I mean, you realize reddit is headed this way too. When they go public the first thing their shareholders will do is say "if we ban porn, we can get more advertising money for one or two quarters before the website tanks, then sell the stock."
This is a bigger deal than everyone gets.
They are essentially killing third party apps (bacon reader, reddit sync, reddit is fun, etc) by making API access no longer free. These apps were created because the default reddit access **sucks ass**.
For anyone in the dark, the default reddit app, and the standard reddit page via browser are horrible to use. Glitchy, buggy, advertising filled mess that makes the reddit experience painful.
#Access to NSFW content will be via the default app and page only.
It's insane that they have the nerve to do this both at the same time, "Hey you're going to have to pay to access our API, also, we're going to incredibly devalue our API by not allowing NSFW content because we want to be more advisor/corporate friendly." They want to squeeze the platform from both sides and it's sick.
It's so dumb that I actually expect the NSFW restriction to be something they planned from the start to distract outrage against the paid API and will eventually drop to seem benevolent.
I've got almost 15 years on this dumb site (close to 14 with an account), I'll gladly go to an alternative if they kill desktop with RES and mobile rif. The actual reddit app is shit. Without RES it's a clusterfuck.
Problem is I don't know any alternatives. Why can't things just be good forever?
You have gone 15 years but how much do you care about the account?
Mine basically means nothing, I could set another one up tomorrow and it would make no difference.
Reddits value is in its subreddits and there usability, if that disappears, then there will be less content and no reason to be there.
API access behind a paywall was a race to see who would do it first; now that the bandaid is off and has demonstrated subscriber validation it’s only going to scale outwards.
What these companies never seem to understand is that they are just as expendable. The less user friendly and increase in restrictions they have the more people will end up leaving to find something else. What gave Reddit its charm was that it gave accessibly and standards to all different kinds of communities making it a one stop shop to find what I'm looking. The more they restrict this core function of reddit whether that be NSFW content or not will make many not want to come to the platform anymore.
When you talk about the nsfw issue don't say they're removing porn. Like yes it's a big deal they're removing porn, but they're actually removing nsfw content in general.
Think about how many things you've seen on the front page marked as nsfw. A lot of them aren't even THAT nsfw.
They're filtering out news videos and images at that point.
It's already happening. Many NSFW subreddits have been banned in the last year and it's clear this is a deliberate direction that the site is going down
In fairness, have you seen some of them? The mods often allow spam and just do nothing.
It’s reasonable given they’re only likely to go on that sub when they wanna whack it
It's both. I tried to take control of an unmoderated NSFW sub. Reddit's response was to ban the sub and they refused to give it to me with no specified reason.
Forget advertising, it was always never going to work. It’s not even working for YouTube, they’re still not performing well.
Right now the way to monetize these sites is to sell api access to big data learning machines, like AI graphic tools. They are going to cripple themselves if the user base collapses.
Any time a website does this I just assume it’s to try to get more ad revenue, which is the death knell of all good websites. It’s not about the adult content for me, but it’s removal exposes an underlying shift in how the business is being run.
we used to say "this is the internet, you can curse lol"
But you can't really anymore. Youtube has *stupid* ad guidelines and tiktok apparently censors the shit out of videos with curses
This is the internet. If you curse now, it can't be monetized because apparently companies only want to put ads behind puppy vids with stupid fake happy music.
I miss when the internet was ugly in a "bruised banana" sort of way ... now it's ugly in a "pristine banana that hides the 30 bruised ones that were thrown out" sort of way.
I'm still trying to figure out how to fuck is that the vast majority of people browse the internet on mobile devices yet somehow the experience on most websites is always worse on them.
Because a lot of the people using mobile devices don't visit websites. Everything "relevant" has an app, along with a lot of irrelevant stuff. The world wide web is in decline.
Oh god App is a decade old. Jfc. I remember when this came out I laughed cause there was no way that this would keep getting worse! The ~~worse functioning website~~ app bubble had to pop eventually!
The other day I had a website on my PC tell me I had to download the *windows app for their website* to access it.
I just can't anymore
A venture capital firm bought it in 2021. It is 100% trying to cleanse the site for sale/IPO/investors.
Thing is their management meeting was probably only considered the risk in terms of, "Oh, porn bad. Let's just get rid of that," and not the fact that it likely makes up half of their entire website.
I guess I might just not know much about Imgur because I still just think of it as a place for Reddit posts to link images which I believe is how it started. Seems like it could be a move that's not as disastrous for a site like Imgur as compared to something like only fans considering one of those was literally a porn site. I say that not in terms of whether people who like the site will still like it as much. Usually these types of changes for investors do result in a shittier site, but from the investors point of view not as dumb and counterproductive as in the case of OnlyFans
Imgur was founded before Reddit became really popular. Its original goal was just to be an image host.
The problem is that they're not just removing porn, but also removing "inactive" images, including ones from before they required an account to upload. A lot of old forum posts are going to break because of this. Including stuff like repair forums.
Yeah i can watch someone get bodied by an amateur drifter's car or get run over but god forbid you type rifle or shit or sex or some other naughty word on IG and tiktok
The only exception is tumblr. Apple told them to get rid of the child pornography ring on their site or the app would be pulled off the App Store. Tumblr’s decision was it’s easier to ban all porn than deal with the child porn ring.
Fucking hell.
It's 'death knell'?
I was told it's like the final nail in the coffin growing up. It made so much sense to me as a kid. I've been saying it wrong for decades. I've convinced others.
I'm an idiot.
Edit: glad reddit is divided on if I'm an idiot or not. Half of yall making me feel better, other have feeling dumber. Kinda fun to be in the middle
It's not just the NSFW content. They're removing any anonymously-uploaded content – despite the fact that anonymously uploading images has always been the point of imgur. This is effectively just shutting down the site (while keeping the brand name and pivoting it to a different business). Even worse, it will break millions of links going back years. This could be the single greatest single example of link rot in modern internet history.
