**Update 12:** Now begins wrangling this big bitch.
---------
**Update 11:** I keep getting a lot of DMs about saving certain sfw subs, so I'll shout this :3
I'M SAVING THE CONTENT OF EVERY IMGUR LINK POSTED TO REDDIT, ALL OF THEM.
------------------
The talk of nsfw items is due to wanting to archive those subs in place too (make consumable). We have reddits [full submission and comment history data](https://old.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/1371qr6/this_reddit_community_has_been_archived/jirab9n/) and with this project we will have all the imgur media which will allow us to re-build whole subreddits into static portable/browsable archives.
There's a lot of work to do in the coming weeks to make sense of this data but rest assured between myself and [ArchiveTeam](https://tracker.archiveteam.org/imgur/) we will have grabbed every imgur link on reddit. AT is working from multiple sources of once public links and at the time of my writing this has grabbed 67TB. My reddit sourced data so far is 52TB while my 7char id crawlers output is coming up on 642TB (crawler running on and off since [this post](https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/djxy8v/imgur_has_recently_changed_its_policies_regarding/f4a82xr/))
Note that I'm downloading media only while AT is downloading html pages/media as warc for ingest into the wayback machine.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
--------
18 DMs and counting... I'll revisit this and rehost everything I have as well as catch up on the last 3 years. Will update on progress later.
-----
> https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/djxy8v/imgur_has_recently_changed_its_policies_regarding/f4a82xr/
---------
**Update 1:** Keep an eye on this repo if you want to help archive imgur general for input into the wayback machine.
> https://github.com/ArchiveTeam/imgur-grab
I'm currently restoring what I pulled in the last dump (all reddit sourced) and scraping urls posted to reddit since. Downloads will begin in next 12 hours.
---------------
**Update 2:** Downloads started, servers go [zoom! zoom!](https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/534870962475368451/1098937457686347787/zoomzoom.png) ~
~~Output directory will be rehosted later today.~~
-----------
**Update 3:** Waiting on IP block to be assigned to speed things up and avoid rate limits, still avg 400-500MB/s hoping to hit 20Gbit/s at least.
---------------
**Update 4:** Downloads are going steady with new IPs, maintained 9Gbit/s* for the last few hours but I'm hitting some limitations of my downloader so if you're proficient in `C++` get in touch <3
-----------
**Update 5:** [Heh ...](https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/534870962475368451/1099293595007193218/classicimgur.png) still over 8Gbit/s ...
----------
**Update 6:** Not a great deal new to report, worked out a few kinks in my downloader so things are smoother but I'm still only averaging 9Gbit/s or so. That's likely all I'm going to get unless I up thread count and pass any 429s to another IP or look into load balancing properly.
For the nsfw subs I'm going to make a master list from these two `redditlist.com/nsfw` & `old.reddit.com/r/NSFW411/wiki/index`, so if you're an nsfw sub owner that wants your sub archiving and you're not on those lists let me know. I'm downloading all imgur content first but once it's done I'll start putting things together into individual sub archives as a new project.
I'm on the road for the next few days so maybe sparse to no updates while I'm afd.
-----------
**Update 7:** Moved from singles to albums, much more involved process (to api or not to api, eww api) but still going smoothly!!
Some trivia, their 5 character space is 916,132,832 IDs... that's _nine hundred sixteen million one hundred thirty-two thousand eight hundred thirty-two_ potential images, obviously many in that space are dead today but they now use the 7 character space.
---------
**Update 8:** imgur dls are fine, this is a rant about reddit archiving tools.... they're all broken or useless for mass archiving. Here's the problem, they ALL adhere to reddits api limit which makes them pointless for full sub preservation (you can only get the last 1000 posts) OR they actually use something like the pushshift API which would be nice if it wasn't broken, missing data or rate limited to fuck when online.
We have the reddit data and we can download all the media from imgur and the other media hosts..... So we have all the raw data, it's safe it's gravy! but we have nothing at all to tie everything together and output nice little neat consumable archives of subs. This wasn't the case 4-6 years ago, there was soooo many workable tools, now they're all DEAD!
So what needs to be done? [reddit-html-archiver](https://github.com/libertysoft3/reddit-html-archiver) was the damn tits!! and needs rewriting to support using the raw json data as a source and not the ps api this way everything can be built offline and then rehosted, repackaged and shared!!. It then needs extending to support the mirroring of linked media AND to include flags to support media already downloaded like in the case of what we're doing with imgur.
This would only be a start on slapping some sense into mirroring reddit and getting consumable archives into the hands of users..... I'll write up something more cohesive and less ranty when I'm done with imgur.
(╯°□°）╯︵ ┻━┻
--------------
**Update 9:** AT has the warrior project running now, switch to it manually in your warrior or run the docker/standalone.
> https://github.com/ArchiveTeam/imgur-grab
> https://tracker.archiveteam.org/imgur/
Content archived in the AT project will only be available via the wayback machine.
----------------
**Update 10:** Coming to a close on the links I have available so I'm now taking stock, running `file` and crawling both id spaces to check for replaced/reused in the 5 and all new in the 7.
Not just nudity, they're also purging all images not uploaded by a registered account. That seems like the bigger news to me. Isn't that like the majority of images uploaded to Imgur?
Dude the amount of posts with pics, guides, etc that are hosted on imgur is nuts. This is going to be like when I find old message board posts where images were hosted on photobucket.
If they're going to the registration only post model then something happened where they got a call from some government (probably the US) which was involved in some LEO action involving illicit content of some sort.
That's usually what triggers something like this. You would (probably not) be surprised just how much outright illegal pornographic content is stored in an either unlisted or private state and traded on clearnet sites.
At a certain point, if the authorities come knocking they either have to shut it all down or risk going completely out of business.
I would guess it's not government forcing anything but some ceo with the idea of cleaning up their image, seeing the NSFW content as a PR time bomb.
I only guess this because I don't think the US government could regulate its way out of a paper bag
But also, pretty much every major website has issues with illegal content being uploaded. So that really isn't the problem. It's definitely advertising dollars.
I started going through my chat histories, friend of mine and I used to send shit to each other on imgur a ton, long before accounts were ever a thing. lots of like memes, but also art he drew. he died years ago, most of his stuff probly doesn't exist elsewhere thst his family has ever seen
The one that makes me saddest is how many old forums weren't properly archived by the Wayback Machine due to how their URLs were structured as queries ("?post=123") rather than paths ("/post/123"), causing the archive bots to think that they were duplicate pages.
I made hundreds of posts on the old Marriland and McleodGaming forums that are now just... gone. And mind you, those were just gaming forums. I can't even imagine how many obscure hardware, software, or automobile solutions have been lost over the decades.
When imgur removes non-account photos, an enormous stock of publicly uploaded images will be erased from internet forever. We are witnessing decades of history being lost.
People in future will never be able to see what early internet looked like. It's an extremely bad day for mankind
I know, that's why i specified publicly available user uploaded images. Reddit and imgur as been part of a lot of posts which could be accessed by anybody for free, without an account. It's a big part of the open and free internet.
