't think any of the porn on Reddit is illegal.
Illegal posts were never allowed, but I imagine any site focused on sharing porn is going to become filled with copyrighted content.
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.
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.
Ohhhhhh think again
Doesn't beg the question. There's a whole evolving history there. Reddit didn't need to 'keep users on the platform' because they weren't leaving it. Most images on imgur shared on reddit (and a billion forums elsewhere) were direct links to the images, they weren't going to any sort of imgur landing page or whatever. Imgur just slowly developed that later and surprisingly developed its own also-ran community onsite.
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.
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.
The other responses are correct, but they're not including an important detail. Reddit was originally a replacement for all of the niche bulletin board sites that had cropped up around the internet. It was a way to create and manage a community without the cost and technical expertise required for phpBB. It also gave you access to existing users without them having to create a new account.
All of those previous Bulletin Board sites did not host images themselves either.
All of those previous Bulletin Board sites did not host images themselves either.
> What the hell was reddit doing that they didn't immediately implement an image hosting feature to keep users on the platform?
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.
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.
Also it was a different internet. We hadn't fully internalized that Reddit was becoming more a stupid meme/image/video dump primarily than a place for discussion of articles.
Image hosting used to be expensive, so forums avoided it and image hosts were scummy and filled with ads. Imgur was a first mover when cloud hosting and CDNs meant it could be relatively cheap for a small shop to do quality image hosting.
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.
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.
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I remember that time on Reddit.
It was interesting seeing all the image hosts in the old days. ImageShack, PhotoBucket, etc
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.
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.
What was funny is if their service is working good - i.e. someone linked an image from their site and it displays for the user - you don't even notice the work the host is doing.
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.
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.
What was really funny was people image leaching off of blogs and personal sites and the owners replacing the image based on the referral header to troll the forum users.
Yep, I did this. I had some art I’d made posted on my blog, and several somebodies liked it enough to make it the background of their MySpace page and use it as forum avatars/signatures. Pretty sure I saw a couple people using it in eBay listings too.
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.
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.
SomethingAwful was infamous for doing this and sending goatse. You could get banned on forums back in the day if you hotlinked images to SA, so... effective strategy, it seems.
The movement to mirror ImageShack back then was awesome
A famous article on that: https://ascii.textfiles.com/archives/1011
The fact that the image is still available is amazeballs in and of itself. It's left up to you to decided if you want to see which version of the grim reaper is available.
Jason Scott is still quite active in the tech community.
He’s one of the principals of archive.org, so that makes it less surprising.
He’s one of the principals of archive.org, so that makes it less surprising.
aka "hotlinking"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inline_linking
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inline_linking
My friend was being lazy years ago hot linking images on ebay, someone else's images of the same item no less, which they got wise to and replaced with hard core porn. He learned to at least steal the image and host it himself...
This story is five days old and the revolt appears to be over. I don't see a single middle finger on Imgur's front page.
It also shifted a bunch over the course of the protests. After the middle fingers, they moved to porn (mass posting and upvoting clear TOS violations), and then just blackout posts (posting and upvoting solid black images). Somewhere in there was also posts of deliberately large images and videos to overload the servers.
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).
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).
they should do what reddit users did and claim that by reposting shit they find online, that they are "creating content" and should be "compensated". laughable
Ok, we've moved the title into the past above. Thanks!
Can’t say I’ve ever seen it as a stand alone platform with a “community”. To me it was always a utility that goes with Reddit or whatever as image host.
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
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
It definitely exists.
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.
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.
This is heartwarming for some reason
It is, though the other side of the coin was always uploading an image for your niche hobby sub and being inundated by sneering imgur users who wanted to know why your keyboard looked "stupid." The site developed a reputation (among reddit users) for being full of thoroughly incurious people with very confident opinions on your niche interest.
It's actually an incredibly interesting but hostile community, though I'm sure they think otherwise. You either fit into that community, or you're going to be meet with an anger I have yet to see in many other places.
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.
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.
This is correct. Once the cost to operate Imgur exceeds revenue from ads, all that content is likely to disappear.
A good alternative is catbox.moe
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.
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.
> but uses a community funding model instead
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.
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 site recently lost a significant income stream when Patreon rugpulled their account.
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!
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!
I haven't heard of it before, but it seems to be down after trying to visit it just now.
Webdevs, why, why o why, do you have to ask me to subscribe to the newsletter before you even let me read the first 5% of the article? Do you really thing people read the first sentence and then go "yes, i definitely want to receive spam from this website! here's my email address!" or what?
