Imgur Updates TOS, Banning NSFW Content(imgurinc.com) |
Imgur Updates TOS, Banning NSFW Content(imgurinc.com) |
In my experience, this kind of change happens much more often for money reasons than for moral reasons.
I think Tumblr's TOS change happened because their credit card processor became uncomfortable at them being essentially "in the porn business" - and indeed, seeing how much smaller Tumblr's business was post-change, the card processor was technically right.
https://www.salon.com/2019/08/16/did-banning-porn-make-tumbl...
> Porn was banned from Tumblr soon after the social network was removed from Apple’s App Store. Child pornography was found on the site, one consequence of the site’s relaxed content moderation approach. Instead of banning specific sites with child pornography, all not-safe-for-work content was banned.
People are framing this as an attack against sex but in reality our automated moderation tools can't know if consent sas given by the models and human moderation is too costly.
The rise of AI porn is giving more power than ever to people who wish to hurt women.
There are still plenty of places to share NSFW content but they're moving towards models of consent verification like PornHub.
I bet an enormous amount, maybe 99%, of imgur content is stuff that users only meant to share once and wouldn't care if it were deleted. But the other 1% is of tremendous value -- even if an image gets no hits in years, that's no guarantee it's really useless (e.g. an instruction manual for an obscure piece of hardware or software). And it's hard to know which is which.
And porn is the most interesting aspect as it's morality is much more debatable than hate speech, doxing people, etc.
I actually feel like it makes the title of the submission inaccurate and my point still stands there.
It's disgusting.
I guess at least the large sites, anyways.
What is the new imgur that will take imgur's place? Anyone know if there's something new?
Does this also apply to posts which are not posted as "public", but can be shared as a link?
> You can share graphic content and consensually produced adult nudity and sexual behavior content within your Tweets, provided that you mark this media as sensitive.
But since we're on the topic, one social media service that you didn't mention is TikTok. I haven't seen anyone write about this and find it a bit fascinating. Although TikTok claim that sexual content isn't allowed, a lot of adult sex workers continuously skirt or outright ignore the rules. Some sex worker's strategy seems to be to continuously create multiple new accounts, as new accounts have a time period and size limit where growth and reach is really easy in order to get creators initially hooked. Two trends I've encountered are women flashing their vaginal lips through a see-through dress with a backlight and women flashing their breasts on reflective background items while seeming to engage in some mundane activity. But even the sex workers that don't engage in blatant TOS violations clearly create content to lead you towards their OnlyFans page. A breakdown of the evolution of the sex worker advertisement meta on TikTok is a YouTube video waiting to be made, especially as TikTok dies off and the strategies no longer remain viable as a vehicle for growth. A modern-day version of Aella's classic "Maximizing Your Slut Impact: An Overly Analytical Guide to Camgirling" [1].
[0] https://help.twitter.com/en/rules-and-policies/media-policy
[1] https://knowingless.com/2018/11/19/maximizing-your-slut-impa...
edit: They sold to Medialab in 2021. That's what's changed.
Imgur stopped existing in 2021 and it became part of Medialab. (Medialab also own kik and whisper)
Because porn sites profit off CSAM, sex trafficking and revenge porn, why would Coca Cola or Disney want to be associated with that?
How do fake nudes hurt women?
edit: i'm guessing you mean using someone's likeness without their consent to create porn, something that was easily doable prior to AI.
AI "gives those people more power" as you put it, but it also gives defenders more power. AI safetyism (aka pantywaistism) is a joke.
Of course, you can make a model of someone with ~30 images and have them wearing and doing whatever you want.
On the flip side, that means if your real nudes are leaked you have plausible deniability. What might have been a career ending incident can now be dismissed as someone generating those images instead.
indeed, that's the way i have seen it as well. political blackmail can become a thing of the past. makes no sense to ban or restrict.
I know that technology is often a double edged sword. I can be in favour of auto-transport, for example, while still supporting research into seat belts and crumple zones.
> AI safetyism (aka pantywaistism) is a joke.
I don't know what these are, sorry. I feel like I'm making a valid point based on my observations and you're attempting to discredit that by associating my view with more extreme groups.
eshoo's argument is that there are photos of Asian females being beaten generated by Stable Diffusion posted to 4chan and thus the NSA needs to step in and do something to stop Stable Diffusion.
These arguments are ridiculous. These are fake images generated with an algorithm. Real images are more concerning because it means real people were harmed in the real world.
