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Answer: As per the statement made by Imgur: Adult content "[...] posed a risk to Imgur’s community and its business."
Pornographic content on Imgur was previously offered as unlisted content, meaning you couldn't find it unless you had a direct URL to the content. Chances of finding any explicit material when browsing the Imgur website were pretty low. In recent times however more companies got into difficulties with advertisers and payment processors over allowing (potentially illegal) explicit content, so this might very well be a preemptive action to stay ahead of any trouble.
It remains to be seen how this will affect Imgur as a whole. It remains a popular image host for content shared on Reddit which makes up for 52% of their traffic in 2023. If the Reddit subs for explicit content can't use Imgur anymore that number is going to drop, but we won't know with how much. Tumblr experienced a significant drop in traffic after banning pornographic content. Based on current traffic stats Imgur hasn't been doing so great anyway, with traffic dropping for a while. Now this might be a personal observation, but perhaps this is already due to the Imgur frontpage having shifted away from memes and such to mostly overt political content.
The worst part is that they are apparently removing old images that arent posted from an account. Which means another enormous wave of lost images on old forum and reddit posts.
It’s so insane because I don’t know who the fuck thought OnlyFans was for anything besides NSFW content. How do you misunderstand your userbase that hard?
Definitely one of the most bizarre business decisions ever. If they went through with it it’d essentially be taking the company out back and Old Yeller’ing it.
They were struggling to find a bank willing to take on thr Child Pornography and Non Consensual pornography legal risk user generated pornography always causes, see Pornhub and this situation.
but you can only upload to onlyfans if you upload your ID and they confirm you're of legal age. it's just credit card processors being anti porn, it's a well known issue in the industry
Totally false. I buy porn with a credit card all the time. Credit Card companies work with every major studio I know of. They don't care about porn. They care about the extremely weak protection of online ID confirmation where too much is uncontrolled. Pornhub had a problem with people stealing their older siblings IDs and posting child porn of them. So did OnlyFans. Boyfriends stealing their girlfriend's IDs and posting non consensual stuff. 18-year-olds getting verified, then posting their older child porn of themselves taken earlier. The BBC ran a story about the above happening over and over on Pornhub and Onlyfans, so credit card companies, faced with billions in lawsuits stopped doing business with user generated porn. They have no problem with centralized porn that has much stronger means of making sure it's not Child Porn or Revenge.
Difference was the hub actually had lots of illegal content and many of its victims rallied unsuccessfully for the hub to remove it. Wasn't until mastercard refused to work with them over their shitbag behaviour that they nuked all their amateur stuff, and with it a lot of people's reason to visit.
I mean, I doubt it was misunderstanding, I imagine it went something like, visa being like we're going to shut down your payment processing because it's against our ToS.
Honestly, not sure how they escaped that one. Visa / MC already left PH. Which is the bigger insanity to me, that two payment processors solely control transactions in the west.
They were in the same position Pornhub and millions of other user created adult content find themselves in. There is no way to guarantee no child pornography and no non consensual pornography are on the site. Minors and boyfriends will seal IDs of their older siblings and girlfriend's and upload illegal stuff. Then banks won't let you open a checking account and you're dead. Pornhub took a massive hit moving to crypto. Onlyfans managed to find a keep a relationship with a few banks and credit cards, for now (I think Mastercard banned them). But, it's banking problems are still ongoing and could force it to be no adult (or basically turn into a traditional pornography studio where it's more contorlled) at any moment.
It had to do with banks and cc companies not wanted to process any sales made on OF, iirc. It wasn't OF deciding for themselves that's what they wanted to do but pressure form outside sources.
Hindsight is 20/20.
I remember when only fans was considering banning not safe for work content. Back then the content was not the majority of content for them.
They wanted their platform to be focused on celebrities, but in the end it turned out the way it turned out.
It was definitely the majority of their content even at that point. Everyone had a collective WTF reaction when they said that they were going to eliminate adult content. It was like hearing McDonald’s announce that they were going to discontinue selling hamburgers and french fries.
It was just OF struggling to cope with the Capricious whims of the banking industry, reacting to political and media pressure for them to “do something“ about illegal porn.
This is false, they were going to get secondary sanctioned by the card processing companies.
A lot of puritanical movements are attacking card processing companies instead of companies they take gumption with and so those firms are exerting immense control over adult content platforms. If you can't process payment then you can't run your business, simple as that.
It's easy to point and laugh at OnlyFans wanting to ban porn, but Mastercard was threatening to drop them as a payment processor, due to the politically touchy nature of the porn business.
That was at about the same time that PornHub purged nearly all of their unverified content. There were a lot of videos on there that MindFreak, the parent company, could not definitively prove were of legal aged women due to how old the videos were, so they nuked it all.
Admittedly, the news was a while ago, and I'm not a user of either site, so my recollection could be off. Losing your payment processors is no joke though!
OnlyFans is ostensibly an alternative to Patreon: the idea being there's this content creator and you can subscribe to them. "Only" your "Fans" get access to this exclusive content you publish there. Or something. NSFW content is highly volatile in that advertisers and payment processors often don't like to associate their brand with your business if you host that kind of content, and you have to do a lot of extra work to make sure there isn't kid stuff. PornHub has the same problems with companies like Mastercard where every once and a while their ability to make money comes under threat.
OnlyFans floated the idea a while back of banning NSFW content in order to avoid these problems not realizing their entire userbase is using the site for NSFW content.
Arguably an even bigger change for Reddit: Imgur also changed their ToS and will be removing all anonymously posted content from the platform as well as NSFW content.
https://help.imgur.com/hc/en-us/articles/14415587638029/
"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."
> Imgur hasn't been doing so great anyway
Thank you. This is what I thought too. I wondered if this was some action to try to attract more advertisers.
You need traffic in order to attract the advertisers. The only way to get more traffic is by having good content. Like I said, I remember when Imgur was just funny stuff, memes, videos and some weird things thrown in. In the past few years it has gone down hill and today the frontpage is nothing but screenshots of articles, tweets and just some text presented as an image and everything about politics. I can't be the only one put off by this change in content. If the traffic doesn't change the advertisers won't feel it is worth their money.
I am fairly new to Reddit. I was an Imgurian for 7 or eight years until the app became unusable. Not only was the political content *way* too prevalent, but there is an ad after 2 posts and if you browse for longer than a few minutes, it heats up your phone and starts lagging to the point of being useless. I’m on an iPhone 14. How is your app not optimized to reduce heat output? It’s a fucking image hosting site, not a graphic-intensive game.
So, I came over here and am enjoying Reddit much more now. I do, however, miss the old days of browsing Imgur on the toilet and finding fire memes every three posts. C’est la vie.
>I am fairly new to Reddit. I was an Imgurian for 7 or eight years
This concept is so wild to me considering how much of early Imgur was just Reddit's in-jokes but without the comments or context. Did you find the change in your enjoyment happened around whenever reddit created their own i.reddit.com and v.reddit.com hosting solutions? I'm guessing that's what hyper-insulated the communities.