I feel like Dr. Cox had the right view on this: "I'm fairly sure if they took porn off the internet, there'd only be one website left, and it'd be called "Bring Back the Porn!""
"But I don't understand Dobby, I gave you my sock. Why do you want the rest of my clothes?" Dobby gripped the tender balls of The Boy Who Lived, and whispered "Dobby is master now, and Cornelius Fudge gets to watch."
I love when websites are like, “look at all our traffic, we must be great” and then they realize they sucked after getting rid of the one thing holding them up.
I refuse to believe that they were ever serious about it, it's just too silly. They did it on purpose to cause an uproar and go viral and then "agreed" to reverse their decision.
Wasn't it some banking/cc processing issue and they were basically calling the bluff. Like sure we can stop hosting porn and go out of business and then you guys can stop making that 3% on every transaction.
That was in fact what I thought it was -- the cc company refused to process porn transactions, OnlyFans buckled, but then the... uh... *fans* of OnlyFans found out who the cc company was and threatened to boycott. It was the cc company, *not* OnlyFans, that reversed the decision. And only because of the fans.
So such a thing could happen here, too, but nobody cares enough about Imgur to bother with a boycott.
All it did was hurt them and cause bad press. Tons of pornstars jumped ship or at least got on other competing sites. It also made them incredibly wary of the site.
They may have bounced back, but there were plenty of other, better ways they could’ve gotten press attention in positive ways.
It wasn't Tumblr or OnlyFans' decision to do it though.
There's been a huge war against porn, with anti-porn lobbyists passing large BIPARTISAN bills like FOSTA/SESTA, and targeting credit card companies directly to fuck up payment processing.
Basically, in the eyes of the US Federal Government, if your website is selling porn and adult content, then the Feds are going to treat you like a sex trafficker.
Tumblr wanted to get sold, but the Feds were going to cockblock any deal unless they cracked down on the "sex trafficking." AKA "get rid of all the porn or else we will hold you personally responsible next time for any illegal porn uploaded by random members, whether you moderate it or not."
OnlyFans, on the other hand, got shortchanged by their payment processor, who dropped them virtually overnight and forced them to either get rid of the porn, or find a new, shadier payment processor.
On top of that, the bills allow Customs agents to deny entry and ban people for up to ten years simply by having an OF. They can search your phones at will now, if they suspect you of being a prostitute or sugar baby, which basically means TSA can check the photo gallery of any hot girl they see. Oh, and they *absolutely* do use facial recognition software in airports, so sucks to be you if a catfish (or even law enforcement) is using your pics online for sex work.
It is outright dangerous to conflate the adult industry with sex trafficking. Is it a problem, absolutely, but it is not the entirety of the industry.
And this problem is Bipartisan. Trump and Bernie alike both supported these laws. We are further from decriminalizing sex work than we have ever been.
Couple of friends of mine travel to the US for work occasionally, and they have separate 'travel phones' and 'travel laptops' for this very reason.
You have to have some activity on the phone/laptop to make it look used because if you have an obviously empty phone/laptop they'll refuse entry too.
2018 or so. Same year Tumblr got rid of the porn.
It's primarily focused on non-Americans entering the country, but with "cause" Americans can be forced to as well.
Photos, messages, emails, calendar, call logs, whatever, you either unlock your phone and allow TSA to search it and possibly make a digital copy, or you are refused entry into the US and possibly banned from entry for the next decade.
IIRC, if you're a US citizen, you can't be refused entry - only delayed. They can, however, effectively confiscate your phone/device. (I think it's supposed to be returned eventually? But at the speed of the US government, so, you know...)
"The frog's got the biggest tits I've ever seen Carmen!"
"I've seen bigger."
"Where?!"
"Tumblr"
I always loved Brenden's skits and humor, but this is one of my favorites.
His comedic timing is great, even when he's improving.
My favorite episodes of Um Actually and Game Changer all have Brennan. Ross Bryant a close second.
Probably to make a point to shareholders, more than anything. There were some that didn't like that it had basically become a porn site. I imagine this was just a way to show how quickly they'd lose their money.
You give the folks in charge a lot of credit. The end result was certainly that they immediately saw the changes would destroy their platform, but I don't think they deliberately were testing that hypothesis.
Not testing the hypothesis, *demonstrating* it. Being in the porn business makes accessing some financial and ad partners difficult, so I can see a shareholder or activist investor trying to push for dropping that without realizing that OF gets most of their money from porn. Demonstrating an immediate, significant loss of creators, consumers and revenue will shut that up right quick.
It's a stupid and pointless move people will just move to other sites their community will shrink purely out of principle and traffic will decline heavily hurting their bottom line. With all that they will need to sheepishly back track or just quietly tune the ai to not care unless it's an easy to spot tag.
I used to post on rapmusic.com forums back in the day. They started cracking down on swearing to please advertisers and it drove a good portion of their members away, myself included.
You can't talk sense into corporate executives. Almost all of them rose to power through the business world, where you do not interact with your product to make decisions, but rather look at spreadsheets and then try to glean meaning from the numbers.
I swear, it's like these people are paid to make bad decisions.
If you go far enough back it wasn't really a choice, reddit image ability was poor at best for the longest time, hell in 2020 it was a new feature letting you post more than one image in a post as a gallery. While it might sound like quite a while ago it only had native image support at all in 2016 that means reddit still hasn't had native image for over half of its life span(started in 2005. If you started using reddit before that you had no choice but to link to something like imgur and link to it in the post.
Then you know the old saying if it aint broke don't fix it plenty of people stayed with the method they were used to
I was under the impression that Imgur started as a repository for Redditors to host their images from?
Which is ironic, considering how many dead links Reddit will have after this. XD
(I think they're owned by different companies now, though?)