Fake images means someone's ego was hurt and they have a legal battle to attend to if they want the fake images of themselves removed from the internet. Those same fake images could be generated with Photoshop. AI just makes it easier. Banning AI doesn't solve the problem. The time and resources spent debating and attempting to ban AI should be diverted to real issues. The fear surrounding AI is misplaced and makes people who embrace the fear look weak and foolish. The people sowing the fear have the most to gain from public compliance.
Additionally, you implied that I am exhibiting some sort of Hacker News group think, I am not. But perhaps this site draws a certain type of personality. I am against government regulation and intervention, and I am VERY against the nanny-statism influence of the UK and others that is being pushed on the US.
These arguments aren't mine. You're attempting to colour my words by associating them with someone else's who they apparently "sound like."
> Real images are more concerning because it means real people were harmed in the real world.
Yes, they are. I hope real images of abuse are treated with the gravity they deserve.
> Those same fake images could be generated with Photoshop. AI just makes it easier.
Yes, many of the things we achieve with me technology could previously have been achieved with more effort using earlier technologies. Airplanes are still world changing, though, even thick we already had cars.
> Banning AI doesn't solve the problem.
This is a strawman.
> Additionally, you implied that I am exhibiting some sort of Hacker News group think, I am not.
I simply meant that HN is a predominantly male space and that men are less likely to be victims of faked pornography, so the discussion here will inevitably take a more detached and theoretical point of view on these matters than if potential victims were more included in the conversion.
I didn't say they are. You stated you didn't know what I was talking about, I explained. No one is attempting to color your words as anything. You made a statement regarding the harm AI is doing to women and I'm saying that it echos the sentiment of a congresswoman who I deeply disagree with.
> This is a strawman.
no, it isn't a strawman when that is literally the issue on the table. Congresswoman Eshoo as I stated wants to use state power to ban Stable Diffusion, and she's using the same argument you're using. The entire world is in a moral panic and it makes me embarrassed to share the same oxygen as these people.
This started when you said I was echoing her.
> no, it isn't a strawman when that is literally the issue on the table. Congresswoman Eshoo...
I am not Congresswoman Eshoo. I said nothing about a ban. I was making my own points from my own perspective and you've begun arguing against something that someone else has said and put me into their camp by saying I'm echoing them.
Safetyism is for the weak, AI safetyism even more-so. "Think of the women" is a stupid argument.
It's a not-so-unspoken fact that a lot of social media platforms are popular because they have tons of pornography. Reddit, Twitter, OnlyFans (more openly) and (until now) Imgur all have massive communities around explicit content. Even Twitch and YouTube are hugely successful as ways for OnlyFans creators to drive users to their explicit content.
Going to be very interesting to see if imgur drops off the face of the earth as tinypic, imageshack, photobucket and many others before it did. Certainly this was the longest-lasting image host I can think of.
I think Reddit started hosting their own content or whatever the redgif site is seems to have taken over Imgur for a while now and the images/vids load lightning fast in comparison to Imgur with my ad blocker lighting up like a Christmas tree every time I visit an Imgur link. I would be happy to never visit that site again.
This is the cycle of a lot of ad-driven businesses. They start out sleek and quick to load because they’re ad-free. They grow insanely fast and burn runway. Then they begin loading the site down with ads to monetize the users. This leads to a gradual exodus and eventual death (or death in the star-like sense of eternal irrelevance).
It seems to be an unstable equilibrium. If you want to stay on top in terms of users and actually make money you’ve got to have a lean and highly optimized site with non-intrusive ads. On the other hand, if you give in to the temptation to take any ad who wants you then you doom the site in exchange for a short term profit.
People were uploading lots of porn to gfycat, so the gfycat people basically cloned themselves and split the adult content off onto another domain in order to keep it separate.
You must be joking.
I have been a user of imgur since it was create by mr. grimm ... I have had a paid account for ~10 years...
v.reddit and i.reddit are absolute garbage by comparison.
Now, that is to say, I use imgur very specifically - I have my own albums (and the album management system on imgur is trash and almost unusable) -- but the ability to just use something like greenshot where I do a snippet with PRTSC key and have it auto-upload to my imgur, and then copy the imgur url immediately to my clipboard is dope... but the album management UX on imgur does suck.
HN thread on the above article: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34480479
1. "We need a better image host!"