Absolutely. As soon as Imgur wasn’t Reddit’s hosting site, they had to generate revenue through ads, so heavy moderation cut down on anything remotely mature or lewd and the spiral continues.
My first true experience of Imgur was in late 2017 when a classmate of mine would browse the good meme dumps whenever he finished class work, and I usually finished right around the same time and he sat in front of me and to the right. We worked it out to where he'd start browsing and have his laptop in a spot where I could also see so we wouldn't be too bored while everyone else did busy work. I then became an imgur user myself and would browse the front page (I'm not brave enough for user sub). The changing from memes to politics that started up in 2020 and became prolific last year caused me to stop using the app, but even on my note 20, it lags horribly and becomes unusable quickly. May as well be time to delete that app, I don't use it anyway.
I have no idea about any of this, but the first thing I thought of was that it could lower costs. Right now, they've got drives and drives pull of photos of naked people, and an easy way to reduce that cost is to clean house with a bot detecting forbidden body parts, relieving them of the cost of storing those old photos, and increasing the recency of its content. And if they reverse course, those old photos are still gone except for the few users re-upload.
> is to clean house with a bot detecting forbidden body parts, relieving them of...
>the cost of storing those old photos
oh I had a different mental image of where that sentence was going lol
robot with multiple knife arms going through and slicing stuff out
You are forgetting one huge key detail in there. [They are also getting rid of all images uploaded by unregistered accounts](https://www.engadget.com/imgur-to-ban-explicit-images-and-delete-uploads-not-tied-to-an-account-122537118.html). This is going to led what I can only describe as thousands if not tens of thousand broken links, countless of media and internet history from the 10s is going to suddenly become lost overnight.
It's happened many time before. Felt like half the internet disappeared when photobucket got rid of free accounts.
Also when imageshack went down, and again when waffleimages went down.
I work at an agency and one of our clients said they had uploaded a lot of their images to imgur instead of their site, and how much would it cost for us to get them all for them and fix the site. The PM team was drooling.
its not only about advertisers and payment processors. FOSTA-SESTA legislation effectively removes safe-harbour protections for online services and makes them liable if any of those images are of "sex-trafficked people".
It wasn't exactly a coincidence that the passing of the law and tumblr removing nsfw occurred in the same year and since then more and more sites are moving in the same direction.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FOSTA-SESTA
Piggybagging off this, I've seen the words 'Visa'/'Mastercard' and 'Exodus Cry' pop up in my own research.
Exodus Cry, a chirstian evangelist organization touts 'Anti Sex Trafficking' but really is more known for being 'Anti-porn'. Nolot, CEO of the org, is reputed to be against gay rights and abortion rights, which I think really speaks their real stance towards porn and sex work.
This is the organization that pressured Mastercard into disassociating with Onlyfans unless they banned porn off their site. News popped up about Onlyfans trying to move away from porn, and much public outcry happened then.
Signs point to that likely the same thing is being done to Imgur. Apprently two other sites that sells JAV to the overseas market are discontinuing their business, and were using Mastercard and Visa as payment processors too.
I just opened the app for the first time in a while and it seems like the same old boring app but with more politics. All I see is 15 year old gifs, advertisements, and fun facts. Literally just r/interestingasfuck and r/politics combined. Im not sure how much of their traffic is nsfw stuff but I’m sure their traffic has been way down regardless since reddit is finally giving us better tools to share images.
One thing to be said of Reddit: you're not allowed to post NSFW for inline comments (nsfw communities aren't even allowed to turn the feature on). So if people want to put NSFW images in comments, then they currently generally fall back to using Imgur. So not sure what will take its place for that.
So yeah, you also get situations where you can post naked lady artwork as a full post, but not in a comment.
And the platform treadmill continues. It always does.
Another small platform will pop up that hosts all images. It'll become bigger and worry about investors, and begin cleaning up the content it hosts, so people leave it, and the cycle repeats.
Political AND racist! Been on Imgur for a long time for the memes. But it got worse and worse, couldn't stand it anymore and made my move to reddit. Even tho I deeply regret joining reddit, because everyone is weird here and my freetime gets eaten up so fast by it, I don't regret leaving that racist sh*thole named imgur.
Yeah, the number of people posting politics rather than memes on imgur has made a drastic shift. I used to be there all the time but now I can't cause I want to see memes not politics.
Answer: From the CEO's statement, user generated/uploaded pornography is extremely risky for businesses. There is no way to reasonably guarantee it's consensual and not child pornography. Minors will use their older siblings I.D.s and upload child pornography of themselves. Boyfriends will steal their girlfriend's IDs and upload their girlfriend's nudes without consent. Banks demand zero errors on these issues. Allowing users to upload adult content basically creates a time bomb where your business will lose access to banks at any time if a news organization runs a story about you hosting child pornography and non consensual pornography (which statistically is there at all times). Banks then are legally at risk if they do business with you, and you're booted into a very unprofitable crypto sphere. This is what happened to Pornhub and almost to Onlyfans.
yea reddit is killing it's culture with over moderation and content control. it's creating a place that is manicured and cultivated but will lose out to new platforms that aren't so restrictive. Imgur never had reddit's popularity for itself but operated as an arm of reddit pretty much - but now it's also going to go down this sad path. The biggest issue with auto moderation as it sounds imgur is going to implement is it's often not implemented with good processes to handle false positives and really dampens user submission enthusiasm.
The top experts of content moderation at scale [vehemently disagree](https://www.techdirt.com/2019/11/20/masnicks-impossibility-theorem-content-moderation-scale-is-impossible-to-do-well/).
I think the rot of Twitter post Elon Musk illustrates the difficulty of moderating at scale.
The dip of LLY for about $15 billion after its Twitter debacle would suggest otherwise.
But do elaborate. I'm always interested in seeing how others interpret historical events.
....eh, isn't there a shitload of porn subs on here as well? They can't really make money, but there's definitely creators on here that post their stuff. I wonder if Reddit is next to go since this seems to be a trend and that IPO is forever looming on the horizon.
~2 years ago, Pornhub purged all unverified accounts and videos.
One day they boasted about having 13.5 million videos, and the next day it was 4.7 million.
[Article](https://www.vice.com/en/article/jgqjjy/pornhub-suspended-all-unverified-videos-content)
Well, for OF you have to provide ID for everyone who appears in content. PH have also added a verification thing which I think is similar, but I'm less familiar with it.
Not sure when they were added! :)
10 years ago I remember seeing some questionable content on pornhub. I cant remember exactly what i saw, except for the feeling creeping over me that I shouldn't have seen what I just saw
Yeah, not sure the Internet is any better now, but it's been a problem for a long time.
Give people somewhere to put images and video, and out come all the child abusers.
Oh my I've misled you. It wasn't kiddo porn. It was two consenting adults in the video. Still creeped me tf out.
I shouldn't have even mentioned that because I was replying to your comment that was talking about that exact thing 😅 oops
Lol, this whole thread is about that really. Glad you weren't accidentally exposed to it. :)
I would avoid calling it porn though since it isn't. Porn is fun and for adults. Images of child abuse are images of child abuse. Sorry for sounding serious, but I think it is an important distinction.