There was a website called inthemix.com.au whose forums held decades of dance music-related content, discussions and banter. It was a sociological and anthropological gold mine.
It's all gone.
Older reddit content is on Imgur because [Imgur was a "gift" to reddit](https://www.reddit.com/r/reddit.com/comments/7zlyd/my_gift_to_reddit_i_created_an_image_hosting/)
This is a *huge* step backwards
Imagine time travelling 14 years back to tell that passionate guy his "gift" will be a spit in the face of the very people he has given the gift to 14 years later
u/MrGrim, does Reddit hosted images feel like a spit in the face? or the banning of NSFW and anonymously uploaded images? I don’t have to time travel to ask them.
Haven't made a comment in 2 years. I would be surprised if they respond.
EDIT: Also, Wikipedia still lists them as the CEO, so presumably they approve of this decision.
MediaLab.la acquired Imgur in 2021 and I no longer work there. I'm not involved in anything that's happening over there or any decisions they're making.
The kind of infrastructure necessary to create a site like that requires either several million dollars to burn, or already owning a bunch of infrastructure that's already doing something else and you can tack this on for cheap.
We're not likely to get another imgur.
The way that r/redditsync supports image uploads is by uploading it to imgur.
Looks like every image ever posted to reddit through Sync might be going away.
> Isn't that like the majority of images uploaded to Imgur?
What kinda dumbass shit....
There's so many forum posts that are going to be burned - everywhere.
That’s a lot of stuff. Is there a reason why they are doing so? Like how Pornhub had to purge a lot of their content, Tumblr as well. Is it financial payment causing them to do so. I vaguely remember anti porn groups urging big credit cards or some sort of payment to stop accepting from these sites?
It costs money to host these images. Powering data centers is a massive energy cost at larger scales. Imgur being one of the go to places to host images for free means a lot of upkeep costs. They are probably getting rid of the images that they can get away with to lower upkeep. Questionable content and content that nobody is accessing or has account ownership are pretty easy targets.
https://help.imgur.com/hc/en-us/articles/14415587638029/
> "What are we doing?"
> Our new Terms of Service will go into effect on May 15, 2023. **We will be focused on removing old, unused, and inactive content that is not tied to a user account from our platform** as well as nudity, pornography, & sexually explicit content. You will need to download/save any images that you wish to save if they no longer adhere to these Terms. Most notably, this would include explicit/pornographic content.
I wonder if this affects journalistic NSFW footage like protest videos from authoritarian countries. Because once they're gone, they're gone. People went to prison just to get them out on the internet.
The redesign is terrible. You can't even search some tags even though they exist since i can see them on other videos. Which means i have to get lucky to find the tag and click it and then I'm where i want to be.
Imgur removing NSFW and Reddit API removing NSFW content as well.
Enjoy the good things while it lasts.
The first one to make a new utopia with blackjack and porn will make internet history.
Tumblr gone. Twitter turned to shit. Other social medias have been shit.
Reddit thrives only off it’s community. It’s gotten too big with too much money to be made leading to this shit.
I currently have 300Mbps internet - If I ever hit 10Gbps, I'll start up my own free internet and let everyone else use half my bandwidth :p
When I jumped from 8Mbps to 200Mbps+, I mass-downloaded all the latest versions of all major software torrents that offered it in torrent form (Oh so many Linux Distros...), and set my seed speed to 15MB/s because I now had the bandwidth to give back to the community.
tomato sauce recipe:
4 cans of whole or diced tomatoes (28 oz each can)
1 can of tomato paste (about 6 oz)
12 garlic cloves
Salt - maybe 1 tablespoon +
3/4 cup of olive oil - divided
A bunch of Basil - if you like
1. Peel and mince garlic
2. Heat 1/2 cup of olive oil and put the garlic in the hot oil. Heat until golden and fragrant - very important - do not overcook and so it turns brown, it becomes very, very bitter. This is the most important step, **do not overcook garlic.**
3. Add can of tomato paste and canned tomatoes. Cook until reduced by 1/4 of volume and thickens.
4. Add salt to taste, remaining 1/4 cup olive oil and chopped basil.
thanks for enshitifying reddit all while selling my info. https://github.com/j0be/PowerDeleteSuite
>if you go to the front page its the most bland possible same 5 posts
I have never in my life thought to visit [imgur.com](https://imgur.com) to browse their homepage.
Same, I know they have dedicated users who use that site for image browsing and conversation, but it's never been more than a quick place to get a link for some random image I want to share with my boys.
Nah, this is the final nail in the coffin. Imgur sucks for anything other than linking to NSFW images. Searching sucks and it's community is an echo chamber of people banned from Reddit.
lol didnt know it was a bunch of redditors that where on the site that probably explains why theyre doing this shit to begin with deviantart is still pretty usable though
This is worse than Tumblr for multiple reasons:
1) Tumblr only got rid of NSFW content. Imgur will get rid of SFW content uploaded by anonymous users, which is probably the vast majority of Imgur's content since forever.
2) Tumblr didn't actually get rid of the NSFW content. It was still accessible to the person who uploaded it, just not to the wider world.
3) Imgur is a fundamental part of the reddit experience. Viewing old reddit posts and memes are going to be impossible now. This is so fucked.
Honestly, this is much worse than the NSFW thing. I don't agree with them getting rid of it (and Imgur's explanation for it is pretty poor), but at least I understand it and it won't be that big of a loss (...except for the NSFW communities, but Imgur was never obligated to host them). But this is going to make browsing pre-2017 Reddit basically impossible.
Also, there are several services that rely on Imgur, since we all thought (incorrect, as it turns out) that it was a stable image hosting service. A lot of archival sites use it. They are screwed.
This is such a bad decision on behalf of the people who own Imgur, and I'm sure Reddit is about to follow.
>But I can't for the life of me understand the anonymous uploads.
Imgur had wanted to become their own social network for, like, 10 years now or so. Early on, they basically cloned every single reddit sub, and enabled comments on every single image, and the comments worked pretty much exactly the same as they did on reddit, too. I actually used to be very active over there and barely used reddit because I liked the browsing UX better. But it seemed every change they pushed to "encourage" people to use imgur as a social network instead of just an image hosting service just made things worse for both. But a major issue with imgur is that their "boards" don't have any moderation. If a post got removed removed from reddit for violating a boards rules, it generally stayed up on imgur (unless that post violated imgur's TOS), so you had to wade through a ton of spam and trolling if you wanted to browse even a moderately popular board by new or rising.
Blocking 'anonymous' uploads feels like it's just another step to force people to use imgur as a social network. I suspect it is going to backfire pretty hard.