Modal windows are just popups reborn.
It blows me away that none of the web browsers are trying to fix this. We eliminated popups back in the 90s/2000s, but now they're back again and no one cares.
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...
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...
But like all recurring viruses, they are more difficult to eliminate and continue to spread and popup when you least expect it.
Webdevs aren't the ones making that decision unless they happen to own the whole company, product managers and marketing demand those popups. Also, unfortunately, they do tend to work better than other options like passively showing signup forms below content or on a dedicated page linked off of something.
404 does it because they don’t like AI scraping. https://www.404media.co/why-404-media-needs-your-email-addre...
I call BS on that. I can get the entire text of the article by just viewing the source, no email address needed. Even if it was somehow needed, it's trivial for a scraper to circumvent that.
I believe the sentiment they published at that link but it doesn't seem like the right method technically, and it conflates "AI is stealing from us" and "we need financial support," the latter of which has been true for independent journalism much longer than LLMs have trained on the web.
Because their other option is to wait until they have no leverage at all and then try to convince you to volunteer for spam
Imgur, great service, lasted this long, amazing. But I always wondered how any of these random image hosts afforded bandwidth (reminds of the other various ones like TwitPic who was saved from being taken offline by Twitter). I mean, I have a gallery of images in there, privately stored, directly linked to here and there around the net, without paying for anything for years. I think at one point I can't even remember now I did pay them a small fee and then they removed that option to go it alone with ads and refused to 'take my money'. Which seemed crazy and still does.
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.
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.
I remember when imgur was created as a fast, no login-pushing, non-scummy alternative to ad-ridden clickjacking hosts that censored nsfw and controversial content.
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.
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.
They knew. Most of them migrated from another community. They migrated on the community reputation of MrGrim and his community cultivation.
r/IgnorantImgur proved that no, a good chunk of them did not know
(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)
(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)
It was always obvious that imgur being a service that just provided image hosting and asked nothing was unsustainable.
I'm impressed they ever managed to turn it into something.
I'm impressed they ever managed to turn it into something.
We knew. The situation is the opposite-- external users did not understand the interface and constantly posted things that were meant to be private onto the public feed.
That issue exists because of the community that spawned on top of what was built just to be a utility. Not the people using it for its original intended purpose.
You got downvoted, but anyone who's used Imgur within the past decade or so has to have seen indications of this. I remember around 2016 when I went to upload some photos for a Reddit post, I found the two different profiles (old-style and new-style) confusing. I could post something private on the old profile or the new one, but if I wanted to bring a post from the old one to the new one, it would get set to public, and also re-post it with a new timestamp... things like that.
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.
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.
Imgur was a simple image host for forums and Reddit long before there was anything resembling a feed or even “users”. The interface was an upload button that gave you a URL that nobody else would have unless you shared it or someone guessed.
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.
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.
stick a comment section on your website and some saddo somewhere will frequent it
Fair enough.. that, or hosting a LamerNews (HN Clone) instance... you get so many drive by spam posts, even just text, it isn't funny. Hard to imagine how bad it can get with images.
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.
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.
> MediaLab AI also owns Genius and World Star
World Star is run by a bunch of AI bots. That's hilarious. World Star!
World Star is run by a bunch of AI bots. That's hilarious. World Star!
Imgur having a "community" is still the strangest part of this story.
Discovering Imgur has its own community and culture is like finding out a group of people live in your closet. You can almost imagine opening the door to grab a coat only to find a dozen people who swear this is the place they bring various outerwear and talk about such things. When you tell them they're in a coat closet, they may get upset and assure you it's more than that, now.
I once discovered a community of people in a PhPBB board I administered - they didn't register on the board itself, but one of the plugins allowed a different type of user registration, and a whole sub-forum itself.
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.
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.
That is such a fascinating story. I would love to hear more about it.
I've always compared it to that tiny alien city in a train station locker from Men In Black II
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A9sd10CHAP8
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A9sd10CHAP8
[deleted]
Imgur has had its own community for over a decade. This really isn't a good comparison; who stores their coats in someone else's closet and expect for nobody else to interact with it?
The answer is most people using imgur to merely post on reddit do just that
I was quite early on Reddit and watched Imgur grow literally from the announcement thread. It got bigger and bigger and I often used it myself.
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.
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.
It was originally a lot of Redditors, and then once (a) Reddit implemented image hosting, and (b) the 'big change' at Reddit happened a few years ago, the community grew from there.