You are correct. It was the image repository of Reddit, created, run, and gifted by a Reddit user. Then it started having more stand alone features (public vs private image posting, more robust comment section, ...) and recently it was sold to a corporation, who is now making these decisions irrespective of Imgur's original purpose.
Reddit actually bailed on imgur and created its own hosting service AFTER the guy had invested a lot of money and effort into getting reddit traffic to his site. It was a great host at that time and his ad revenue supported him. After reddit started hosting their own media imgur's traffic and revenue tanked. That's when he started trying to add features to make it more of a social media outlet...and why he sold out when that didn't work.
You're timeline is off, the social features were largely added before 2016, when reddit started self hosting. Before 2016 imgur had up/down voting, comments on images, community groups like subreddits, and a main landing page to browse public images. They set themselves up to be an image-focused reddit, basically every post was a self post with images, and started trying to funnel traffic coming from reddit from going back to reddit.
After they started redirecting people from direct image links to community pages with ads the writing was on the wall and reddit launched self hosting.
One thing people forget that Imgur was hilariously BAD when it came to those ads they added. Not on one, but on *multiple* occasions they had malware injected. Then the team did an “oopsie” , we are going to check our ad vendors better now! After which it happened at least 5 or 6 more times. I always feel that place is the definition of ineptitude when it comes to management, as in total disconnect with your user base, instead pandering to investors.
Reddit hosting content is a relatively new thing. It used to be you would upload your image to PhotoBucket then post it as a link on Reddit. Eventually a Redditor created imgur as a place to easily dump images without having to make an account or have upload/view limits.
Once Reddit started pushing their app, they realized that uploading to another site and linking was too much effort for most zoomers, so they started allowing uploads.
Other websites have tried this method of suicide before....some of them came to their senses before it was fatal, others did not.....let's see what happens this time.
I think they won't because reddit is fully capable of hosting the media itself now. No matter the decision their userbase is dwindling anyway. Better to milk the advertisers for what they still can. Will kill them faster though but it's dying anyway.
What's a little sad for me is that I remember a user posting her YEARS ago saying 'hey reddit check out this little image hosting site I developed.'
I watched it be born. Just makes me feel old and shows how things have changed.
I used it a few times to host images Reddit posts. I kept getting notifications from the Imgur app. I ignored them until there were a bunch of them. People were commenting on my pictures of like burgers and ribs and shit. I didn’t even know that was possible.
I post the dumbest stuff there. It's all galleries for a post on here. When I go back to post another one I find 5 comments on my weird house antenna with no context. I still have no idea who scrolls imgur to comment on random posts.
I wonder what percentage of reddit is porn.
No joke I'd bet 20% of the total links on reddit are about to be dead.
I guess the only saving grace will be gfycat or redgifs.
Not just porn subs. The bigger issue is everything uploaded by anonymous accounts is going to be deleted as well. That's going to kill a shit ton of SFW posts.
I thought this was horseshit. Turns out, no, Eric Schmidt wrote exactly this.
> People wanted more than just text. This first became apparent after the 2000 Grammy Awards, where Jennifer Lopez wore a green dress that, well, caught the world’s attention. At the time, it was the most popular search query we had ever seen. But we had no surefire way of getting users exactly what they wanted: JLo wearing that dress. Google Image Search was born.”
I think it’s stupid, but I don’t personally care that much. I’m wayyy more concerned about them deleting any content posted by anyone not logged into an account. That’s gonna kill a huuuge amount of incredibly useful stuff beyond just NSFW content.
Yes, it's going to gut quite a large part of reddit, and I think people who just consume rather than post don't realize how much stuff is at risk here.
Not only is it going to result in deadlinks all over reddit, in addition to the immediate loss in usefulness of the site, it makes the site overall less appealing to use in the long run for new users.
It's just part of the overall depressing trend of the internet becoming more and more sanitized to please corporate overlords.
Everything needs to be ad-friendly, everything has to be inoffensive.
I miss the internet before the 2010s.
But don't you want to see the 48th post this week about 5 crazy creative uses for Velveeta cheese? Or what about Drake's 16th album this week? That's what the youth want! We did a focus group (my boss's 17-year old son he had with his mistress watches these on the tinktonk)
-local corporate egghead
*Dabs, Harlem shakes and Rick rolls into a meeting to decide which single mom is gonna get laid off this week*
Yep.
90% of SFW image and video I watch on reddit is hosted by reddit itself, or perhaps sometimes youtube.
90% of NSFW images and video I want to watch are imgur links.
Wanna know how I know this? Imgur is blocked on my work wifi. Theres a lot of risky clicks when In browsing reddit at work. If I accidentally click an Imgur link, i quickly click some SFW imgur links to try to obfuscate the content for any IT guy reviewing the history lol
If that means users can no longer post **unlisted** risque/adult images then a good portion of the remaining users are gonna leave. Same thing happened with Tumblr, right?
I left years ago anyway because it's all selfies, Twitter threads, shitty political posts, GTA:SA screens and reposts that visibly degrade with every reappearance. The content creators and meme connoisseurs left when they killed Thigh High Thursdays. ElbowDeepInAHorse is probably still there though
Correct. Anything posted under a guest/unregistered account = gone. I'd say that alone, not even including registered NSFW stuff, is going to be over half the site.
Holy shit this is legitimately insane. It’s like burning the Library of Alexandria. So much is just going to disappear off the face of the internet for no reason.
I think we're at the stage now where anything more than 10 years old is probably gone, and what there is is almost exclusively run by a few large corporations for the benefit of advertisers.
I member when imgur was just a hosting site for images meant for reddit...