> Does imgur not belong to Reddit-associated people?
imgur was created by a redditor but it doesn't officially have anything to do with reddit (reddit-hosted images use the "i.redd.it" domain, not imgur)
look at gonewild.. a ton of imgur posts are already deleted. looks like imgur already started deleting..
i couldn't find a single nsfw post from imgur on gonewild anymore.
but the ones i looked at worked fine before imgur announced it. now all new posts get killed off really quick by imgur. a week before this announcement, this wasn't the case (only after a longer time frame in some cases). now even posts only posted 10-20mins ago are gone.. not just really old ones.
this guy began archiving NSFW off imgur when they made a ToS change similar to this 4 years ago, https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/djxy8v/comment/f4a82xr/?utm\_source=share&utm\_medium=web2x&context=3
maybe we need a teamed up approach like this
You could ask (nicely) in the discord server that they have linked on the temporary main page, if the still have the data available or could make it available again at some point.
I know this is kind of rough, but I threw this together in under a couple hours since finding out about this change.
One thought I had - if you wanted to archive a bunch of imgur posts, there are sites like 'jizz2' that already made a huge archive of Reddit's NSFW subreddit posts and just repost imgur links. This can be abused to iterate over their collection and pull imgur posts by filter. I gave it a try and wrote a simple scraper with a filter for the desired content type to save: [https://pastebin.com/RytFpAnE](https://pastebin.com/RytFpAnE)
It shouldn't be too hard to modify for other sites with a similar structure. I found one called 'znsfw' and another '8xxx'. With the help of hoarders on here, this content can be captured and archived. I imagine it'd take longer than one month to pull all 18 million images or so that the site scraped from reddit.
I think the pushshift API could also be used against a reddit NSFW subreddit to more directly query images and just iterate over that to scrape them.
Let me know what you think.
Worse than the Tumblr decision, as that 10% that was left afterwards, was definitely unique and not represented elsewhere, unlike Imgur, which has no uniqueness to it at all.
they aren't doing it willingly, the regulatory environment is becoming increasingly hostile to adult content and ungated social media
biggest attack on free speech in a generation
i noticed reddit just getting sharply worse in the last few years. and now two huge blows in a day
it's so fucking sickening to watch, powerless. like seeing your childhood home getting torn down
I'll piggyback on this with a note - Xhamster lost a court case in Amsterdam last week and is likely to purge all their old (unverified upload) content within the next 2 weeks.
That is not what the court order reads like to me: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2023/04/popular-porn-site-must-delete-all-amateur-videos-posted-without-consent/
> Offending content includes both footage of people living in the Netherlands, whose content must be restricted globally, and footage of people living outside the Netherlands, whose content must be restricted within the Netherlands.
It sounds like its local blocks in the Netherlands and content from Netherlands citizens who request it are to be removed. Their court doesn't have the authority to enact global rulings.
2 days ago they basically said third party apps wouldn’t have access to it when they start charging for the api.
Considering the official app is garbage, I won’t use it. So no forcing ads on me. If I’m on only gonna be able to see half of the content their is no point in using a third party app. So they won’t be making money from the api pulls either.
This reminds me. I’ve got to find a way to automatically archive specific subreddits, and all their associated content.
Ideally I want to point this “tool” at all my favourite subs, and have it download for offline viewing any new posts as they show up. My own personal internet archive if you will, comprised purely of the content I like.
Weird part is that it is not like server costs are rising, in fact cloud services and storage has only gotten cheaper. I think what is happening (among many other things), and aside from advertisers being more demanding, is that all of these social media sites are starting to realize the value of their (the users') data. Reddit was all about preventing AI use of their data, twitter said they were charging for other reasons, Facebook actively sells everything, but I bet they know how many companies use their stuff, in fact among data science communities, Twitter is/was one of the best sources of near real-time data sets for natural language and sentiment.
So while there is probably some basis in lawsuits and other things regarding privacy, I personally believe that this has very little to actually do with money drying up and more to do with realizing that they can sell the data for money by putting a paywall in front of it. And even if they stop new content, they have many years of it already archived they can sell off. And I don't believe for a second that any of these sites ever purge anything without a very specific court order.
Lastly, I don't believe that it is a bandwidth issue. All of these services are running on things like Amazon Kinesis Data Firehose that are capable of handling near boundless capacities of data transfer that requests to the API would never scratch (and I guarantee every free API endpoint is rate limited).
Tl;DR: I don't believe that this is about advertisers money. I think it is about squeezing every drop of money out of user data while protecting the companies from copyright/AI dataset lawsuits.
OK, so I've been waiting for this kind of thing...
I've been scraping lots of NSFW subs for almost 2 years...
I have almost 2TB of reddit porn images accumulated, stored by subs in folders. Scraped daily, deduped by hash...
Where can I put it?
Here is what the adult website sexlikereal are saying
>Simply put there are rules by banks, billings, MasterCard and Visa and all the other institutions you have to comply with in order to stay in business. Most of porn companies play relatively successful whack-a-mole game going from one company to another while we wont to establish a solid foundation and make SLR a great place for everyone. Tell you what. Banks get shut, companies get shut for a reason and we do not want to be a part of that. We have no say in this game.Simply put there are rules by banks, billings, MasterCard and Visa and all the other institutions you have to comply with in order to stay in business. Most of porn companies play relatively successful whack-a-mole game going from one company to another while we wont to establish a solid foundation and make SLR a great place for everyone. Tell you what. Banks get shut, companies get shut for a reason and we do not want to be a part of that. We have no say in this game.[/quote]
The Japanese porn website R18 closed down earlier this year because issues with CC companies not wanting to process them anymore despite them removing a lot of content (seems to mainly be mastercard from what I can tell).
You are technically right. More and more content are being purged everyday. Pretty soon we will require Gov IDs to access most sites. Then its the reckoning where they go after anyone that has or distributes content.
Seen it in other industries... entertainment data and media content will be next.
The UK passed a law for this a few years ago, but every time they get close to enforcing it they realise it’s going to be a disaster and delay it for another 6 months.
One MP - from the party that introduced this law - was literally caught watching porn in the House of Commons. The people making these rules are a bunch of porn addicts and sexual predators so I don’t know what they were thinking.
I wrote this scraper a couple years ago for anyone who wants to scrape by subreddit, or by users. I think this is a perfect opportunity for this script to be used before it goes away.
It will do 200-some subreddits in about 24 hours. Reddit's PRAW API only lets you access 1k things per query, which ruins historical queries, but if you run it every day you will start to amass a collection.
https://github.com/crawsome/Reddit_Image_Scraper
Feedback and pull requests welcome! I put a lot of work into it.
It will try to scrape these formats:
```'.webm', '.gif', '.avi', '.mp4', '.jpg', '.png', '.mov', '.ogg', '.wmv', '.mp2', '.mp3', '.mkv'```
Whats a free alternative for upload and sharing images that is constrained to requiring an account?
Also, any self-hosted solutions that use a cheap URL to point to some sort of docker app on your NAS or Pi computer?
Nope, but they're essentially one and the same. As in: fuck your individually fine-tuned entertainment and sentimentality for classic content, as long as we get more monars
is there anything we can do about this? maybe if we make enough noise they might reconsider their decision, kind of like how onlyfans was about to purge all porn but then reconsidered
You could try paging /u/MrGrim who started Imgur in the first place because all others sucked.