Every for-profit business needs to earn money somehow, and if you're just "that service that reddit users use for uploading and viewing images", it's really hard to justify your existence in the first place.
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.
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.
AS IS TRADITION.
Imgur itself was created due to the previous one, er, imgbucket maybe, being terrible. Which in turn...
Imgur itself was created due to the previous one, er, imgbucket maybe, being terrible. Which in turn...
How did it come to this? Wasn't imgur a free owner operated service for uploading images to reddit?
That was a long time ago. In 2014 they took a bite of the poisoned apple and received 40 mil. I can imagine that's where the rat race began, till they sold to this MediaLab company in 2021.
I can imagine anything of value, both culturally and technologically, is just being squeeze for any possible penny.
I can imagine anything of value, both culturally and technologically, is just being squeeze for any possible penny.
It was, then reddit did their own image hosting and Imgur had to shift to keeping their own community, and slowly introducing ads (the reason Imgur was started in the first place was because the found was sick of bad image sharing sites with ads) Eventually the Imgur founder sold it, and here we are today.
Nothing is free, servers must be paid. On top of that owners want to make money. We can enjoy free services while the investors money last, but in the end every long-term service must find a way to pay the bill.
(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.
(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.
It's not like Imgur didn't finance with ads. They did that for a long time. Dunno if it paid the bills.
The latest kerfuffle is because they were bought and the new owners fired all the moderators in favor of "AI moderation."
Honestly, Imgur’s been falling apart — layoffs, broken stuff, random policy changes, and everyone’s sick of being treated like the product. I just started using https://s3nd.pics
and it feels like what Imgur should’ve been: no ads, no data-selling, no weird algorithm. You control what you see, and the vibe is way more community-first. Worth checking out if you’re tired of the same old “platform milks users until it dies” cycle.
Lots of comments but nothing talking about all the lawsuits against medialab (mentioned in the fine article):
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.
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.
>years-long degradation of the website
This is a very true statement, but to me the degradation started many years ago.
This is a very true statement, but to me the degradation started many years ago.
How can something be years-long without having started years ago?
>In 2021, a media holding company called MediaLab AI acquired Imgur and Schaaf left
To me, the article is saying it started in 2021, but I think it started well before 2021.
To me, the article is saying it started in 2021, but I think it started well before 2021.
The degradation started when they began looking at the Accept HTTP header to see if you were clicking a direct link to an image so they could show you a page full of ads instead of just the image. And that happened well before that bloke sold the site.
I remember a long time ago you’d click on a direct link and it would redirect you to the image’s page. Then, it would superimpose a cat paw beckoning the user to swipe and see other images. I recall people really hating that.
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.
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.
Honestly quite surprised Imgur has a thriving on-site community. I thought it was just a solution to Reddit's original inability to upload photos directly.
I has alwas been revolting.
This will work as well as the Reddit revolts.
The Reddit revolt worked for me. It broke me of the habit of hanging out there.
It's crazy how night and day the quality tank was after they essentially killed their API. The good contributors were all pushed away or became less active.
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.
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.
It really was. Apollo was the reddit UI for me. The old reddit web page looks awful on a phone. The new page is a mess of algorithmic disaster on any device. I cannot stand their 1st-party app. When they killed the API, I no longer enjoyed using reddit on my phone, which is where I accessed it 95% of the time. They made it pretty easy for me to stop using the site at all.
OTOH, I had previously posted often enough to get in on the IPO, and that made up for a lot of the annoyances.
OTOH, I had previously posted often enough to get in on the IPO, and that made up for a lot of the annoyances.
Couldn't agree more. Pushing people away from 3rd party apps was a business decision I understand as much as I disliked it (Boost gang gang) but the unusable nightmare of an app they pushed me toward was such an insult that I ended up just off the platform entirely. Any social media site that loses the bathroom loses the war, and Reddit was no longer my #1 for #2s.
You, sir, are a poet.
I'm surprised they still support the old web UI which is the only way to make reddit usable these days.
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)
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)
I've pretty much ignored the various Reddit revolts. What drove me away from Reddit and Imgur was the constant spam of US politics. The recent Imgur revolt actually made the site better for me (after the middle finger spam ended) - political posts went from ~50% to less than 10%.
the Reddit revolt drove me to Lemmy. it's methadone to Reddit's heroin, but it doesn't feel like Dead Internet over there.
Are there any good YouTube videos about the Imgur drama? None of the big sloptubers seen to be following it.
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.