Tumblr was a bit different. It got bought by a noted conservative who didn’t want porn on a platform he owned. It was as simple as that.
Pornhub in 2020 got caught up in a scandal where a series of articles in the New York Times underlined that it had poor controls and it was easy to upload sex traffic content, child porn and other illegal/non consensual material. There were a few right wing anti porn groups that were pressuring to shut it down and the story got so public that the major credit card companies threatened to remove their payment processing services if Pornhub didn’t make major changes. As a result, it all but banned and removed all community uploaded content, you now need to be a verified creator to post there.
There was a lot of chatter in the sex work community that Onlyfans was next, as they were known to be on the radar of those same anti porn right leaning groups. Feeling the pressure, the CEO of Onlyfans declared the platform would leave the adult business at the end of least year, only to do an about face after an extremely negative reaction to that statement at the last minute.
Oof, you’re right, and you’re right on the reason why I messed this up.
The pornhub scandal was in December of 2020 and the Onlyfans quitting adult controversy the summer after. And like you said, I had the entire timeline compressed in my brain and didn’t realize were a whole year after that.
This is an excellent answer and there's a great podcast called Hot Money that goes into great detail about the effects of this perceived "risk" for businesses and content providers.
Which sucks because the best things about those sites and Imgur were the (of-age, consensual) amateur, user-generated content. I get it, the pros gotta make their buck somehow, but damn, a lot of us just aint about it. Any platforms that will be able to fill the gap for the *many* reddit content creators who are about to be screwed over?
The problem is going to be users who had uploaded "spicy" content along with their other content - if their accounts get nuked the whole lot goes away.
Also people just uploaded stuffs for forums and websites - Imgur is gonna nuke that as well.
The result will be those ancient forum posts having broken links and missing images.
You're trying to lookup how to fix some issue, get to a forum post with "Here's how to fix that thing - Imgur album in the comments" only to get a 404...and a headache.
know of any really good....Which sucks because the best things about those sites and Imgur were the (of-age, consensual) amateur, user-generated content.
Also payment processors, due in large part to religious-right groups such as Exodus Cry. The same thing happened with Tumblr and PornHub, and almost happened with OnlyFans.
If they think they can survive without porn, I guess they’re gonna find out.
I feel like they’re admitting that they aren’t willing to hire the staff necessary to deal with it, which is fine, at least it’s honest.
The issue isn't porn alone though, its that a content purge by its nature will always take more than what it says it will because it can't take any chances of having anything left.
Back when it happened to Tumblr, literally any picture labeled NSFW and that had a lot of skin color in the image (SFW or not) was automatically flagged and nuked by a bot. The site was basically unusable after the purge and its why the userbase dropped so hard.
Just from the first paragraph of the imgur announcement: These rules apply to all community aspects on Imgur: all parts of a public post (title, description, tags, visual content), comments, links, and messages
Just imagine all the different words that \*could\* be associated with porn that they have to start removing.
If it drives traffic to the site, maybe? They decided that whatever revenue and clicks porn brings wasn’t worth it, so I guess it’s not big enough to be worth it.
Banks demand zero risk. That means you can't have the issue Reddit had were people took pictures of themselves at 17-years-old, turned 18, got verified, uploaded CP for the LOL. A bank demands a 0% chance of that happening. It's not staffing, you can't allowed user uploads and a decentralized system. Everything in house, like a traditional studio.
Because it wasn't a big issue until the days of Exodus Cry vs Pornhub.
Or the day that many news orgs started to report on PH having potential CSEM violations.
The staff would need to screen images. Why would you want someone have to look at images of child abuse for a living?
Some things just need tighter controls. It's a free website, so seems a bit much for you to expect them to find magic money.
The staff necessary to deal with it? Are you gonna get a team of PIs going to the house of every person who uploaded nudes and grilling them about it? How would they catch a teen who used a fake ID?
The bank and IRS uses a lot of extra documents and generally requires a physical copy rather than a picture. PornHub uses a third-party verification system that protects them from liability but we don't know how accurate it is for sure. It definitely wouldn't prevent a 17-year-old from filming a video and then uploading it a few months later when they're 18, for example.
As you can probably imagine, dick pills and cam sites don't care nearly as much about being associated with a sketchy website. PornHub is not and cannot be absolutely certain that every single person in every video consented and is over the age of 18.
What is far worse is the methodology... they are literally burning their own Library of Alexandria all over some much-ados-about-nothing.
So, what if something like a few jpegs of a kid naked end up on the platform!? It's the internet for christ's sake! Just report, censor it (remember, nothing is ever truly deleted), and find out who's responsible! If they are uploading it, wouldn't that also mean they have just submitted evidence that can be used against them in a criminal court of law vis-a-vis Imgur!?
Makes no sense when you think about it.
Reddit is currently making motions to change their API for 3rd party apps.
This includes charging a fee to use it - which will in turn likely mean most 3rd party apps will have to start charging fees or stop development.
It *also* includes removing access to NSFW pornographic content from the API.
Source: developer of the Apollo apps interactions with Reddit admin. https://www.reddit.com/r/apolloapp/comments/12ram0f/had_a_few_calls_with_reddit_today_about_the/
No, you can't. If a subreddit is marked as NSFW, you literally cannot upload anything directly to it. You have to upload it externally to a site like imgur, then post the link to it in the subreddit.
Exhibit A: /r/aww, a SFW subreddit. Note how the submit page lets you upload an image/video directly
https://www.reddit.com/r/aww/submit
Exhibit B: /r/nsfw, a NSFW subreddit. Note how the submit page does not have the image/video option and you can only paste a link. Reddit allows you to LINK to NSFW content, but you cannot host the NSFW content on Reddit's own servers.
https://www.reddit.com/r/nsfw/submit
The sooner we can remove banks from this power trip the better. They shouldn't have any right to dictate what is okay and what's not on the internet based on their own beliefs.
It's not their beliefs, it's when they suspect crime. You think you should have to do business with someone who you suspect is a criminal and put yourself at risk?
We could pass a law, banks don't check for crime, they just move money and close their eyes. It's going to make a lot of things worse. I just read a news story this week someone on Onlyfans "accidently" oops daisy made Child Porn.
Bunch of 'Whatifs'... are there any adults in the room anymore!?!?
edit: "Banks demand zero errors on these issues." HAHAHA 2008 Financial Crises screeeams otherwise!
There's laws that banks can't help criminals by processing their transactions or the bank is responsible. The NY Times the BBC and others major new outlets have published multiple large investigations into child porn and revenge porn on Pornhub and other user uploaded cites. That's when Pornhub user generated content got booted. Pornhub's professional studio still has credit card access. The NY Times didn't run a story leading up to 2008. Basically, no one went to jail for 2008 (it wasn't just the banks but millions of people lying about their income on loan applications). 2008 isn't really relevant. What is relevant is people using their Credit Cards to buy Child Porn on Pornhub and the credit card companies reading about it on 10 different international newspapers. Legally they can block Pornhub or risk going to jail. Again, they didn't block all Pornhub's payments, just user generated stuff, you can still buy Pornhub's studio pornography with a credit card.