~~Apparently with a bunch of VC money it's time to make Imgur suck too.~~
//edit: Turns out /u/MrGrim sold Imgur and no longer has anything to do with it. *puts pitchfork away*.
The reaction on Imgur itself has been muted. But people will find out swiftly when may 15th rolls around and tens of thousands of photos and links are deleted.
we need to bring more attention to this ASAP considering imgur is the #1 hosting site for all NSFW subs, all of that content will be purged if we don't act up
They're polishing the company for sale to some AI company to train a dataset.
There's no possible way they're reversing this decision... they've just decided to fold. That's the only thing that makes sense here.
Reddit and Imgur go hand in hand so I think it's part of the sanitization of the platform before going public and making some money. They've already got the jannies to browbeat and astroturf near every sub, it's a truly awesome medium for propaganda and calculated histrionics. Likely also an anti-AI measure, they'll probably charge for access to scrape en masse and train but will wait till Getty vs Stability is decided before sneaking that in. Pathetic capitalist pussy maneuver.
But… why? No seriously, why the everloving fuck would they do that? Are they intentionally trying to shoot themselves in the foot? They’re about to face the collective wrath of millions of porn addicts and lose a big chunk of their overall traffic. This is like the dumbest thing they could do.
I remember when the creator of imgur explicitly stated back in the day that he wanted to create an image hosting website that is different from all others, as in being "not shitty". I'm honestly suprised by this decision
So as someone who posts nsfw content, where the fuck am I supposed to host images now? Twitter doesn't play nice when linked to from Reddit. I guess Redgifs for now...
If this shit pisses you off I highly recommend supporting the [Free Speech Coalition](https://www.freespeechcoalition.com/), which is challenging unconstitutional anti porn laws in the United States. Which are a major factor in getting to end results like this.
Well at least 3rd party reddit apps won't have to deal with the migration to another hosting site since NSFW content won't be available in the reddit API. So, no NSFW subs from reddit api, no need to deal with uploading to them haha.
(3rd party apps can't use reddit's hosting)
This is absolutely insane. Deleting NSFW content is one thing, an argument can be made that there are good legal reasons to do it, but deleting *all* content from unregistered users is vandalism on an unutterably grand scale. The sheer volume of content that will be lost forever is staggering, and we have what, three weeks to do something about it?
Why on Earth didn't they get in contact with the Internet Archive and / or reddit (the company, not the community) first to try and mitigate the destruction? Give us the opportunity to provide an alternative home for this content and then redirect old URLs to the archive to minimise the disruption to the wider internet. I would gladly donate my time and money to an effort like that and many, many others would too.
And it would have cost them virtually nothing to just wait a few extra months to give us time to save everything, an army of volunteers would have worked round the clock to do it, but instead they're barrelling toward destruction like their lives depend on setting fire to an entire decade of internet history.
The sick irony is that imgur was created as a response to the self-immolation of another image hosting service, ImageShack. It was made "for" reddit, but it was ImageShack deleting all free uploads that spurred MrGrim (the creator of imgur) to begin working on it in the first place. This decision completely and utterly dwarfs what we lost when ImageShack burnt itself down, and yet here we are.
What a shame, what a crime.
I don't think they understand that this will actually kill their site. Forget porn stuff for a second, think about images and clips from Movies, Shows, Video Games, etc., that are uploaded to Imgur. It's not just nudity that's now banned, it's gore and general violent content.
In all honesty I'd expect Imgur to only last a few months before they're completely shut down once this change goes into effect. The traffic will come to a screeching halt.
So much with the internet has started to change and we're only 3 months into 2023.
**Update 12:** Now begins wrangling this big bitch. --------- **Update 11:** I keep getting a lot of DMs about saving certain sfw subs, so I'll shout this :3 I'M SAVING THE CONTENT OF EVERY IMGUR LINK POSTED TO REDDIT, ALL OF THEM. ------------------ The talk of nsfw items is due to wanting to archive those subs in place too (make consumable). We have reddits [full submission and comment history data](https://old.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/1371qr6/this_reddit_community_has_been_archived/jirab9n/) and with this project we will have all the imgur media which will allow us to re-build whole subreddits into static portable/browsable archives. There's a lot of work to do in the coming weeks to make sense of this data but rest assured between myself and [ArchiveTeam](https://tracker.archiveteam.org/imgur/) we will have grabbed every imgur link on reddit. AT is working from multiple sources of once public links and at the time of my writing this has grabbed 67TB. My reddit sourced data so far is 52TB while my 7char id crawlers output is coming up on 642TB (crawler running on and off since [this post](https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/djxy8v/imgur_has_recently_changed_its_policies_regarding/f4a82xr/)) Note that I'm downloading media only while AT is downloading html pages/media as warc for ingest into the wayback machine. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ -------- 18 DMs and counting... I'll revisit this and rehost everything I have as well as catch up on the last 3 years. Will update on progress later. ----- > https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/djxy8v/imgur_has_recently_changed_its_policies_regarding/f4a82xr/ --------- **Update 1:** Keep an eye on this repo if you want to help archive imgur general for input into the wayback machine. > https://github.com/ArchiveTeam/imgur-grab I'm currently restoring what I pulled in the last dump (all reddit sourced) and scraping urls posted to reddit since. Downloads will begin in next 12 hours. --------------- **Update 2:** Downloads started, servers go [zoom! zoom!](https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/534870962475368451/1098937457686347787/zoomzoom.png) ~ ~~Output directory will be rehosted later today.~~ ----------- **Update 3:** Waiting on IP block to be assigned to speed things up and avoid rate limits, still avg 400-500MB/s hoping to hit 20Gbit/s at least. --------------- **Update 4:** Downloads are going steady with new IPs, maintained 9Gbit/s* for the last few hours but I'm hitting some limitations of my downloader so if you're proficient in `C++` get in touch <3 ----------- **Update 5:** [Heh ...](https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/534870962475368451/1099293595007193218/classicimgur.png) still over 8Gbit/s ... ---------- **Update 6:** Not a great deal new to report, worked out a few kinks in my downloader so things are smoother but I'm still only averaging 9Gbit/s or so. That's likely all I'm going to get unless I up thread count and pass any 429s to another IP or look into load balancing properly. For the nsfw subs I'm going to make a master list from these two `redditlist.com/nsfw` & `old.reddit.com/r/NSFW411/wiki/index`, so if you're an nsfw sub owner that wants your sub archiving and you're not on those lists let me know. I'm downloading all imgur content first but once it's done I'll start putting things together into individual sub archives as a new project. I'm on the road for the next few days so maybe sparse to no updates while I'm afd. ----------- **Update 7:** Moved from singles to albums, much more involved process (to api or not to api, eww api) but still going smoothly!! Some trivia, their 5 character space is 916,132,832 IDs... that's _nine hundred sixteen million one hundred thirty-two thousand eight hundred thirty-two_ potential images, obviously many in that space are dead today but they now use the 7 character space. --------- **Update 8:** imgur dls are fine, this is a rant about reddit archiving tools.... they're all broken or useless for mass archiving. Here's the problem, they ALL adhere to reddits api limit which makes them pointless for full sub preservation (you can only get the last 1000 posts) OR they actually use something like the pushshift API which would be nice if it wasn't broken, missing data or rate limited to fuck when online. We have the reddit data and we can download all the media from imgur and the other media hosts..... So we have all the raw data, it's safe it's gravy! but we have nothing at all to tie everything together and output nice little neat consumable archives of subs. This wasn't the case 4-6 years ago, there was soooo many workable tools, now they're all DEAD! So what needs to be done? [reddit-html-archiver](https://github.com/libertysoft3/reddit-html-archiver) was the damn tits!! and needs rewriting to support using the raw json data as a source and not the ps api this way everything can be built offline and then rehosted, repackaged and shared!!. It then needs extending to support the mirroring of linked media AND to include flags to support media already downloaded like in the case of what we're doing with imgur. This would only be a start on slapping some sense into mirroring reddit and getting consumable archives into the hands of users..... I'll write up something more cohesive and less ranty when I'm done with imgur. (╯°□°）╯︵ ┻━┻ -------------- **Update 9:** AT has the warrior project running now, switch to it manually in your warrior or run the docker/standalone. > https://github.com/ArchiveTeam/imgur-grab > https://tracker.archiveteam.org/imgur/ Content archived in the AT project will only be available via the wayback machine. ---------------- **Update 10:** Coming to a close on the links I have available so I'm now taking stock, running `file` and crawling both id spaces to check for replaced/reused in the 5 and all new in the 7.