2. Makes new image host.
3. Uh oh, hosting costs money.
4. Ads.
5. Lawsuits because illegal stuff. Uh oh, lawyers cost money.
6. "We need a better image host!"
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/reddit/comments/12qwagm/an_update_r...
For now old.reddit.com works to get rid of all this guff but when that goes, so do I.
Also, the irony of the Tumblr comparison is that Tumblr has become my default social image hosting provider now that they allow soft porn and have a paid ad-free subscription. The tables have turned!
Are you perhaps copying the wrong thing when trying to share? I've never had this happen. Even copying an image link from their homepage at the time of this post works as expected
https://i.imgur.com/v052wgb.jpeg (some starwars cartoon) or https://i.imgur.com/VT1B7fn.mp4 (some cat with a pineapple)
I also know that Tumblr has norms against "horny on main", so maybe Tumblr users were very diligent about using alts and the other sites make that too frictional
No shitty middlemen that need $$$ for server lettuce?
Nah; not retarded enough.
A 2019 Gallup poll found that 61% of American respondents believed pornography was "morally unacceptable." That's nearly twice the share that thought smoking marijuana was immoral, and higher than abortion. Somewhere around half of American women support banning it altogether, as well as a not insignificant share of men: https://ifstudies.org/ifs-admin/resources/lehmanfigure2-w640...
(IFS is a biased source here, but the surveys they cite are not)
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.
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.
This i guess is another move away from image content for imgur. Dunno.
Looks like the shadow theatre has a captive audience
> We don't want to create a bad experience for someone that might stumble across explicit images, nor is it in our company ethos to support explicit content, so some lascivious or sexualized posts are not allowed.
Hey Imgur! By banning NSFT you've create a bad experience for me and now I'm stumbled. Happy?
The usual answer is that advertisers don't want their ads appearing next to it.
Reddit adding its native hosting effectively kneecaped it, however, although from Imgur's perspective it's hard to say that's a bad thing since they just lose money on bandwidth. Since then, Imgur has been strongly pushing non-direct image links where they can show ads.
That's the cause for these changes.
no thanks
Let's see if that violates these new "guidelines."
How does that work? Illegal where I live, illegal where they are or illegal anywhere?
Further if I'm pro abortion, is that condoning 'illegal activity'? What about smoking weed, which is illegal in certain states but legal in others. If I talk about crossing the road not at a crossing which is legal in my country, would that be banned? Do I now need to read up on US business law to find out where they're incorporated and or where the servers are sited to find the applicable state to then find the applicable laws? Are their moderators also going to be trained to this standard?
Now this, interesting to see a site from day 1 coming up and (probably) going down.
Tech companies deciding to not allow any vulgar content is seriously a bizarre "value" to uphold in the age of the internet.
This feels like yet another recent chilling case where Barlow's Declaration of Independence of Cyberspace should probably be rolled out. Where shitty governmental fear mongering trash again just makes being online in authentic & dirty ways harder & harder.
Does anyone know what may be happening?
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.
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.
It’s hard to have an army of dirt cheap outsourced moderators sort out regular porn from revenge porn.
If you take too long dealing with regular spam, not much happens. If you take too long dealing with this kind of content, you get cut off from payment providers and advertising.
The HN crowd is mostly safe from such attacks so this is a real blindspot.
But doesn't all NSFW content just expand the range of what you have to detect and process?
I think the issues here is the US money is over and now the big investors are from countries that porn is banned like China and Arabias.
When has it been not grotesque? It's just that “American” “norms” are actually starting to “progress” to the mean.
Post all the conservative political opinions you want. As long as you stay away from posting hate, personal attacks, and similar, you're not going to lose your Twitter account
Broadly, the biggest pushes have been to limit exposure of highly-sexualized content to those 18+.
If I said that Earth was at the center of the solar system, up is down and the sky is green you would tell me that I'm wrong and misinformed, but if I said that I believe in a magical man in the sky who can walk on water and will send everyone to Hell for eternity for looking at porn then suddenly my "faith" has to be respected and everyone else has to change their behaviors to accommodate it. It's utter nonsense.
A terabyte of new porn will be generated while you are reading this
You can go your whole life consuming porn for hours a day and never see the same content twice, for free
Not sure what your complaint is
Sure, you can do that on Twitter already, plenty of depraved porn on that platform. Imgur doesn't have to allow that. It's not like there is a lack of places on the internet where you can post porn.