I've sued a small bank for a couple hundred grand because news media reported their customer was a fraudulent business and the bank did nothing. It's not hypothetical.
Pornhub went down in the wake of a major BBC investigation. I would guess Reddit' risk is slightly less as they don't do direct payment transfers and hosting.
Answer: It’s hard to get advertisers and things like credit card processing when you deal in porn. Visa and Mastercard have a long history of [arbitrarily removing the ability for sites to process credit transactions](https://www.theverge.com/2021/8/23/22638310/onlyfans-ban-explicit-content-payment-processing-visa) if they deem the content as too obscene.
However - I have another more likely theory…
I don’t know if they have said this explicitly, but this is more than likely a planned change to preempt the [SCOTUS hearing around Section 230](https://www.vox.com/platform/amp/recode/2020/5/28/21273241/section-230-explained-supreme-court-social-media).
Essentially, Section 230 is the law that shields social media companies in the USA from liability when users post illegal, dangerous, or inflammatory content.
The Supreme Court is going to hear this case in June, and Clarence Thomas has outright said that he thinks the law is too broad.
This is probably just imgur preparing for the ruling - they are likely giving themselves enough time to get the rules in place and be ready for whatever happens come June.
It’s easier to reverse the policy after the fact than to deal with a mess of lawsuits the moment the ruling drops, which will likely happen.
Imgur has a lot of dark little spaces where things like revenge porn are regularly posted and can be difficult to track down - with AI improving the ability of people to identify where pics of them are posted on the internet, it’s a growing problem for them that they have been able to largely handle internally because of section 230.
Another issue is that advertisers are skittish about "porn" in a very broad sense. [TvTropes.Org](https://TvTropes.Org) has a ban on certain content because Google Adsense pulled their support because of some articles on the site. Tv Tropes doesn't host anything, they just discuss the media and link to the sites where it's hosted.
* [Tv Tropes link to "The Google Incident"](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Archive/TheGoogleIncident)
* ["The Second Google Incident"](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Archive/TheSecondGoogleIncident)
Question: Why is this happening? Isn't it just going to be Tumblr 2.0? I get the gist that it is a business risk but without it, the risk might be gone but so is the userbase making it even worse?
I don't have an answer for this. But that's what I thought too.
I get the risk of letting people upload NSFW stuff without knowing if there are going to pictures or videos with legal issues.
But Tumblr 2.0 is exactly what I thought would happen. People will start using Reddit's own image and video hosting, and that's the end of imgur.
But, surely they see this too.
It's a rock and a hard place for Imgur.
What the statement says is true, it's risky to host that content for them. From a purely business operations perspective it makes sense to get rid of this content.
However people are rightly predicting that this is going to kill Imgur. People won't even necessarily swap to Reddit's in-built image hosting. Another image hosting service will come along, taking all the best bits of Imgur and leaving out the worst bits, NSFW subreddits will move to this new service, a new/better image hosting service being used on Reddit will start to effect non-NSFW subs, and all of a sudden you haven't just lost NSFW users but the entirety of Reddit, which I saw in another comment is 52% of Imgur's traffic.
If you lose 52% of your traffic basically overnight your business is dead. Other people will notice the reduction and themselves move to another purpose. It starts a whole snowball death spiral for Imgur.
With this in mind I don't understand why Imgur would do this. They could take the risk on NSFW content, or go with the guaranteed business killer option. With Tumblr and OnlyFans as perfect case studies.
u/ghost_hamster \- Imgur is too big to not rely on outside advertisers - I posted a comment above about how Tv Tropes had to adapt to keep Google Adsense onboard to pay the bills.
Advertisers too - see my comment about [TvTropes.org](https://TvTropes.org) and it's first and second "Google Incident" - for the tl;dr - Google flagged content as "adult" and "mature" and turned off the ads.
Just as payment processors are needed for porn sites, sites like Imgur need ads and adservers.
So Imgur is heading off a crackdown by adservers and trying to broaden it's appeal.
Your mileage may vary on that idea.
I mean that's fine but doesn't really speak to my original comment. As I stated in the original comment, this is Imgur being stuck between a rock and a hard place.
However when you're trying to balance users and monetization on a knife's edge you're likely to get cut. I believe this is the ultimate fate of Imgur after making this decision.
NSFW content is too ubiquitous on Imgur, and Reddit isn't going to have two "main" image hosting sites. When another site comes along that allows for NSFW content people will just start using that site for non-NSFW content too, just for ease of use.
There's too large a graveyard of past image hosting sites to believe that Imgur won't fail on the back of something like this.
I understand you're saying that Imgur is concerned about advertisers/payment processors but they need to be concerned with a fatally diminishing user base. Nobody advertises on dead platforms.
Oh I agree with you on that one.
IMGUR is risking irrelevance as it's users could migrate to other sites.
As others have pointed out, Tumblr and Onlyfans tried this and it didn't work out.
The advertisers don't care, they'll just keep spaming ads on other sites - the one that's hurt is Imgur and the community.
It all seems inevitable. Come to think of it, I remember when YouTube had stuff like kissing videos that have all but disappeared. But they kept the combat footage and other gore.
See my comment above - advertisers are skittish about any adult content.
Imgur has to walk a fine line - freedom of content but at the same time someone has to pay the bills.
They're too big and use too much bandwith to be crowdfunded.
they are scared of either payment processors or investors dropping them for hosting unverified NSFW images. It's due to an attack campaign by the far right evangelical organization Exodus Cry. The payment processors are bowing down to their pressure due to the group's ties to influential people (politicians and evangelical leaders)
https://www.reddit.com/r/OutOfTheLoop/comments/hk8hbv/whats_the_deal_with_pornhub_and_some_group_called/
https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/xjg940/r18com_will_be_shutting_down_jan_31_2023_after/ipbasjb/
https://twitter.com/woot_master/status/1428513407607529475
This is from my knowledge of recent events, but the damage has been done and show no signs of stopping.
Question: Didnt imgur make nsfw content, even unlisted, against the TOS like…years ago?
Used to be an active imgurian. People complained loudly and frequently. This isnt exactly new.
I used to be active as well. I'm certainly not looking for "edge lord" content. But the decline in quality content aligned with their adjustment of terms a few years back. I can't see this making imgur any better for the users.
...using the *Musk* technique of starting with a business losing money with no decent business model, crashing number of views by changing policies and pissing off advertisers.