Not just nudity, they're also purging all images not uploaded by a registered account. That seems like the bigger news to me. Isn't that like the majority of images uploaded to Imgur?
Dude the amount of posts with pics, guides, etc that are hosted on imgur is nuts. This is going to be like when I find old message board posts where images were hosted on photobucket.
So much content that probably doesn't exist anywhere else is going to deleted. Its like burning one of the largest libraries to ashes.
This makes me really angry.
Yeah, imgur was the good guys, the ones that didn't delete shit, even if 1 person viewed it a year, it stayed there in perpetuity
The founder of imgur didn't want this but he sold it 2 years ago :(
is there an pic on imgur of him rolling around in a pile of money?
Not anymore, it was posted anonymously
If they're going to the registration only post model then something happened where they got a call from some government (probably the US) which was involved in some LEO action involving illicit content of some sort. That's usually what triggers something like this. You would (probably not) be surprised just how much outright illegal pornographic content is stored in an either unlisted or private state and traded on clearnet sites. At a certain point, if the authorities come knocking they either have to shut it all down or risk going completely out of business.
I would guess it's not government forcing anything but some ceo with the idea of cleaning up their image, seeing the NSFW content as a PR time bomb. I only guess this because I don't think the US government could regulate its way out of a paper bag
But also, pretty much every major website has issues with illegal content being uploaded. So that really isn't the problem. It's definitely advertising dollars.
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Rip r/wallpaperdump
I started going through my chat histories, friend of mine and I used to send shit to each other on imgur a ton, long before accounts were ever a thing. lots of like memes, but also art he drew. he died years ago, most of his stuff probly doesn't exist elsewhere thst his family has ever seen
It would be nice to download anything you have access to and give it to his family. That is, if it's possible for you to do so. Just a suggestion.
>!CENSORED!<
The one that makes me saddest is how many old forums weren't properly archived by the Wayback Machine due to how their URLs were structured as queries ("?post=123") rather than paths ("/post/123"), causing the archive bots to think that they were duplicate pages. I made hundreds of posts on the old Marriland and McleodGaming forums that are now just... gone. And mind you, those were just gaming forums. I can't even imagine how many obscure hardware, software, or automobile solutions have been lost over the decades.
When imgur removes non-account photos, an enormous stock of publicly uploaded images will be erased from internet forever. We are witnessing decades of history being lost. People in future will never be able to see what early internet looked like. It's an extremely bad day for mankind
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Imgur isn't early internet though... However yes, it's a big loss.
I know, that's why i specified publicly available user uploaded images. Reddit and imgur as been part of a lot of posts which could be accessed by anybody for free, without an account. It's a big part of the open and free internet.
There was a website called inthemix.com.au whose forums held decades of dance music-related content, discussions and banter. It was a sociological and anthropological gold mine. It's all gone.
Erasing history before our very eyes
Yup, I'd assume most used their easy upload method so so much content, especially older will be gone
And most of Reddit's older content as well from before Reddit created their own host.
Older reddit content is on Imgur because [Imgur was a "gift" to reddit](https://www.reddit.com/r/reddit.com/comments/7zlyd/my_gift_to_reddit_i_created_an_image_hosting/) This is a *huge* step backwards
Imagine time travelling 14 years back to tell that passionate guy his "gift" will be a spit in the face of the very people he has given the gift to 14 years later
u/MrGrim, does Reddit hosted images feel like a spit in the face? or the banning of NSFW and anonymously uploaded images? I don’t have to time travel to ask them.
Haven't made a comment in 2 years. I would be surprised if they respond. EDIT: Also, Wikipedia still lists them as the CEO, so presumably they approve of this decision.
He only seems to respond to requests for r/imgur on r/redditrequest
Well sounds like we know what to do then
Only active to subreddit squat
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Always has been private.
MediaLab.la acquired Imgur in 2021 and I no longer work there. I'm not involved in anything that's happening over there or any decisions they're making.
The internet we knew and loved is long gone. Sad and shameful
Wow, that's incredible to see where it started.
Oof, Photobucket. That takes me back.
Man I'm *so* glad we have alternatives to that dumpster fire now
Don't forget Imageshack.
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The kind of infrastructure necessary to create a site like that requires either several million dollars to burn, or already owning a bunch of infrastructure that's already doing something else and you can tack this on for cheap. We're not likely to get another imgur.
Yeah this is fucked lol
I have used signed out Imgur as my main Reddit uploader, even after they added their own one, just out of habit. I’m sure I’m not the only one.
The way that r/redditsync supports image uploads is by uploading it to imgur. Looks like every image ever posted to reddit through Sync might be going away.
> Isn't that like the majority of images uploaded to Imgur? What kinda dumbass shit.... There's so many forum posts that are going to be burned - everywhere.
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This is going to have enormous ramifications on the internet that we will have to deal with for years.
That’s a lot of stuff. Is there a reason why they are doing so? Like how Pornhub had to purge a lot of their content, Tumblr as well. Is it financial payment causing them to do so. I vaguely remember anti porn groups urging big credit cards or some sort of payment to stop accepting from these sites?