When Imgur was created I doubt that much thought went into why it's so difficult to build a good image hosting site. There's no profit in it. You need to add a social layer, or some other hook that make people stick around and watch ads. As storage and bandwidth has become cheaper, it makes sense that a site like Reddit just went ahead and did their own image hosting. Imgur has become disconnected and needs to find its own audience, which is has, it just so happens that their audience is terrible. 4chan looks downright cheerful compared to Imgur.
Maybe they managed to carve out a niche? One that could be profitable if they get rid of X amount of storage, hence deleting NSFW content and older anonymous uploads.
I couldn't care less about their discussions. I remember some years ago taking a look there and it was super eerie, because the people where discussing images posted to reddit without having any context whatsoever.
“They are like rats living in a sewer. They feed off of the shit that gets pumped through it but have no concept of the fact that it’s simply a piece of infrastructure for a large city above them.”
I do not agree with throwaway accounts. They should go away entirely.
You are being just as "toxic" in your motives.
I don't really use either sites, but isn't Reddit mostly a collection of links to content from other places? Whenever I needed to share an image online over the years, I tended to use Imgur without an account after bildr.no shut down, but I did only use those services if it didn't matter that the image disappeared after I'd shared it, and now that you can copy-paste images into basically any messaging service on basically any device that sort of need has disappeared.
Not really. Even the most popular posts on the imgur front page average around 1,000 upvotes (compared to 40,000 for the reddit front page with default subs) and most are only getting 300 upvotes with 20-30 comments. That's about as popular as a middle-tier subreddit, of which there are thousands. Which I guess isn't "dead" but those certainly aren't numbers that are going to get the VCs opening checkbooks.
Measuring active users for imgur is tricky because a massive proportion of those users are just using it as an image host and not "engaging" in the community. And even a lot of that engagement is just being driven by Reddit rather than coming from imgur itself.
So no, I think calling imgur a popular social media site is extremely misleading: it's an extremely popular image host that happens to have a social media site that a small community uses attached to it.
Yes, to my knowledge, you are correct. It was a surprise when I first learned it but apparently there are users that visit imgur directly without using reddit.
Of course, some of them use NSFW tagging for spoilers …
For months now, I've been unable to view photos on Imgur. Only recently, I finally realized their "over capacity" error was their cop-out for "we don't want to serve your IP blocks". (Yes, I am primarily on VPN.)
Obviously, USA-ian. The poll you quoted and linked deals with what Americans think, which is kind of reinforcing GP's point: the current treatment of pornography around the world, especially on the Internet, is in large part a US protestant/puritan cultural export.
We're this close to prints and scans, like grandpa.
[0] https://www.wired.com/story/tiktok-platforms-cory-doctorow/
Instagram is victim to this trying to follow every trend and turning themselves into another WeChat that has every feature ever.
People use Facebook because its network effects are effectively impossible for alternatives to overcome.
It could be that Imgur has already more than paid back its acquisition price to MediaLab[0] and now they are willing to risk killing it in order to not have the NSFW hassle with their banks.
Or not, but it seems like this happens enough that the money people should understand it by now.
So contrary to what you say, the practice of having "alts" is pretty much encouraged.
I don't think you can use the same email on multiple accounts at the same time, but using address extensions or creating new emails is easy.
You're running a one-person troll farm? Please reconsider your choices in life.
Imgur support wouldn't respond to forum owners.
This is a really important point. From what I can see, Imgur doesn't have a porn community, it just has a lot of porn because it's used as an image host by outside communities. Porn is probably a net drain on profit for them, since they make their revenue off of people who use Imgur itself, not from servicing direct image links posted on Reddit.
To me it seems like it's not necessarily budgeting issue but natural greed kicking in. I'm sure imgur people are not tightening their belts over this.
If I expect a typical image to be 1MB and get 10000 views, I could prepay 30 years of cloudflare R2 hosting with one penny. That's the kind of model I'd want when ads aren't an option. But it's really hard to build something around microtransactions like that.
Frankly, hearing grade-school versions of my own opinions parroted back at me ad nauseum is more annoying than if the posts were coming from other end of the spectrum. At least you can make a useful comment on something you disagree with. Now Imgur is all echo chamber all the time.
My own turn to the right came from discomfort with the IFLScience and NowThis set
"Religion for people who are atheist's"
Which is lighthearted, but not a joke. Economic theory says that the economic cycle helps to free up misallocated resources.