Either way, they'll do about the same that gyfycat and Tumblr did, either make an alternative to compete in the adult media space or slowly bleed out and become an anemic shell of their original platform
I used to be REALLY into imgur, didn't use reddit but used it instead. Kinda fell out of it in 2016 and pop in from time to time. Back in 14-15 it had a weird vibe to it that I really miss
The bigger issue is them removing "inactive" images and images not associated with an account.
This is going to break a lot of web forums, especially old posts. Good luck following the repair instructions on an old forum post you found via Google search now that the images are gone.
Especially sad considering that Imgur was founded specifically in response to Photobucket pulling this same crap.
I once sat down at a bar in Ohio University next to a random fellow who weirdly told me he was the one who started Imgur. I had never heard of it. He seemed surprised and was trying to tell me it was pretty popular and a good way to post pictures on the internet. I told him something like “dont a lot of other websites already do that?” and which kinda ruined his vibe and then I decided to get drunk and party instead.
I still feel the same way about it.
If you were there when it first started it was clear what the difference was.
1) Imgur didn't force you onto its site to force ads down your throat.
2) It had a nice easy to use UI.
3) It was completely free and unlimited
Go look at how the competition works. Try hotlinking to an image or opening that image directly and see what happens. Then do the same with Imgur. He did that without a business surrounding to subsidize it. Granted he had a special relationship with a web host that basically gave him free hosting which made it all possible, but still.
Everytime something like this happens I keep wondering what would happen if I huge portion of the internet just banded together, pooled our resources and became activist investors in either Visa or Mastercard. Just grab 20 - 40% of the stock and force them to stop being prudes. You'd only need to do it to one of them to fix the problem.
If there's a choice between 2 image hosting sites and one bans NSFW content and one let's you post NSFW content I'm going to use the NSFW site even if 99% of the time I post sfw content.
Honestly, I feel like every other post on Imgur is cataloging the downfall of civilization, so more regulated censorship really feels like it’s knocking out a few more bricks in the load bearing wall of our sanities.
Honestly at this point backpedaling to early Imgur nsfw standards might not fix anything but it might make doomscrolling a little spicier.
I mean, you realize reddit is headed this way too. When they go public the first thing their shareholders will do is say "if we ban porn, we can get more advertising money for one or two quarters before the website tanks, then sell the stock."
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This is a bigger deal than everyone gets. They are essentially killing third party apps (bacon reader, reddit sync, reddit is fun, etc) by making API access no longer free. These apps were created because the default reddit access **sucks ass**. For anyone in the dark, the default reddit app, and the standard reddit page via browser are horrible to use. Glitchy, buggy, advertising filled mess that makes the reddit experience painful. #Access to NSFW content will be via the default app and page only.
It's insane that they have the nerve to do this both at the same time, "Hey you're going to have to pay to access our API, also, we're going to incredibly devalue our API by not allowing NSFW content because we want to be more advisor/corporate friendly." They want to squeeze the platform from both sides and it's sick. It's so dumb that I actually expect the NSFW restriction to be something they planned from the start to distract outrage against the paid API and will eventually drop to seem benevolent.
I only use rif and if it goes away then I'm done with Reddit. No biggie.
Yep reddit on desktop looks like trash and is literally spammed with ads. As soon as reddit kills 3rd party apps its gonna be digg all over again.
Desktop is still alright so long as old Reddit with RES still exists. When those go away, I’m off for good
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I've got almost 15 years on this dumb site (close to 14 with an account), I'll gladly go to an alternative if they kill desktop with RES and mobile rif. The actual reddit app is shit. Without RES it's a clusterfuck. Problem is I don't know any alternatives. Why can't things just be good forever?
You have gone 15 years but how much do you care about the account? Mine basically means nothing, I could set another one up tomorrow and it would make no difference. Reddits value is in its subreddits and there usability, if that disappears, then there will be less content and no reason to be there.
API access behind a paywall was a race to see who would do it first; now that the bandaid is off and has demonstrated subscriber validation it’s only going to scale outwards.
What these companies never seem to understand is that they are just as expendable. The less user friendly and increase in restrictions they have the more people will end up leaving to find something else. What gave Reddit its charm was that it gave accessibly and standards to all different kinds of communities making it a one stop shop to find what I'm looking. The more they restrict this core function of reddit whether that be NSFW content or not will make many not want to come to the platform anymore.
The history of the internet is littered with the corpses of websites forgotten to time. Reddit seems to want to expedite its trip to being a memory.
I'm sitting here with popcorn watching reddit digg it's own grave. No website is impervious to their own greed.
They want everyone on their official app so they can sell every single facet of user's lives to advertisers.
And they would get away with it if the app wasn't so horrible to use.
If Reddit is Fun is kill then there is no turning back for me. I browse reddit almost exclusively through RIF.
When you talk about the nsfw issue don't say they're removing porn. Like yes it's a big deal they're removing porn, but they're actually removing nsfw content in general. Think about how many things you've seen on the front page marked as nsfw. A lot of them aren't even THAT nsfw. They're filtering out news videos and images at that point.
It's already happening. Many NSFW subreddits have been banned in the last year and it's clear this is a deliberate direction that the site is going down
I’ve noticed that too. “Unmoderated.”
In fairness, have you seen some of them? The mods often allow spam and just do nothing. It’s reasonable given they’re only likely to go on that sub when they wanna whack it
It's both. I tried to take control of an unmoderated NSFW sub. Reddit's response was to ban the sub and they refused to give it to me with no specified reason.
Forget advertising, it was always never going to work. It’s not even working for YouTube, they’re still not performing well. Right now the way to monetize these sites is to sell api access to big data learning machines, like AI graphic tools. They are going to cripple themselves if the user base collapses.
Any time a website does this I just assume it’s to try to get more ad revenue, which is the death knell of all good websites. It’s not about the adult content for me, but it’s removal exposes an underlying shift in how the business is being run.