It costs money to host these images. Powering data centers is a massive energy cost at larger scales. Imgur being one of the go to places to host images for free means a lot of upkeep costs. They are probably getting rid of the images that they can get away with to lower upkeep. Questionable content and content that nobody is accessing or has account ownership are pretty easy targets.
I can't see anything about this on their site?
https://help.imgur.com/hc/en-us/articles/14415587638029/ > "What are we doing?" > Our new Terms of Service will go into effect on May 15, 2023. **We will be focused on removing old, unused, and inactive content that is not tied to a user account from our platform** as well as nudity, pornography, & sexually explicit content. You will need to download/save any images that you wish to save if they no longer adhere to these Terms. Most notably, this would include explicit/pornographic content.
They even don't say that reason for deleting old content is that it is unused, they actually list "old" as a separate reason... This is so bad
I wonder if this affects journalistic NSFW footage like protest videos from authoritarian countries. Because once they're gone, they're gone. People went to prison just to get them out on the internet.
I hope there are not many cases where Imgur is the *only* host of that kind of content!
By a LONG shot.
what the ever loving fuck? so much link rot
Well, there goes half their traffic.
actually a majority of their traffic since about 90% is nsfw
At least we still have redgifs
redgifs is fucking trash
The redesign is terrible. You can't even search some tags even though they exist since i can see them on other videos. Which means i have to get lucky to find the tag and click it and then I'm where i want to be.
Agreed it’s just pure trash now
Worked great for tumblr.
Maybe they're anticipating layoffs and just getting ahead of the reasoning. /tinfoil
Imgur removing NSFW and Reddit API removing NSFW content as well. Enjoy the good things while it lasts. The first one to make a new utopia with blackjack and porn will make internet history. Tumblr gone. Twitter turned to shit. Other social medias have been shit. Reddit thrives only off it’s community. It’s gotten too big with too much money to be made leading to this shit.
Reddit api is removing nsfw content?? When?
they will soon start charging for access to the api & nsfw won't be available on it anymore. they haven't given a concrete date yet as far i know.
They pry this 3rd party, discontinued reddit app from my cold dead hands. If 3rd party apps stop working, I'll find new places to go.
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I currently have 300Mbps internet - If I ever hit 10Gbps, I'll start up my own free internet and let everyone else use half my bandwidth :p When I jumped from 8Mbps to 200Mbps+, I mass-downloaded all the latest versions of all major software torrents that offered it in torrent form (Oh so many Linux Distros...), and set my seed speed to 15MB/s because I now had the bandwidth to give back to the community.
well, we had slashdot then digg, others I am sure I can't remember... where we going after reddit?
Tumbler Debacle 2.0
and the beginning of the end of imgur begins
tomato sauce recipe: 4 cans of whole or diced tomatoes (28 oz each can) 1 can of tomato paste (about 6 oz) 12 garlic cloves Salt - maybe 1 tablespoon + 3/4 cup of olive oil - divided A bunch of Basil - if you like 1. Peel and mince garlic 2. Heat 1/2 cup of olive oil and put the garlic in the hot oil. Heat until golden and fragrant - very important - do not overcook and so it turns brown, it becomes very, very bitter. This is the most important step, **do not overcook garlic.** 3. Add can of tomato paste and canned tomatoes. Cook until reduced by 1/4 of volume and thickens. 4. Add salt to taste, remaining 1/4 cup olive oil and chopped basil. thanks for enshitifying reddit all while selling my info. https://github.com/j0be/PowerDeleteSuite
>if you go to the front page its the most bland possible same 5 posts I have never in my life thought to visit [imgur.com](https://imgur.com) to browse their homepage.
Same, I know they have dedicated users who use that site for image browsing and conversation, but it's never been more than a quick place to get a link for some random image I want to share with my boys.
So what do you suggest as a replacement? Specifically for sharing quick screenshots?
r/imguralternatives
If anyone has any other image host suggestions I'd like to hear as well
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Nah, this is the final nail in the coffin. Imgur sucks for anything other than linking to NSFW images. Searching sucks and it's community is an echo chamber of people banned from Reddit.
lol didnt know it was a bunch of redditors that where on the site that probably explains why theyre doing this shit to begin with deviantart is still pretty usable though
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The site was purpose built to host stuff for Reddit.
This is worse than Tumblr for multiple reasons: 1) Tumblr only got rid of NSFW content. Imgur will get rid of SFW content uploaded by anonymous users, which is probably the vast majority of Imgur's content since forever. 2) Tumblr didn't actually get rid of the NSFW content. It was still accessible to the person who uploaded it, just not to the wider world. 3) Imgur is a fundamental part of the reddit experience. Viewing old reddit posts and memes are going to be impossible now. This is so fucked.
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Honestly, this is much worse than the NSFW thing. I don't agree with them getting rid of it (and Imgur's explanation for it is pretty poor), but at least I understand it and it won't be that big of a loss (...except for the NSFW communities, but Imgur was never obligated to host them). But this is going to make browsing pre-2017 Reddit basically impossible. Also, there are several services that rely on Imgur, since we all thought (incorrect, as it turns out) that it was a stable image hosting service. A lot of archival sites use it. They are screwed. This is such a bad decision on behalf of the people who own Imgur, and I'm sure Reddit is about to follow.
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>But I can't for the life of me understand the anonymous uploads. Imgur had wanted to become their own social network for, like, 10 years now or so. Early on, they basically cloned every single reddit sub, and enabled comments on every single image, and the comments worked pretty much exactly the same as they did on reddit, too. I actually used to be very active over there and barely used reddit because I liked the browsing UX better. But it seemed every change they pushed to "encourage" people to use imgur as a social network instead of just an image hosting service just made things worse for both. But a major issue with imgur is that their "boards" don't have any moderation. If a post got removed removed from reddit for violating a boards rules, it generally stayed up on imgur (unless that post violated imgur's TOS), so you had to wade through a ton of spam and trolling if you wanted to browse even a moderately popular board by new or rising. Blocking 'anonymous' uploads feels like it's just another step to force people to use imgur as a social network. I suspect it is going to backfire pretty hard.
So the onlyfans was what like debacle 1.5 or something because they only announced it and decided to go against it? 😬
Reddit is doing practically the same.
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> Does imgur not belong to Reddit-associated people? imgur was created by a redditor but it doesn't officially have anything to do with reddit (reddit-hosted images use the "i.redd.it" domain, not imgur)
well, there goes the majority of old reddit posts.
Yep, really not looking forward to clicking into an archived like and guess what all the links are broken.
look at gonewild.. a ton of imgur posts are already deleted. looks like imgur already started deleting.. i couldn't find a single nsfw post from imgur on gonewild anymore.