People will create all manner of crazy businesses. Some will be duds, some will be frauds, and some will be the future. Then to sort out which is which, you have to turn off the flood of money.
Which seems... aspirational?
The big ones do. There is stil the long tail of forums and legacy chat platforms that don't do hosting or have extreme limits. That is what will be most affected by this change.
Let's see how it goes
The worst possible outcome for Reddit is that this move shines light on how many porn communities exist on reddit, which causes media scrutiny, which causes advertisers to bail or threaten to bail, which causes Reddit to ban NSFW subreddits, which spells the end of Reddit.
This would probably be a good thing for the world, except for the loss of the NSFW subreddits. All the "normal" subreddits are cesspools.
How dare you say this about my /r/DaystromInstitute
Where there is no harm, there can be no foul.
Also, this is speaking in a way that might sound like some referencing some legal standard, or being an exhaustive or overwhelming philosophical analysis. But, even were these assertions true, I suggest that the argument is missing the issue raised.
Specifically, the image used as an example of 'ok' in one part of the Imgur policy document arguably hits all over the specific language of the harassment section of the same document. See quoted parts.
It seems an incredibly poor example to choose, and it's arguably a renewed instance of harassing image posting by their own definitions.
That's just not how Russia rolls. Simple things like low fuel prices, alcohol and porn are what prevents the population from complaining.
Russians highly value internal peace and will not actively go against anything that helps to secure it.
They don’t have nearly the resources, grassroots base, or supply of Russian money the NRA has had, OTOH, neither is in the degree of legal mess the NRA is currently in, either.
People with the money, time, and luxury just are not capable of solving it, as they exist in ivory towers far away from real problems, and can not fathom investing in people outside their circles with solutions.
I'm saying the solution to many "unsolvable" problems might just be in the brain of an unknown person operating within the drudges of wage slavery, like a Subway worker for example [1].
There are countless unqualified people wielding an "infinite source of free money" already. Why should they, while others are left to rot? Why are we all okay with their autonomy to use "free money", players winning in a made up game they created, while others are crushed by the weight of survival?
Most people don't need infinite money. They just need enough to survive and be happy, while also have a direct stake in the fruits of their labor instead of having to turn over all their fruits to people who have free money. An exchange of survival for someone's life work is not an exchange worthy of even considering.
This suppresses innovative solutions across the board. It saps away the energy and motivation people have to contribute their solutions. It is an underlying mechanism to a modern dark age.
It's not a new development, I believe this has been the case since at least 2016.
If visiting the page directly, we get served a HTML document with a billion resources that loads the image with a comment section beneath it, and includes a sidebar of "related" and "newest in most viral" content.
Possibly even advertisements, but I wouldn't know, as a good friend doesn't let friends browse the internet without an ad blocker.
You could try opening the URL from a different browser? For example my main use case is clicking "Show Original" on Discord, so when it opens in my browser, the first visit is not in the context of an img tag.
So now I get
https://rimgo.pussthecat.org/v052wgb.jpeg
and
https://rimgo.pussthecat.org/VT1B7fn.mp4
when i click so I can actually load them without all the bs.
Thanks for the pineapple cat, though. Big fan of that part.
That;s a pretty standard Conservative position that I think would be well received here.
Just because it isn't a perfectly bright dividing line doesn't mean it's entirely subjective. It is also to the benefit of a side regularly spewing hate to also argue that it's subjective.
(And to be clear, none of those things short of imminent threats should ever be considered punishable by a government; that has far more negative outcomes than positive ones. But they absolutely should have consequences by individuals and groups who choose not to associate with such things.)
Anyone from imgur here who can just tell us? :D
Disintermediation here removes a lot of scumbags
Personally I got so sick of it all that I have up pornography completely about 4 years ago. I'm not saying everyone else should follow suit but I count it as the single best thing I ever did for myself, my mental health and my real life relationships.
The problem I see is that once you get even to the scale of a 10th of size of imgur your hosting bills (storage + bandwidth) will cross into the 10s of thousands per month, which would require you to be in the top 1% of Patreon users. I don't think you'd find people lining up to donate for such a service, especially given there are so many copycats.
On the other hand, I think Imgur also pushed way more traffic upon itself by trying to make itself into another social media site. Like, if it just stayed an image host it probably could have stayed more niche and wouldn't have had thousands of casual internet users scrolling through images all day at work.