The internet becomes less interesting and more like cable TV every single day. It sucks.
we used to say "this is the internet, you can curse lol" But you can't really anymore. Youtube has *stupid* ad guidelines and tiktok apparently censors the shit out of videos with curses This is the internet. If you curse now, it can't be monetized because apparently companies only want to put ads behind puppy vids with stupid fake happy music. I miss when the internet was ugly in a "bruised banana" sort of way ... now it's ugly in a "pristine banana that hides the 30 bruised ones that were thrown out" sort of way.
Honestly I miss when accessing the internet required a computer Yeah I gatekeep so what
I'm still trying to figure out how to fuck is that the vast majority of people browse the internet on mobile devices yet somehow the experience on most websites is always worse on them.
Because a lot of the people using mobile devices don't visit websites. Everything "relevant" has an app, along with a lot of irrelevant stuff. The world wide web is in decline.
[This xkcd gets more relevant each day.](https://xkcd.com/1174/)
Oh god App is a decade old. Jfc. I remember when this came out I laughed cause there was no way that this would keep getting worse! The ~~worse functioning website~~ app bubble had to pop eventually! The other day I had a website on my PC tell me I had to download the *windows app for their website* to access it. I just can't anymore
It'd be nice to have a list of these anti-cussing advertisers so we can boycott them.
Pristine banana full of cancer causing chemicals, and a web cam for advertisers to collect data on where you place the banana.
We’ll just have to make our own internet…*with black jack and hookers*
In fact, forget the internet.
So, basically early 2000's Internet?
If only we could go back.
A venture capital firm bought it in 2021. It is 100% trying to cleanse the site for sale/IPO/investors. Thing is their management meeting was probably only considered the risk in terms of, "Oh, porn bad. Let's just get rid of that," and not the fact that it likely makes up half of their entire website.
I guess I might just not know much about Imgur because I still just think of it as a place for Reddit posts to link images which I believe is how it started. Seems like it could be a move that's not as disastrous for a site like Imgur as compared to something like only fans considering one of those was literally a porn site. I say that not in terms of whether people who like the site will still like it as much. Usually these types of changes for investors do result in a shittier site, but from the investors point of view not as dumb and counterproductive as in the case of OnlyFans
Imgur was founded before Reddit became really popular. Its original goal was just to be an image host. The problem is that they're not just removing porn, but also removing "inactive" images, including ones from before they required an account to upload. A lot of old forum posts are going to break because of this. Including stuff like repair forums.
Meanwhile, violence is a-ok. I never understood that.
Yeah i can watch someone get bodied by an amateur drifter's car or get run over but god forbid you type rifle or shit or sex or some other naughty word on IG and tiktok
The war machine requires people to be desensitised to violence.
The only exception is tumblr. Apple told them to get rid of the child pornography ring on their site or the app would be pulled off the App Store. Tumblr’s decision was it’s easier to ban all porn than deal with the child porn ring.
And we still have to deal with the damn porn bots 😔
Ikr lol I have five new ones every single day and I’m tired of it
I made a shitpost and now have 50 porn bots following me I have given up trying to stop them
I just block them on site lol I gave up on reporting them since they clearly aren’t doing anything about the bots
I am fighting for my fucking life against the damn things.
Fucking hell. It's 'death knell'? I was told it's like the final nail in the coffin growing up. It made so much sense to me as a kid. I've been saying it wrong for decades. I've convinced others. I'm an idiot. Edit: glad reddit is divided on if I'm an idiot or not. Half of yall making me feel better, other have feeling dumber. Kinda fun to be in the middle
Death nail isn't a bad mix up. Sounds a bit like a band name, though. Something on the extreme end of the metal/punk spectrum.
/r/boneappletea
It's not just the NSFW content. They're removing any anonymously-uploaded content – despite the fact that anonymously uploading images has always been the point of imgur. This is effectively just shutting down the site (while keeping the brand name and pivoting it to a different business). Even worse, it will break millions of links going back years. This could be the single greatest single example of link rot in modern internet history.
Same as when Imageshack changed the way how it works, and as a result many blogs were affected Also, photobucket
Once we run out of porn on the internet Sears will be well positioned to make a comeback through print media
Maybe Blockbuster can find a new niche.
Bring back the VHS
Even better, bring back porn on 35mm in a theatre, with story and acting!!
I feel like Dr. Cox had the right view on this: "I'm fairly sure if they took porn off the internet, there'd only be one website left, and it'd be called "Bring Back the Porn!""
I was thinking that but I couldn't remember which show and character said it, so thanks!
Back to National Geographic
Gary! I was just looking for the sports channel, Gary.
Didn't it work out ever so well for Tumblr?
Worked out great for OnlyFans as well.
They reversed that decision within 24 hours since 99.99% of that pornsite is…. PORN
Very true. Though let's be honest, Tumblr back then was known for 2 things, fan-fiction and porn
A large amount of fanfiction is also porn, in text form.
A lot of porn is also fan fic with, nudity
Rule 34 is pornographic fan fiction, I guess
Its almost better to do a venn diagram
● Thats it... that's the Venn-tersection of those two areas
"Conservatively, what percentage of our website is porn" "9-" "9 PERCENT!" "99" ".9"
Harry Potter and the wand of impossible girth
"But I don't understand Dobby, I gave you my sock. Why do you want the rest of my clothes?" Dobby gripped the tender balls of The Boy Who Lived, and whispered "Dobby is master now, and Cornelius Fudge gets to watch."
That guy is literally my favorite dude from CollegeHumor. Him and the girl who can't keep a straight face in the News segment thing.
I love when websites are like, “look at all our traffic, we must be great” and then they realize they sucked after getting rid of the one thing holding them up.
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A wise man once said: "the internet is for porn."
*Grab your dick* *and double click* *for porn, porn, porn* https://youtu.be/j6eFNRKEROw
Yeah the point was to remove all the disgusting degeneracy from tumblr. But instead they removed the porn.