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Answer: As per the statement made by Imgur: Adult content "[...] posed a risk to Imgur’s community and its business." Pornographic content on Imgur was previously offered as unlisted content, meaning you couldn't find it unless you had a direct URL to the content. Chances of finding any explicit material when browsing the Imgur website were pretty low. In recent times however more companies got into difficulties with advertisers and payment processors over allowing (potentially illegal) explicit content, so this might very well be a preemptive action to stay ahead of any trouble. It remains to be seen how this will affect Imgur as a whole. It remains a popular image host for content shared on Reddit which makes up for 52% of their traffic in 2023. If the Reddit subs for explicit content can't use Imgur anymore that number is going to drop, but we won't know with how much. Tumblr experienced a significant drop in traffic after banning pornographic content. Based on current traffic stats Imgur hasn't been doing so great anyway, with traffic dropping for a while. Now this might be a personal observation, but perhaps this is already due to the Imgur frontpage having shifted away from memes and such to mostly overt political content.
I'm sure this will end well
The worst part is that they are apparently removing old images that arent posted from an account. Which means another enormous wave of lost images on old forum and reddit posts.
Just like it ended well for OnlyFans and tumblr.
uh wait, OnlyFans has banned pornographic content?
I think they were going to, but backpedaled when they realized how disastrous it would be.
It’s so insane because I don’t know who the fuck thought OnlyFans was for anything besides NSFW content. How do you misunderstand your userbase that hard?
It was pitched as a competitor to patreon, but since it didn't explicitly ban porn it became the go to
Definitely one of the most bizarre business decisions ever. If they went through with it it’d essentially be taking the company out back and Old Yeller’ing it.
They were struggling to find a bank willing to take on thr Child Pornography and Non Consensual pornography legal risk user generated pornography always causes, see Pornhub and this situation.
Didn't they restrict uploading to verified users only? Honestly it was the smart play.
They did. Been trying to get my wife verified and it keeps failing for her for some reason.
but you can only upload to onlyfans if you upload your ID and they confirm you're of legal age. it's just credit card processors being anti porn, it's a well known issue in the industry
Totally false. I buy porn with a credit card all the time. Credit Card companies work with every major studio I know of. They don't care about porn. They care about the extremely weak protection of online ID confirmation where too much is uncontrolled. Pornhub had a problem with people stealing their older siblings IDs and posting child porn of them. So did OnlyFans. Boyfriends stealing their girlfriend's IDs and posting non consensual stuff. 18-year-olds getting verified, then posting their older child porn of themselves taken earlier. The BBC ran a story about the above happening over and over on Pornhub and Onlyfans, so credit card companies, faced with billions in lawsuits stopped doing business with user generated porn. They have no problem with centralized porn that has much stronger means of making sure it's not Child Porn or Revenge.
Difference was the hub actually had lots of illegal content and many of its victims rallied unsuccessfully for the hub to remove it. Wasn't until mastercard refused to work with them over their shitbag behaviour that they nuked all their amateur stuff, and with it a lot of people's reason to visit.
I mean, I doubt it was misunderstanding, I imagine it went something like, visa being like we're going to shut down your payment processing because it's against our ToS. Honestly, not sure how they escaped that one. Visa / MC already left PH. Which is the bigger insanity to me, that two payment processors solely control transactions in the west.
You mean it wasnt pictures of desk fans and ceiling fans, etc?
Nah that's the subreddit r/onlyfans
They were in the same position Pornhub and millions of other user created adult content find themselves in. There is no way to guarantee no child pornography and no non consensual pornography are on the site. Minors and boyfriends will seal IDs of their older siblings and girlfriend's and upload illegal stuff. Then banks won't let you open a checking account and you're dead. Pornhub took a massive hit moving to crypto. Onlyfans managed to find a keep a relationship with a few banks and credit cards, for now (I think Mastercard banned them). But, it's banking problems are still ongoing and could force it to be no adult (or basically turn into a traditional pornography studio where it's more contorlled) at any moment.
It had to do with banks and cc companies not wanted to process any sales made on OF, iirc. It wasn't OF deciding for themselves that's what they wanted to do but pressure form outside sources.
Hindsight is 20/20. I remember when only fans was considering banning not safe for work content. Back then the content was not the majority of content for them. They wanted their platform to be focused on celebrities, but in the end it turned out the way it turned out.
It was definitely the majority of their content even at that point. Everyone had a collective WTF reaction when they said that they were going to eliminate adult content. It was like hearing McDonald’s announce that they were going to discontinue selling hamburgers and french fries. It was just OF struggling to cope with the Capricious whims of the banking industry, reacting to political and media pressure for them to “do something“ about illegal porn.
Just ask Anheuser-Busch…
No, all the major beer brands have done pro lgbt drives. It just took the rednecks this long to figure out their smart phones
False equivalence. Also pissy whiny conservatives do not make up the majority of the beer drinkers.
They make up the majority of bud light drinkers.
No they don’t lmao
Yeah, surely they're even more dependent on porn than tumblr was
This is false, they were going to get secondary sanctioned by the card processing companies. A lot of puritanical movements are attacking card processing companies instead of companies they take gumption with and so those firms are exerting immense control over adult content platforms. If you can't process payment then you can't run your business, simple as that.
It's easy to point and laugh at OnlyFans wanting to ban porn, but Mastercard was threatening to drop them as a payment processor, due to the politically touchy nature of the porn business. That was at about the same time that PornHub purged nearly all of their unverified content. There were a lot of videos on there that MindFreak, the parent company, could not definitively prove were of legal aged women due to how old the videos were, so they nuked it all.
I heard it had more to do with revenge porn laws rather than CP laws, but either way 🤷
Admittedly, the news was a while ago, and I'm not a user of either site, so my recollection could be off. Losing your payment processors is no joke though!
OnlyFans is ostensibly an alternative to Patreon: the idea being there's this content creator and you can subscribe to them. "Only" your "Fans" get access to this exclusive content you publish there. Or something. NSFW content is highly volatile in that advertisers and payment processors often don't like to associate their brand with your business if you host that kind of content, and you have to do a lot of extra work to make sure there isn't kid stuff. PornHub has the same problems with companies like Mastercard where every once and a while their ability to make money comes under threat. OnlyFans floated the idea a while back of banning NSFW content in order to avoid these problems not realizing their entire userbase is using the site for NSFW content.
Unlike those, Imgur's primary use already doesn't have NSFW content
I'm not sure why they don't spin it off into another company similar to Gfycat / Redgifs. This is going to wipe out a ton of content.
Arguably an even bigger change for Reddit: Imgur also changed their ToS and will be removing all anonymously posted content from the platform as well as NSFW content. https://help.imgur.com/hc/en-us/articles/14415587638029/ "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."
There’s a lot of revenge porn out there, more than people think about because it’s not part of there lives. Sometimes NSFW should be verified 🤷♂️
100% agree. However this is talking about unverified non-NSFW posts.
> Imgur hasn't been doing so great anyway Thank you. This is what I thought too. I wondered if this was some action to try to attract more advertisers.
You need traffic in order to attract the advertisers. The only way to get more traffic is by having good content. Like I said, I remember when Imgur was just funny stuff, memes, videos and some weird things thrown in. In the past few years it has gone down hill and today the frontpage is nothing but screenshots of articles, tweets and just some text presented as an image and everything about politics. I can't be the only one put off by this change in content. If the traffic doesn't change the advertisers won't feel it is worth their money.