There are quite a lot of examples in the past (all the way to the Roman empire) of rich people spending their money on community projects just because they wanted some things to exist, not to make even more money.
(yes, yes, I'm aware of the concept of "natural rights", I've read the Second Treatise, blah blah—it's a pretty idea, but it's weak, to put it mildly)
AFAIK they can stand up, kinda, if you have some foundational rules at the bottom that you're taking as divinely-revealed and unquestionable. Otherwise, not so much.
They're a good rhetorical tool and a nice shorthand for "thing we care about a lot", but I'm pretty sure it's a mistake to treat them as for-real real, to any greater degree than anything else we guard with laws and norms. Again, if you've got info that might change my mind, do share—it'd be really handy if they were real.
Or a small business, but I wonder how much money there is in that.
They call it "hustling" and "growth hacking", and I suppose there might be good ROI on this when you're just starting up and trying to do some "organic advertising" in a niche community/subreddit. Those couple extra upvotes may be the difference between drowning unnoticed vs. staying on the front page long enough to gather initial interest, and spark a discussion that keeps it up for a day or more.
I still believe it's unethical behavior, though.
how else do journalists write this articles on internet hate mobs?
Recently, I have used these accounts to get answers to questions: post the question with one account and ~3 bad but assertive answers with other accounts, and that's usually enough to get at least one response from someone who knows the right answer and wants to prove they are smart. All of this can now be done very easily by ChatGPT, too - it used to take effort.
This is the "dark" part of social media marketing that nobody talks about but a lot of people engage in.
Tons of accounts reposting content from ~2 months ago to create a long, legitimate-looking post history and high karma score. They then use those accounts to complain about Product X or love Product Y -- and they don't look like a shillbot. Ditto for political actors, propagandists, et al.
One Reddit user, Unidan, was famously banned for doing this with 12 accounts, and in retrospect, this sort of scheme may have "made" his success - his replies showed up as the top comment a lot (even when they were not insightful) and it got him significant name recognition.
Consensus is a different meaning. Going by how odd "a consensus" sounds I would simply assume the writer mixed both or misremembered, and I do not read further intent. Just my opinion.
Those apps will now also have to move to a subscription-only model because the APIs will be paid, as the Apollo dev confirmed.
It wouldn't be so difficult to swallow if the official mobile app was high quality, but it isn't. There are major UX issues with the official app that haven't been fixed for years. The 3rd party app ecosystem is vibrant because of this. Instead of competing and being the best on merit, they have decided to play their platform-owner veto card which is very disappointing, compounded with their dishonesty about the true intent of these changes.
There is absolutely zero way they're unaware of the impact and I guarantee you they have thought this move through thoroughly.
[1] https://old.reddit.com/r/reddit/comments/12qwagm/an_update_r...
Indeed, it seems to be a chaotic mess, as most of Reddit's "throw shit at a walk and hope something sticks" development methodology is.
It absolutely does. There is tons of normal content that is tagged as NSFW for various non pornogrpahic reasons, and consdering 'regular users' includes the millions of people that use apollo, Rif, etc , thats a huge amount of the user base negatively effected.
I often use spoiler formatting for comedic effect, etc.
For context, normally you are placing 3x3 tile farms either around 2x2 tile mills or 4x4 tile Town Centers, so you end up with a "pinwheel" at best. But the Poles can build a 3x3 Folwark (like a mill but makes your food come in faster if the farms are close enough) leading to some very satisfying ways to use building space efficiently and aesthetically.
https://www.reddit.com/r/apolloapp/comments/12ram0f/had_a_fe...
Eh. I exclusively use https://old.reddit.com/ on both Desktop and Mobile, and never felt inconvenienced.
Our cell phones are large enough today to use 2008-era websites without any additional bells and whistles.
But, of course, people who are already used to whatever UI they chose are going to suffer. Alas.
Or they could do what Facebook used to do (still does?), and put them on Blu-ray disk cold storage, then load them into one of those giant jukebox-esque machines that grabs the Blu-ray disk whenever someone click an ancient link and spend 60 seconds serving the image up or whatever.
Hell, write all the images with their URLs to magnetic tape and donate them to the Internet archive, and let them figure out what to do with them if/when they eventually have the funds.
Literally anything would be better than outright deleting those old images.
https://www.datacenterfrontier.com/cloud/article/11431537/in...