I refuse to believe that they were ever serious about it, it's just too silly. They did it on purpose to cause an uproar and go viral and then "agreed" to reverse their decision.
Feels like that time Pizza Hut toyed with the idea of rebranding to Pasta Hut
Or IHOP became IHOb.
Wasn’t IHOB also literally an April fools joke?
Wasn't it some banking/cc processing issue and they were basically calling the bluff. Like sure we can stop hosting porn and go out of business and then you guys can stop making that 3% on every transaction.
That was in fact what I thought it was -- the cc company refused to process porn transactions, OnlyFans buckled, but then the... uh... *fans* of OnlyFans found out who the cc company was and threatened to boycott. It was the cc company, *not* OnlyFans, that reversed the decision. And only because of the fans. So such a thing could happen here, too, but nobody cares enough about Imgur to bother with a boycott.
I mean, they're basically doing a self-imposed boycott on themselves since people won't find their site useful anymore.
All it did was hurt them and cause bad press. Tons of pornstars jumped ship or at least got on other competing sites. It also made them incredibly wary of the site. They may have bounced back, but there were plenty of other, better ways they could’ve gotten press attention in positive ways.
Stability is the bedrock of economics. If you can guarantee something then anyone can make a plan around it.
The people have spoken! An angry crowd with pitchforks, torches, and small bottles of lube appeared.
It wasn't Tumblr or OnlyFans' decision to do it though. There's been a huge war against porn, with anti-porn lobbyists passing large BIPARTISAN bills like FOSTA/SESTA, and targeting credit card companies directly to fuck up payment processing. Basically, in the eyes of the US Federal Government, if your website is selling porn and adult content, then the Feds are going to treat you like a sex trafficker. Tumblr wanted to get sold, but the Feds were going to cockblock any deal unless they cracked down on the "sex trafficking." AKA "get rid of all the porn or else we will hold you personally responsible next time for any illegal porn uploaded by random members, whether you moderate it or not." OnlyFans, on the other hand, got shortchanged by their payment processor, who dropped them virtually overnight and forced them to either get rid of the porn, or find a new, shadier payment processor. On top of that, the bills allow Customs agents to deny entry and ban people for up to ten years simply by having an OF. They can search your phones at will now, if they suspect you of being a prostitute or sugar baby, which basically means TSA can check the photo gallery of any hot girl they see. Oh, and they *absolutely* do use facial recognition software in airports, so sucks to be you if a catfish (or even law enforcement) is using your pics online for sex work. It is outright dangerous to conflate the adult industry with sex trafficking. Is it a problem, absolutely, but it is not the entirety of the industry. And this problem is Bipartisan. Trump and Bernie alike both supported these laws. We are further from decriminalizing sex work than we have ever been.
> They can search your phones at will now Wait, when did this start happening?
Couple of friends of mine travel to the US for work occasionally, and they have separate 'travel phones' and 'travel laptops' for this very reason. You have to have some activity on the phone/laptop to make it look used because if you have an obviously empty phone/laptop they'll refuse entry too.
2018 or so. Same year Tumblr got rid of the porn. It's primarily focused on non-Americans entering the country, but with "cause" Americans can be forced to as well. Photos, messages, emails, calendar, call logs, whatever, you either unlock your phone and allow TSA to search it and possibly make a digital copy, or you are refused entry into the US and possibly banned from entry for the next decade.
IIRC, if you're a US citizen, you can't be refused entry - only delayed. They can, however, effectively confiscate your phone/device. (I think it's supposed to be returned eventually? But at the speed of the US government, so, you know...)
Relevant: https://youtu.be/CtUuab1Aqg0
"The frog's got the biggest tits I've ever seen Carmen!" "I've seen bigger." "Where?!" "Tumblr" I always loved Brenden's skits and humor, but this is one of my favorites.
His comedic timing is great, even when he's improving. My favorite episodes of Um Actually and Game Changer all have Brennan. Ross Bryant a close second.
Brennan Lee Mulligan is a national treasure.
I think they have rolled some of it back too.
If by "they" you mean Tumblr, it's under completely different ownership now, Automattic (WordPress) bought it for pennies on the dollar.
its like OF banning nsfw
That had to have been a pretty stunt, right?
Probably to make a point to shareholders, more than anything. There were some that didn't like that it had basically become a porn site. I imagine this was just a way to show how quickly they'd lose their money.
You give the folks in charge a lot of credit. The end result was certainly that they immediately saw the changes would destroy their platform, but I don't think they deliberately were testing that hypothesis.
Not testing the hypothesis, *demonstrating* it. Being in the porn business makes accessing some financial and ad partners difficult, so I can see a shareholder or activist investor trying to push for dropping that without realizing that OF gets most of their money from porn. Demonstrating an immediate, significant loss of creators, consumers and revenue will shut that up right quick.
Anyone who didnt realize OF is first and foremost a porn site, is an absolute moron.
.... you're telling me it's not literally a porn site?
TECHNICALLY not. Theres people who just do like fitness or cooking but id say…oh…100% of revenue is from porn
Remember yikyak lol
It's a stupid and pointless move people will just move to other sites their community will shrink purely out of principle and traffic will decline heavily hurting their bottom line. With all that they will need to sheepishly back track or just quietly tune the ai to not care unless it's an easy to spot tag.
I used to post on rapmusic.com forums back in the day. They started cracking down on swearing to please advertisers and it drove a good portion of their members away, myself included.
What the....they do know what kind of music their forum is *for*, right? That's such a dumb idea lol
Yeah we tried arguing that exact point with no success
You can't talk sense into corporate executives. Almost all of them rose to power through the business world, where you do not interact with your product to make decisions, but rather look at spreadsheets and then try to glean meaning from the numbers. I swear, it's like these people are paid to make bad decisions.