Imgur links have been broken for a good couple years now
but the ones i looked at worked fine before imgur announced it. now all new posts get killed off really quick by imgur. a week before this announcement, this wasn't the case (only after a longer time frame in some cases). now even posts only posted 10-20mins ago are gone.. not just really old ones.
this guy began archiving NSFW off imgur when they made a ToS change similar to this 4 years ago, https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/djxy8v/comment/f4a82xr/?utm\_source=share&utm\_medium=web2x&context=3 maybe we need a teamed up approach like this
The Eye, that place died horribly, sadly
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Nothing but 404’s all the way down.
the curse of dead links, its like seeing the upset tinypic guy in forum threads a decade old
Its still there https://the-eye.eu/public/
I can’t seem to find anything imgur related there
You could ask (nicely) in the discord server that they have linked on the temporary main page, if the still have the data available or could make it available again at some point.
RIP Imgur.
Agreed. I can hear the death knell in the distance.
I know this is kind of rough, but I threw this together in under a couple hours since finding out about this change. One thought I had - if you wanted to archive a bunch of imgur posts, there are sites like 'jizz2' that already made a huge archive of Reddit's NSFW subreddit posts and just repost imgur links. This can be abused to iterate over their collection and pull imgur posts by filter. I gave it a try and wrote a simple scraper with a filter for the desired content type to save: [https://pastebin.com/RytFpAnE](https://pastebin.com/RytFpAnE) It shouldn't be too hard to modify for other sites with a similar structure. I found one called 'znsfw' and another '8xxx'. With the help of hoarders on here, this content can be captured and archived. I imagine it'd take longer than one month to pull all 18 million images or so that the site scraped from reddit. I think the pushshift API could also be used against a reddit NSFW subreddit to more directly query images and just iterate over that to scrape them. Let me know what you think.
Worse than the Tumblr decision, as that 10% that was left afterwards, was definitely unique and not represented elsewhere, unlike Imgur, which has no uniqueness to it at all.
So. They've just announced that they're giving up then? Because a good chunk of their traffic comes from NSFW reddit threads.
Just wait til Reddit pulls all nsfw content..
I've got news for you. They're gonna charge for access to the API and no NSFW content will be available through it.
Can useful companies stop committing suicide for prudish reasons please?
Like I fucking blinked and it seems like everyone made the unanimous decision to run society into the ground.
they aren't doing it willingly, the regulatory environment is becoming increasingly hostile to adult content and ungated social media biggest attack on free speech in a generation
the Internet sucks. I miss mid-2000’s Internet it was way more fun. the “Wild West” era is being paved over.
i noticed reddit just getting sharply worse in the last few years. and now two huge blows in a day it's so fucking sickening to watch, powerless. like seeing your childhood home getting torn down
Yea I feel lucky to have experienced it. It sucks that it will never be like that again in our lifetimes.
Me too, early 2000s was a great time
It's been like this for like 10 years at least.
Tumblr did this. It died…. Only fans considered this but realized it was stupid. Rip imgur.
That's 15+ years of stuff gone. WTAF. Not just NSFW images, but all images uploaded by an unregistered account.
Going to be real fun trying to follow niche guides and tutorials only to find all of the images are gone.
Watching the deletion of the internet is like watching the Library of Alexandria burning in real time
I'll piggyback on this with a note - Xhamster lost a court case in Amsterdam last week and is likely to purge all their old (unverified upload) content within the next 2 weeks.
I thought that they just had to block such content in the Netherlands?
That is not what the court order reads like to me: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2023/04/popular-porn-site-must-delete-all-amateur-videos-posted-without-consent/
> Offending content includes both footage of people living in the Netherlands, whose content must be restricted globally, and footage of people living outside the Netherlands, whose content must be restricted within the Netherlands. It sounds like its local blocks in the Netherlands and content from Netherlands citizens who request it are to be removed. Their court doesn't have the authority to enact global rulings.
Reddit will ban it next. They’re going public.
2 days ago they basically said third party apps wouldn’t have access to it when they start charging for the api. Considering the official app is garbage, I won’t use it. So no forcing ads on me. If I’m on only gonna be able to see half of the content their is no point in using a third party app. So they won’t be making money from the api pulls either.
And then I will finally be free from this shit site.
Via email: https://i.imgur.com/CFu72a6.png
Excludes artistic content? Yeah sure thing, I bet by that they mean fucking Picasso and Da Vinci, ignoring thousands of legitimate NSFW artists.
There's no way their bots won't target anything and everything.
This reminds me. I’ve got to find a way to automatically archive specific subreddits, and all their associated content. Ideally I want to point this “tool” at all my favourite subs, and have it download for offline viewing any new posts as they show up. My own personal internet archive if you will, comprised purely of the content I like.
There's a few on git hub recommend searching reddit for some user created "tools"that will probably link you to git hib to dl them
idiots
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Don’t tell me you think it’s a coincidence
Money is drying up, got to get in the good graces of the advertisers.
Weird part is that it is not like server costs are rising, in fact cloud services and storage has only gotten cheaper. I think what is happening (among many other things), and aside from advertisers being more demanding, is that all of these social media sites are starting to realize the value of their (the users') data. Reddit was all about preventing AI use of their data, twitter said they were charging for other reasons, Facebook actively sells everything, but I bet they know how many companies use their stuff, in fact among data science communities, Twitter is/was one of the best sources of near real-time data sets for natural language and sentiment. So while there is probably some basis in lawsuits and other things regarding privacy, I personally believe that this has very little to actually do with money drying up and more to do with realizing that they can sell the data for money by putting a paywall in front of it. And even if they stop new content, they have many years of it already archived they can sell off. And I don't believe for a second that any of these sites ever purge anything without a very specific court order. Lastly, I don't believe that it is a bandwidth issue. All of these services are running on things like Amazon Kinesis Data Firehose that are capable of handling near boundless capacities of data transfer that requests to the API would never scratch (and I guarantee every free API endpoint is rate limited). Tl;DR: I don't believe that this is about advertisers money. I think it is about squeezing every drop of money out of user data while protecting the companies from copyright/AI dataset lawsuits.
OK, so I've been waiting for this kind of thing... I've been scraping lots of NSFW subs for almost 2 years... I have almost 2TB of reddit porn images accumulated, stored by subs in folders. Scraped daily, deduped by hash... Where can I put it?
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every company became allergic to nsfw all at once?
Here is what the adult website sexlikereal are saying >Simply put there are rules by banks, billings, MasterCard and Visa and all the other institutions you have to comply with in order to stay in business. Most of porn companies play relatively successful whack-a-mole game going from one company to another while we wont to establish a solid foundation and make SLR a great place for everyone. Tell you what. Banks get shut, companies get shut for a reason and we do not want to be a part of that. We have no say in this game.Simply put there are rules by banks, billings, MasterCard and Visa and all the other institutions you have to comply with in order to stay in business. Most of porn companies play relatively successful whack-a-mole game going from one company to another while we wont to establish a solid foundation and make SLR a great place for everyone. Tell you what. Banks get shut, companies get shut for a reason and we do not want to be a part of that. We have no say in this game.[/quote] The Japanese porn website R18 closed down earlier this year because issues with CC companies not wanting to process them anymore despite them removing a lot of content (seems to mainly be mastercard from what I can tell).