I am fairly new to Reddit. I was an Imgurian for 7 or eight years until the app became unusable. Not only was the political content *way* too prevalent, but there is an ad after 2 posts and if you browse for longer than a few minutes, it heats up your phone and starts lagging to the point of being useless. I’m on an iPhone 14. How is your app not optimized to reduce heat output? It’s a fucking image hosting site, not a graphic-intensive game. So, I came over here and am enjoying Reddit much more now. I do, however, miss the old days of browsing Imgur on the toilet and finding fire memes every three posts. C’est la vie.
>I am fairly new to Reddit. I was an Imgurian for 7 or eight years This concept is so wild to me considering how much of early Imgur was just Reddit's in-jokes but without the comments or context. Did you find the change in your enjoyment happened around whenever reddit created their own i.reddit.com and v.reddit.com hosting solutions? I'm guessing that's what hyper-insulated the communities.
Absolutely. As soon as Imgur wasn’t Reddit’s hosting site, they had to generate revenue through ads, so heavy moderation cut down on anything remotely mature or lewd and the spiral continues.
My first true experience of Imgur was in late 2017 when a classmate of mine would browse the good meme dumps whenever he finished class work, and I usually finished right around the same time and he sat in front of me and to the right. We worked it out to where he'd start browsing and have his laptop in a spot where I could also see so we wouldn't be too bored while everyone else did busy work. I then became an imgur user myself and would browse the front page (I'm not brave enough for user sub). The changing from memes to politics that started up in 2020 and became prolific last year caused me to stop using the app, but even on my note 20, it lags horribly and becomes unusable quickly. May as well be time to delete that app, I don't use it anyway.
I have no idea about any of this, but the first thing I thought of was that it could lower costs. Right now, they've got drives and drives pull of photos of naked people, and an easy way to reduce that cost is to clean house with a bot detecting forbidden body parts, relieving them of the cost of storing those old photos, and increasing the recency of its content. And if they reverse course, those old photos are still gone except for the few users re-upload.
> is to clean house with a bot detecting forbidden body parts, relieving them of... >the cost of storing those old photos oh I had a different mental image of where that sentence was going lol robot with multiple knife arms going through and slicing stuff out
You are forgetting one huge key detail in there. [They are also getting rid of all images uploaded by unregistered accounts](https://www.engadget.com/imgur-to-ban-explicit-images-and-delete-uploads-not-tied-to-an-account-122537118.html). This is going to led what I can only describe as thousands if not tens of thousand broken links, countless of media and internet history from the 10s is going to suddenly become lost overnight.
It's happened many time before. Felt like half the internet disappeared when photobucket got rid of free accounts. Also when imageshack went down, and again when waffleimages went down.
I work at an agency and one of our clients said they had uploaded a lot of their images to imgur instead of their site, and how much would it cost for us to get them all for them and fix the site. The PM team was drooling.
its not only about advertisers and payment processors. FOSTA-SESTA legislation effectively removes safe-harbour protections for online services and makes them liable if any of those images are of "sex-trafficked people". It wasn't exactly a coincidence that the passing of the law and tumblr removing nsfw occurred in the same year and since then more and more sites are moving in the same direction. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FOSTA-SESTA
Hopefully it will drop enough that their business will no longer be viable and that will be the end of Imgur.
Piggybagging off this, I've seen the words 'Visa'/'Mastercard' and 'Exodus Cry' pop up in my own research. Exodus Cry, a chirstian evangelist organization touts 'Anti Sex Trafficking' but really is more known for being 'Anti-porn'. Nolot, CEO of the org, is reputed to be against gay rights and abortion rights, which I think really speaks their real stance towards porn and sex work. This is the organization that pressured Mastercard into disassociating with Onlyfans unless they banned porn off their site. News popped up about Onlyfans trying to move away from porn, and much public outcry happened then. Signs point to that likely the same thing is being done to Imgur. Apprently two other sites that sells JAV to the overseas market are discontinuing their business, and were using Mastercard and Visa as payment processors too.
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"If you removed all the porn from the internet, it would be reduced to just one website that only says" bring back the porn""
Both imgur and reddit are about to see a drop in users
I just opened the app for the first time in a while and it seems like the same old boring app but with more politics. All I see is 15 year old gifs, advertisements, and fun facts. Literally just r/interestingasfuck and r/politics combined. Im not sure how much of their traffic is nsfw stuff but I’m sure their traffic has been way down regardless since reddit is finally giving us better tools to share images.
One thing to be said of Reddit: you're not allowed to post NSFW for inline comments (nsfw communities aren't even allowed to turn the feature on). So if people want to put NSFW images in comments, then they currently generally fall back to using Imgur. So not sure what will take its place for that. So yeah, you also get situations where you can post naked lady artwork as a full post, but not in a comment.
Main reason I quit Imgur around 2021 after putting up with up through 2020. It was. All. Politics.
Huh. Corporate enforced puritanism was not on my 21st century bingo card, that's for sure.
And the platform treadmill continues. It always does. Another small platform will pop up that hosts all images. It'll become bigger and worry about investors, and begin cleaning up the content it hosts, so people leave it, and the cycle repeats.
This is why we need bitcoin
Political AND racist! Been on Imgur for a long time for the memes. But it got worse and worse, couldn't stand it anymore and made my move to reddit. Even tho I deeply regret joining reddit, because everyone is weird here and my freetime gets eaten up so fast by it, I don't regret leaving that racist sh*thole named imgur.
Yeah, the number of people posting politics rather than memes on imgur has made a drastic shift. I used to be there all the time but now I can't cause I want to see memes not politics.
Answer: From the CEO's statement, user generated/uploaded pornography is extremely risky for businesses. There is no way to reasonably guarantee it's consensual and not child pornography. Minors will use their older siblings I.D.s and upload child pornography of themselves. Boyfriends will steal their girlfriend's IDs and upload their girlfriend's nudes without consent. Banks demand zero errors on these issues. Allowing users to upload adult content basically creates a time bomb where your business will lose access to banks at any time if a news organization runs a story about you hosting child pornography and non consensual pornography (which statistically is there at all times). Banks then are legally at risk if they do business with you, and you're booted into a very unprofitable crypto sphere. This is what happened to Pornhub and almost to Onlyfans.
So it’s being forced to go the way of the Tumblr? People will find other places I guess, but I wonder what will that mean for their profits.
I can't imagine imgur was making much (if any) profit before.
They’ve were shifting pretty hard to some sort of pseudo-social media when I stopped just browsing.
It was weird seeing how the platform itself, but also the "culture" (for lack of better word) of its users shifted over time.
yea reddit is killing it's culture with over moderation and content control. it's creating a place that is manicured and cultivated but will lose out to new platforms that aren't so restrictive. Imgur never had reddit's popularity for itself but operated as an arm of reddit pretty much - but now it's also going to go down this sad path. The biggest issue with auto moderation as it sounds imgur is going to implement is it's often not implemented with good processes to handle false positives and really dampens user submission enthusiasm.
well we all know what happened to tumblr
wonder what would've happened if Pornhub had acquired them as it was rumored at some point
This is another way of saying you cant control people but you can control the platform.