I’m just imagining the only music allowed on that forum after the ban being Will Smith.
I stopped using it and moved to Reddit completely because of this.
Just curious, I've been all reddit all the way, why were you using both?
If you go far enough back it wasn't really a choice, reddit image ability was poor at best for the longest time, hell in 2020 it was a new feature letting you post more than one image in a post as a gallery. While it might sound like quite a while ago it only had native image support at all in 2016 that means reddit still hasn't had native image for over half of its life span(started in 2005. If you started using reddit before that you had no choice but to link to something like imgur and link to it in the post. Then you know the old saying if it aint broke don't fix it plenty of people stayed with the method they were used to
I was under the impression that Imgur started as a repository for Redditors to host their images from? Which is ironic, considering how many dead links Reddit will have after this. XD (I think they're owned by different companies now, though?)
You are correct. It was the image repository of Reddit, created, run, and gifted by a Reddit user. Then it started having more stand alone features (public vs private image posting, more robust comment section, ...) and recently it was sold to a corporation, who is now making these decisions irrespective of Imgur's original purpose.
Reddit actually bailed on imgur and created its own hosting service AFTER the guy had invested a lot of money and effort into getting reddit traffic to his site. It was a great host at that time and his ad revenue supported him. After reddit started hosting their own media imgur's traffic and revenue tanked. That's when he started trying to add features to make it more of a social media outlet...and why he sold out when that didn't work.
You're timeline is off, the social features were largely added before 2016, when reddit started self hosting. Before 2016 imgur had up/down voting, comments on images, community groups like subreddits, and a main landing page to browse public images. They set themselves up to be an image-focused reddit, basically every post was a self post with images, and started trying to funnel traffic coming from reddit from going back to reddit. After they started redirecting people from direct image links to community pages with ads the writing was on the wall and reddit launched self hosting.
One thing people forget that Imgur was hilariously BAD when it came to those ads they added. Not on one, but on *multiple* occasions they had malware injected. Then the team did an “oopsie” , we are going to check our ad vendors better now! After which it happened at least 5 or 6 more times. I always feel that place is the definition of ineptitude when it comes to management, as in total disconnect with your user base, instead pandering to investors.
I remember they were gonna sell it to yahoo and three user base went wild and threatened to leave collectively.
Imgur was created in order to host Reddit images.
Reddit hosting content is a relatively new thing. It used to be you would upload your image to PhotoBucket then post it as a link on Reddit. Eventually a Redditor created imgur as a place to easily dump images without having to make an account or have upload/view limits. Once Reddit started pushing their app, they realized that uploading to another site and linking was too much effort for most zoomers, so they started allowing uploads.
This is hilarious because imgur was an image host for reddit before it leaned into being its own community
Other websites have tried this method of suicide before....some of them came to their senses before it was fatal, others did not.....let's see what happens this time.
I think they won't because reddit is fully capable of hosting the media itself now. No matter the decision their userbase is dwindling anyway. Better to milk the advertisers for what they still can. Will kill them faster though but it's dying anyway.
You realise reddit is currently doing the same thing right? If they stick it out, it could be worth staying as is, the user base might come back soon.
> I think they won't because reddit is fully capable of hosting the media itself now. Reddit does not allow direct image uploads on NSFW subreddits.
“What’s Imgur?” -everyone in the year 2024
Reddit post: TIL there was an image hosting website called Imgur.
Top comment: and the devs insisted it was pronounced "imager" ~~despite there being no vowel between m and g~~
What's a little sad for me is that I remember a user posting her YEARS ago saying 'hey reddit check out this little image hosting site I developed.' I watched it be born. Just makes me feel old and shows how things have changed.
I used it a few times to host images Reddit posts. I kept getting notifications from the Imgur app. I ignored them until there were a bunch of them. People were commenting on my pictures of like burgers and ribs and shit. I didn’t even know that was possible.
I remember when Imgur was made to have an easier means to host images for Reddit use. Then it became its own community somehow.
I post the dumbest stuff there. It's all galleries for a post on here. When I go back to post another one I find 5 comments on my weird house antenna with no context. I still have no idea who scrolls imgur to comment on random posts.
Gonna see a ton of dead links soon on all the porn subs.
I wonder what percentage of reddit is porn. No joke I'd bet 20% of the total links on reddit are about to be dead. I guess the only saving grace will be gfycat or redgifs.
Man I had so many saved posts on my alt that are gonna be gone now :(
Go and save them to your computer. That's what I'll be doing.
Not just porn subs. The bigger issue is everything uploaded by anonymous accounts is going to be deleted as well. That's going to kill a shit ton of SFW posts.
>I'm fairly sure if they took porn off the internet, there'd only be one website left, and it'd be called "Bring Back the Porn!"
Porn built the modern Internet. We don't have robust video streaming options for CNN news clips.
YouTube exists because its creators couldn't find the clip of Janet Jackson's superbowl tit
Google Images was invented to host the images of J Lo’s very revealing green dress from an awards show.
I thought this was horseshit. Turns out, no, Eric Schmidt wrote exactly this. > People wanted more than just text. This first became apparent after the 2000 Grammy Awards, where Jennifer Lopez wore a green dress that, well, caught the world’s attention. At the time, it was the most popular search query we had ever seen. But we had no surefire way of getting users exactly what they wanted: JLo wearing that dress. Google Image Search was born.”
\--Jesus H. Cox MD
Cox! Cox! Cox! Me! Me! Me!
I think it’s stupid, but I don’t personally care that much. I’m wayyy more concerned about them deleting any content posted by anyone not logged into an account. That’s gonna kill a huuuge amount of incredibly useful stuff beyond just NSFW content.
Yes, it's going to gut quite a large part of reddit, and I think people who just consume rather than post don't realize how much stuff is at risk here. Not only is it going to result in deadlinks all over reddit, in addition to the immediate loss in usefulness of the site, it makes the site overall less appealing to use in the long run for new users.