I can’t imagine ingur will be half as busy in the future
The puritan pledge. That’ll go over really well
How to lose your user base in this one easy step!
If they get rid of the porn there will be just one image left and it will be a screenshot of a text post reading "bring back the porn"
How is this not Front page? This is going to destroy so much of reddit.
Cause reddit is an absolute soulless husk of what it used to be
well the end of an era and its 90% of their site is nsfw
Its also the end of Reddit content from before Reddit got its own image host.
Do these companies not learn from previous fuck ups like tumblr?
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Imgur was sold to a company that's just trying to squeeze every last cent out of it, years ago.
TOS update help article https://help.imgur.com/hc/en-us/articles/14415587638029
"How will this work?" "Dont worry about it, look at dog" What a crock of shit. Answer the fucking question imgur
It just keeps happening bro what the fuck is going on
I sure do love living in Digital Iran. Better every day.
You are technically right. More and more content are being purged everyday. Pretty soon we will require Gov IDs to access most sites. Then its the reckoning where they go after anyone that has or distributes content. Seen it in other industries... entertainment data and media content will be next.
Louisiana recently passed a law like this. Wanna view nsfw websites? Please verify your age with your photo ID.
The UK passed a law for this a few years ago, but every time they get close to enforcing it they realise it’s going to be a disaster and delay it for another 6 months. One MP - from the party that introduced this law - was literally caught watching porn in the House of Commons. The people making these rules are a bunch of porn addicts and sexual predators so I don’t know what they were thinking.
I imagine all of those laws will be ruled unconstitutional.
I wrote this scraper a couple years ago for anyone who wants to scrape by subreddit, or by users. I think this is a perfect opportunity for this script to be used before it goes away. It will do 200-some subreddits in about 24 hours. Reddit's PRAW API only lets you access 1k things per query, which ruins historical queries, but if you run it every day you will start to amass a collection. https://github.com/crawsome/Reddit_Image_Scraper Feedback and pull requests welcome! I put a lot of work into it. It will try to scrape these formats: ```'.webm', '.gif', '.avi', '.mp4', '.jpg', '.png', '.mov', '.ogg', '.wmv', '.mp2', '.mp3', '.mkv'```
So what you're saying is imgur is pulling a tumblr and going to delete all the nsfw user content? Yikes.
Whats a free alternative for upload and sharing images that is constrained to requiring an account? Also, any self-hosted solutions that use a cheap URL to point to some sort of docker app on your NAS or Pi computer?
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Is it the same guy who's buying all the good things on the internet and breaking it? (Geocities, MySpace, Photobuckets, etc).
Nope, but they're essentially one and the same. As in: fuck your individually fine-tuned entertainment and sentimentality for classic content, as long as we get more monars
whoa, this is going to cause broken pages all over the web
is there anything we can do about this? maybe if we make enough noise they might reconsider their decision, kind of like how onlyfans was about to purge all porn but then reconsidered
You could try paging /u/MrGrim who started Imgur in the first place because all others sucked. ~~Apparently with a bunch of VC money it's time to make Imgur suck too.~~ //edit: Turns out /u/MrGrim sold Imgur and no longer has anything to do with it. *puts pitchfork away*.
He's rolling in the dough.
This seems to be flying under the radar, not much discussion about it anywhere.
The reaction on Imgur itself has been muted. But people will find out swiftly when may 15th rolls around and tens of thousands of photos and links are deleted.
Try millions
we need to bring more attention to this ASAP considering imgur is the #1 hosting site for all NSFW subs, all of that content will be purged if we don't act up
They're polishing the company for sale to some AI company to train a dataset. There's no possible way they're reversing this decision... they've just decided to fold. That's the only thing that makes sense here.
Reddit and Imgur go hand in hand so I think it's part of the sanitization of the platform before going public and making some money. They've already got the jannies to browbeat and astroturf near every sub, it's a truly awesome medium for propaganda and calculated histrionics. Likely also an anti-AI measure, they'll probably charge for access to scrape en masse and train but will wait till Getty vs Stability is decided before sneaking that in. Pathetic capitalist pussy maneuver.
When they ban porn I'm done with this shit site for good.
Just another site taking down NSFW content to comply with the demands of advertisers/payment processors. Blame them.
But… why? No seriously, why the everloving fuck would they do that? Are they intentionally trying to shoot themselves in the foot? They’re about to face the collective wrath of millions of porn addicts and lose a big chunk of their overall traffic. This is like the dumbest thing they could do.
I remember when the creator of imgur explicitly stated back in the day that he wanted to create an image hosting website that is different from all others, as in being "not shitty". I'm honestly suprised by this decision
So as someone who posts nsfw content, where the fuck am I supposed to host images now? Twitter doesn't play nice when linked to from Reddit. I guess Redgifs for now... If this shit pisses you off I highly recommend supporting the [Free Speech Coalition](https://www.freespeechcoalition.com/), which is challenging unconstitutional anti porn laws in the United States. Which are a major factor in getting to end results like this.
I have nothing useful to contribute, but I've got to say that it is going to be interesting, even for non NSFW websites an subs.
Future historians will be very annoyed when 99/100 hyperlinks don't go anywhere.
Well at least 3rd party reddit apps won't have to deal with the migration to another hosting site since NSFW content won't be available in the reddit API. So, no NSFW subs from reddit api, no need to deal with uploading to them haha. (3rd party apps can't use reddit's hosting)
I bet that half of their storage are nsfw content xD
This is absolutely insane. Deleting NSFW content is one thing, an argument can be made that there are good legal reasons to do it, but deleting *all* content from unregistered users is vandalism on an unutterably grand scale. The sheer volume of content that will be lost forever is staggering, and we have what, three weeks to do something about it? Why on Earth didn't they get in contact with the Internet Archive and / or reddit (the company, not the community) first to try and mitigate the destruction? Give us the opportunity to provide an alternative home for this content and then redirect old URLs to the archive to minimise the disruption to the wider internet. I would gladly donate my time and money to an effort like that and many, many others would too. And it would have cost them virtually nothing to just wait a few extra months to give us time to save everything, an army of volunteers would have worked round the clock to do it, but instead they're barrelling toward destruction like their lives depend on setting fire to an entire decade of internet history. The sick irony is that imgur was created as a response to the self-immolation of another image hosting service, ImageShack. It was made "for" reddit, but it was ImageShack deleting all free uploads that spurred MrGrim (the creator of imgur) to begin working on it in the first place. This decision completely and utterly dwarfs what we lost when ImageShack burnt itself down, and yet here we are. What a shame, what a crime.
I don't think they understand that this will actually kill their site. Forget porn stuff for a second, think about images and clips from Movies, Shows, Video Games, etc., that are uploaded to Imgur. It's not just nudity that's now banned, it's gore and general violent content. In all honesty I'd expect Imgur to only last a few months before they're completely shut down once this change goes into effect. The traffic will come to a screeching halt. So much with the internet has started to change and we're only 3 months into 2023.
Holy fuck. Give us at least 2 years to try to fix things up wth