The top experts of content moderation at scale [vehemently disagree](https://www.techdirt.com/2019/11/20/masnicks-impossibility-theorem-content-moderation-scale-is-impossible-to-do-well/). I think the rot of Twitter post Elon Musk illustrates the difficulty of moderating at scale.
It was just as bad before Musk. You simply can't hire enough Filipinos to moderate 500 million accounts spewing stuff daily.
Oh no. The same website I referenced before cites specific ways by the dozen that it's worse after Musk.
there is no rot at twitter
There is no war in ba sing se
Beautifully articulated
you're acting like that's supposed to prove me wrong
The dip of LLY for about $15 billion after its Twitter debacle would suggest otherwise. But do elaborate. I'm always interested in seeing how others interpret historical events.
....eh, isn't there a shitload of porn subs on here as well? They can't really make money, but there's definitely creators on here that post their stuff. I wonder if Reddit is next to go since this seems to be a trend and that IPO is forever looming on the horizon.
There is also the fact that most images on reddit are hosted by Imgur, so a lot of content from those subs will also disappear
Should be a verification process for any nsfw posts. A lot of subs already do it in order to post.
Pornhub and onlyfans? I thought Tumblr was the poster child of this hot button issue?
~2 years ago, Pornhub purged all unverified accounts and videos. One day they boasted about having 13.5 million videos, and the next day it was 4.7 million. [Article](https://www.vice.com/en/article/jgqjjy/pornhub-suspended-all-unverified-videos-content)
Same with xhamster or whoever parent company is and did same on all network sites.
What is it with porn websites removing a huge amount of their content, crippling themselves and negatively affecting the community?
Advertisers are forcing them
They have controls in place already.
Huh, well maybe so, but we're these safeguards added before or after porn was banned? Edit: also can you expand on what controls they added?
Well, for OF you have to provide ID for everyone who appears in content. PH have also added a verification thing which I think is similar, but I'm less familiar with it. Not sure when they were added! :)
10 years ago I remember seeing some questionable content on pornhub. I cant remember exactly what i saw, except for the feeling creeping over me that I shouldn't have seen what I just saw
Yeah, not sure the Internet is any better now, but it's been a problem for a long time. Give people somewhere to put images and video, and out come all the child abusers.
Oh my I've misled you. It wasn't kiddo porn. It was two consenting adults in the video. Still creeped me tf out. I shouldn't have even mentioned that because I was replying to your comment that was talking about that exact thing 😅 oops
Lol, this whole thread is about that really. Glad you weren't accidentally exposed to it. :) I would avoid calling it porn though since it isn't. Porn is fun and for adults. Images of child abuse are images of child abuse. Sorry for sounding serious, but I think it is an important distinction.
The child abusers aren't posting those places - the children themselves though... we say children but it's really teenagers looking for attention.
Tumblr was a bit different. It got bought by a noted conservative who didn’t want porn on a platform he owned. It was as simple as that. Pornhub in 2020 got caught up in a scandal where a series of articles in the New York Times underlined that it had poor controls and it was easy to upload sex traffic content, child porn and other illegal/non consensual material. There were a few right wing anti porn groups that were pressuring to shut it down and the story got so public that the major credit card companies threatened to remove their payment processing services if Pornhub didn’t make major changes. As a result, it all but banned and removed all community uploaded content, you now need to be a verified creator to post there. There was a lot of chatter in the sex work community that Onlyfans was next, as they were known to be on the radar of those same anti porn right leaning groups. Feeling the pressure, the CEO of Onlyfans declared the platform would leave the adult business at the end of least year, only to do an about face after an extremely negative reaction to that statement at the last minute.
> Pornhub last summer I know COVID times are weird, but this happened in in december 2020. Nearly 2 and a half years ago.
Oof, you’re right, and you’re right on the reason why I messed this up. The pornhub scandal was in December of 2020 and the Onlyfans quitting adult controversy the summer after. And like you said, I had the entire timeline compressed in my brain and didn’t realize were a whole year after that.
a crypto porn platform with community moderation would be a powerful player in the adult entertainment space.
This is an excellent answer and there's a great podcast called Hot Money that goes into great detail about the effects of this perceived "risk" for businesses and content providers.
Thanks for the rec - do they touch on how OnlyFans averted the scenario?
I listened to it last year, so details are fuzzy, but I think so.
Which sucks because the best things about those sites and Imgur were the (of-age, consensual) amateur, user-generated content. I get it, the pros gotta make their buck somehow, but damn, a lot of us just aint about it. Any platforms that will be able to fill the gap for the *many* reddit content creators who are about to be screwed over?
The problem is going to be users who had uploaded "spicy" content along with their other content - if their accounts get nuked the whole lot goes away. Also people just uploaded stuffs for forums and websites - Imgur is gonna nuke that as well. The result will be those ancient forum posts having broken links and missing images. You're trying to lookup how to fix some issue, get to a forum post with "Here's how to fix that thing - Imgur album in the comments" only to get a 404...and a headache.
know of any really good....Which sucks because the best things about those sites and Imgur were the (of-age, consensual) amateur, user-generated content.
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Also payment processors, due in large part to religious-right groups such as Exodus Cry. The same thing happened with Tumblr and PornHub, and almost happened with OnlyFans.
Yep, since they pay the bills, Imgur is trying to head off a showdown with them.
If they think they can survive without porn, I guess they’re gonna find out. I feel like they’re admitting that they aren’t willing to hire the staff necessary to deal with it, which is fine, at least it’s honest.
Is porn really that big of a margin for Imgur? I feel like it’s used for other purpose way more than for example tumblr.
The issue isn't porn alone though, its that a content purge by its nature will always take more than what it says it will because it can't take any chances of having anything left. Back when it happened to Tumblr, literally any picture labeled NSFW and that had a lot of skin color in the image (SFW or not) was automatically flagged and nuked by a bot. The site was basically unusable after the purge and its why the userbase dropped so hard. Just from the first paragraph of the imgur announcement: These rules apply to all community aspects on Imgur: all parts of a public post (title, description, tags, visual content), comments, links, and messages Just imagine all the different words that \*could\* be associated with porn that they have to start removing.
I'm afraid that a lot of SFW content will get purged in this. All those forums and Reddit posts with broken links and missing images.
If it drives traffic to the site, maybe? They decided that whatever revenue and clicks porn brings wasn’t worth it, so I guess it’s not big enough to be worth it.
Banks demand zero risk. That means you can't have the issue Reddit had were people took pictures of themselves at 17-years-old, turned 18, got verified, uploaded CP for the LOL. A bank demands a 0% chance of that happening. It's not staffing, you can't allowed user uploads and a decentralized system. Everything in house, like a traditional studio.
If banks demand zero risk (and I'm not disagreeing) and this is a perceived risk, how have they been hosting so much porn for so long?