The blog post has a link to video from FB itself from 2014 and it has no audio. its not the first old FB video I came across that had no audio. Wonder if the cold storage has something to do with it.
https://web.facebook.com/Engineering/videos/1015212866009720...
In my data hoarding days (as a consumer, not FB scale), I found burning media an archive tool to be much more costly (and less reliable and more physical space) than simply using multiple hard drives.
Now, it could very well be that FB is able to buy burnable media at a much cheaper rate than consumers (i.e. perhaps there is more margin in media that massively bulk purchasing can reduce and the type of HDs that FB would buy would be more expensive than consumer drives, it could also be that actively used burnable media would be more reliable than actively used hard drives. while it's cold storage, its not frozen storage that is rarely used, with that said, the jukeboxes are probably expensive and suffer more reliablity issues than the hard drives), but on the consumer level, it just didn't seem to be a doable thing.
Ex: 8TB HD could cost $120. That's ~ 400 25GB single layer blurays. Now, 400 disks of optical media no matter how efficient one can store them will take up a lot more room than a single 8TB HD. For the 400 bluray blanks to be cheaper than the HD, they would have to be less than 30cents a disk. Glancing at amazon today, the cheapest I see for 25GB BDR blanks (and dual/triple/quad layer blanks are more expensive per GB, i.e. a 50GB blank would be $1.6 a disc) is about 40cents a disk. At that price level, you are better off just buying/copying to multiple disks for even better disaster recovery and it wont really cost you more than to store everything once on optical media.
anyways, if anyone could point out flaws in my assumptions (or why at FB scale the answers are different) I'd be interested.
I stopped using imgur several years ago precisely because I couldn't upload anything easily, account or no account.
Mobile in particular couldn't upload period, the feature(?) simply wasn't even there.
I've since moved on to using Discord, specifically a private "server" I made for the purpose, for my image hosting needs. God knows how long that arrangement will last.
All this to say imgur has been useless garbage for many years, its decline to irrelevance is long overdue.
I frequently use Imgur because of its built in support in various tools such as Greenshot.
I can upload by just pasting into the client, and it works anywhere Discord works. I can access images from anywhere by using/sharing the direct links.
If I can easily and simply upload and access images, that's all I want out of an image hoster. Everything else is signal noise.
Imgur.com user-agent: Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Yahoo! Slurp; http://help.yahoo.com/help/us/ysearch/slurp)
There is no shortage of people who would volunteer for something like this. The replacements might even be less terrible, both at the job (reddit is stiflingly over-moderated, as documented on r/undelete and r/redditminusmods) and in their dealings with users.
Personally I am running a mediagoblin server on a Droplet but I have a feeling that only works as long as nothing I make ever goes viral.
See also: https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300251234/manufacturing-...
That's a random study I found on Google, of course, I'm sure Meta has more accurate data on that.
Besides, you need to build the same kind of redundancy in both cases, so that shouldn't influence the choice.
[0] https://www.canada.ca/en/conservation-institute/services/con...
Also consider the economics of actually retrieving and indexing the data. If you have to spend 2 hours looking for a blu-ray/DVD with the data you need, then maybe it changes the economics back to HDDs, which can look up a file within 20 TB of data almost instantaneously using an NTFS Journal.
Possibly they did different things for different IP blocks?
I've stopped using Reddit now. I liked the freedom of speech and the curiosity of the users. Freedom of speech had been eliminated totally. Curuisity can presumably be found in some niche subreddits - but even the niche subreddits I used to frequent have fallen.
> It may end up having a much larger impact than reddit corporate anticipates.
Is unlikely. I'm not adding an opinion on whether or not this is a good move, or a user-friendly move.
So at least for me, using a third-party app is well worth it despite seeing ads.
Reddit's management simply have awful UI instincts.
This is what you get without a competent UX team unfortunately
You generally don't make an ad-supported business if you respect your users as human beings, but the old -> new Reddit redesign is something really special - going through with it, and then sticking to it for so many years now, pretty much requires seeing your users as cattle.
Oh, they aren't universally hated.
Most of reddit users have only seen the "new" interface, so they don't know what they're missing.
And when they find out, they're already conditioned to use the "new" UI, so switching is difficult.
The new UI enforces age gating via sign-in (switch to the old UI, and you can get away with "Continue"), which is better for engagement.
The new UI is mobile friendly, which is WAY better for engagement. (Most users are mobile users, even though mobile devices are worse than desktop PCs in every way except convenience.)