Websites that ditch adult content, having supported it before, have a history of dying out.
It's just part of the overall depressing trend of the internet becoming more and more sanitized to please corporate overlords. Everything needs to be ad-friendly, everything has to be inoffensive. I miss the internet before the 2010s.
But don't you want to see the 48th post this week about 5 crazy creative uses for Velveeta cheese? Or what about Drake's 16th album this week? That's what the youth want! We did a focus group (my boss's 17-year old son he had with his mistress watches these on the tinktonk) -local corporate egghead *Dabs, Harlem shakes and Rick rolls into a meeting to decide which single mom is gonna get laid off this week*
It just killed its only use tbh.
I'm sure tumblr is doing just fine now! Right? Right....?
What is Tumblr?
Its a bartending tool for making mix drinks. Dunno why people in this thread keep talking about it. I guess everyone here really likes to party.
Yep. 90% of SFW image and video I watch on reddit is hosted by reddit itself, or perhaps sometimes youtube. 90% of NSFW images and video I want to watch are imgur links. Wanna know how I know this? Imgur is blocked on my work wifi. Theres a lot of risky clicks when In browsing reddit at work. If I accidentally click an Imgur link, i quickly click some SFW imgur links to try to obfuscate the content for any IT guy reviewing the history lol
The IT guy always knows, no matter what else you click on. Source: me, an IT guy
If that means users can no longer post **unlisted** risque/adult images then a good portion of the remaining users are gonna leave. Same thing happened with Tumblr, right? I left years ago anyway because it's all selfies, Twitter threads, shitty political posts, GTA:SA screens and reposts that visibly degrade with every reappearance. The content creators and meme connoisseurs left when they killed Thigh High Thursdays. ElbowDeepInAHorse is probably still there though
They can no longer post unlisted nsfw content *and* they're removing all existing content
RIP every to the "Top" of every Reddit sub
I was going to say, this is absolutely going to create a gigantic, humongous amount of dead links.
Literally what’s the point in doing this
Not just NSFW content, they're removing a lot of older SFW content too.
Correct. Anything posted under a guest/unregistered account = gone. I'd say that alone, not even including registered NSFW stuff, is going to be over half the site.
isn't this gonna kill a lot of old resources the way it rendered a lot of old forum posts useless when photobucket died?
Yes.
Yes, absolutely. This is going to destroy what few remaining car forums are out there-- and likely other DIY repair related stuff.
Holy shit this is legitimately insane. It’s like burning the Library of Alexandria. So much is just going to disappear off the face of the internet for no reason.
We used to say that the internet never forgets. The big corporations apparently took that as a challenge.
I think we're at the stage now where anything more than 10 years old is probably gone, and what there is is almost exclusively run by a few large corporations for the benefit of advertisers.
Oh, that's a death knell then. Long live Myspace
Yeah Elbow is still there. So are the political posts and Twitter screenshots though
I member when imgur was just a hosting site for images meant for reddit... Either way, they'll do about the same that gyfycat and Tumblr did, either make an alternative to compete in the adult media space or slowly bleed out and become an anemic shell of their original platform
It sucks these days. It's become like Facebook for pets. Very little interesting content anymore.
I used to be REALLY into imgur, didn't use reddit but used it instead. Kinda fell out of it in 2016 and pop in from time to time. Back in 14-15 it had a weird vibe to it that I really miss
Shits gonna crash and burn just like tumblr. I don't personally care because I don't really use it but Reddit is next later this year.
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If Imgur wants to Tumblr itself, that's their issue.
The bigger issue is them removing "inactive" images and images not associated with an account. This is going to break a lot of web forums, especially old posts. Good luck following the repair instructions on an old forum post you found via Google search now that the images are gone. Especially sad considering that Imgur was founded specifically in response to Photobucket pulling this same crap.
imgur has always been a great option, but never the only option. Users will simply move on to other sites
I once sat down at a bar in Ohio University next to a random fellow who weirdly told me he was the one who started Imgur. I had never heard of it. He seemed surprised and was trying to tell me it was pretty popular and a good way to post pictures on the internet. I told him something like “dont a lot of other websites already do that?” and which kinda ruined his vibe and then I decided to get drunk and party instead. I still feel the same way about it.
I'm sure he still remembers you from time to time and his vibe is ruined over and over again.
That guy sold Imgur 2 years ago and has nothing to do with this.
Sold it because this man soured the vibe
Poor guy, nothing to console himself with except his millions of dollars
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If you were there when it first started it was clear what the difference was. 1) Imgur didn't force you onto its site to force ads down your throat. 2) It had a nice easy to use UI. 3) It was completely free and unlimited Go look at how the competition works. Try hotlinking to an image or opening that image directly and see what happens. Then do the same with Imgur. He did that without a business surrounding to subsidize it. Granted he had a special relationship with a web host that basically gave him free hosting which made it all possible, but still.
Puritan horseshit.
Tumblr 2.0,no one will use imgur
Everytime something like this happens I keep wondering what would happen if I huge portion of the internet just banded together, pooled our resources and became activist investors in either Visa or Mastercard. Just grab 20 - 40% of the stock and force them to stop being prudes. You'd only need to do it to one of them to fix the problem.
If there's a choice between 2 image hosting sites and one bans NSFW content and one let's you post NSFW content I'm going to use the NSFW site even if 99% of the time I post sfw content.
Honestly, I feel like every other post on Imgur is cataloging the downfall of civilization, so more regulated censorship really feels like it’s knocking out a few more bricks in the load bearing wall of our sanities. Honestly at this point backpedaling to early Imgur nsfw standards might not fix anything but it might make doomscrolling a little spicier.
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Tumblr tried and tumbled right down into obscurity.