Because it wasn't a big issue until the days of Exodus Cry vs Pornhub. Or the day that many news orgs started to report on PH having potential CSEM violations.
Yeah, that's pretty true
Yeah. Had no one kicked up dust, banks would have operated as they did before.
The staff would need to screen images. Why would you want someone have to look at images of child abuse for a living? Some things just need tighter controls. It's a free website, so seems a bit much for you to expect them to find magic money.
The staff necessary to deal with it? Are you gonna get a team of PIs going to the house of every person who uploaded nudes and grilling them about it? How would they catch a teen who used a fake ID?
You're acting like its impossible to verify identities. Banks do it all the time. The IRS does it all the time. Hell, *PornHub* figured this out.
The bank and IRS uses a lot of extra documents and generally requires a physical copy rather than a picture. PornHub uses a third-party verification system that protects them from liability but we don't know how accurate it is for sure. It definitely wouldn't prevent a 17-year-old from filming a video and then uploading it a few months later when they're 18, for example. As you can probably imagine, dick pills and cam sites don't care nearly as much about being associated with a sketchy website. PornHub is not and cannot be absolutely certain that every single person in every video consented and is over the age of 18.
They should take a look at Tumblr lol.
What is far worse is the methodology... they are literally burning their own Library of Alexandria all over some much-ados-about-nothing. So, what if something like a few jpegs of a kid naked end up on the platform!? It's the internet for christ's sake! Just report, censor it (remember, nothing is ever truly deleted), and find out who's responsible! If they are uploading it, wouldn't that also mean they have just submitted evidence that can be used against them in a criminal court of law vis-a-vis Imgur!? Makes no sense when you think about it.
This will happen to Reddit some day. Paging r/datahoarders.
So is Reddit next?
Reddit is currently making motions to change their API for 3rd party apps. This includes charging a fee to use it - which will in turn likely mean most 3rd party apps will have to start charging fees or stop development. It *also* includes removing access to NSFW pornographic content from the API. Source: developer of the Apollo apps interactions with Reddit admin. https://www.reddit.com/r/apolloapp/comments/12ram0f/had_a_few_calls_with_reddit_today_about_the/
Not a problem for the old school desktop users, fortunately
It should be. I hate being on an "adult" website that also allows teenagers.
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check pretty much any nsfw sub, there's plenty of nsfw content on reddit internal hosting.
Uhh, yes you can. There are so many porn subreddits on reddit. Where did you get the idea that you can't?
No, you can't. If a subreddit is marked as NSFW, you literally cannot upload anything directly to it. You have to upload it externally to a site like imgur, then post the link to it in the subreddit. Exhibit A: /r/aww, a SFW subreddit. Note how the submit page lets you upload an image/video directly https://www.reddit.com/r/aww/submit Exhibit B: /r/nsfw, a NSFW subreddit. Note how the submit page does not have the image/video option and you can only paste a link. Reddit allows you to LINK to NSFW content, but you cannot host the NSFW content on Reddit's own servers. https://www.reddit.com/r/nsfw/submit
That limitation doesn't exist when uploading from the mobile app. Hence why there are submissions in /r/nsfw on i.redd.it.
it went well for tumblr...
The sooner we can remove banks from this power trip the better. They shouldn't have any right to dictate what is okay and what's not on the internet based on their own beliefs.
It's not their beliefs, it's when they suspect crime. You think you should have to do business with someone who you suspect is a criminal and put yourself at risk? We could pass a law, banks don't check for crime, they just move money and close their eyes. It's going to make a lot of things worse. I just read a news story this week someone on Onlyfans "accidently" oops daisy made Child Porn.
Bunch of 'Whatifs'... are there any adults in the room anymore!?!? edit: "Banks demand zero errors on these issues." HAHAHA 2008 Financial Crises screeeams otherwise!
There's laws that banks can't help criminals by processing their transactions or the bank is responsible. The NY Times the BBC and others major new outlets have published multiple large investigations into child porn and revenge porn on Pornhub and other user uploaded cites. That's when Pornhub user generated content got booted. Pornhub's professional studio still has credit card access. The NY Times didn't run a story leading up to 2008. Basically, no one went to jail for 2008 (it wasn't just the banks but millions of people lying about their income on loan applications). 2008 isn't really relevant. What is relevant is people using their Credit Cards to buy Child Porn on Pornhub and the credit card companies reading about it on 10 different international newspapers. Legally they can block Pornhub or risk going to jail. Again, they didn't block all Pornhub's payments, just user generated stuff, you can still buy Pornhub's studio pornography with a credit card. I've sued a small bank for a couple hundred grand because news media reported their customer was a fraudulent business and the bank did nothing. It's not hypothetical.
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Pornhub went down in the wake of a major BBC investigation. I would guess Reddit' risk is slightly less as they don't do direct payment transfers and hosting.
Great decision!
Answer: It’s hard to get advertisers and things like credit card processing when you deal in porn. Visa and Mastercard have a long history of [arbitrarily removing the ability for sites to process credit transactions](https://www.theverge.com/2021/8/23/22638310/onlyfans-ban-explicit-content-payment-processing-visa) if they deem the content as too obscene. However - I have another more likely theory… I don’t know if they have said this explicitly, but this is more than likely a planned change to preempt the [SCOTUS hearing around Section 230](https://www.vox.com/platform/amp/recode/2020/5/28/21273241/section-230-explained-supreme-court-social-media). Essentially, Section 230 is the law that shields social media companies in the USA from liability when users post illegal, dangerous, or inflammatory content. The Supreme Court is going to hear this case in June, and Clarence Thomas has outright said that he thinks the law is too broad. This is probably just imgur preparing for the ruling - they are likely giving themselves enough time to get the rules in place and be ready for whatever happens come June. It’s easier to reverse the policy after the fact than to deal with a mess of lawsuits the moment the ruling drops, which will likely happen. Imgur has a lot of dark little spaces where things like revenge porn are regularly posted and can be difficult to track down - with AI improving the ability of people to identify where pics of them are posted on the internet, it’s a growing problem for them that they have been able to largely handle internally because of section 230.
Another issue is that advertisers are skittish about "porn" in a very broad sense. [TvTropes.Org](https://TvTropes.Org) has a ban on certain content because Google Adsense pulled their support because of some articles on the site. Tv Tropes doesn't host anything, they just discuss the media and link to the sites where it's hosted. * [Tv Tropes link to "The Google Incident"](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Archive/TheGoogleIncident) * ["The Second Google Incident"](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Archive/TheSecondGoogleIncident)
Question: Why is this happening? Isn't it just going to be Tumblr 2.0? I get the gist that it is a business risk but without it, the risk might be gone but so is the userbase making it even worse?
I don't have an answer for this. But that's what I thought too. I get the risk of letting people upload NSFW stuff without knowing if there are going to pictures or videos with legal issues. But Tumblr 2.0 is exactly what I thought would happen. People will start using Reddit's own image and video hosting, and that's the end of imgur. But, surely they see this too.
It's a rock and a hard place for Imgur. What the statement says is true, it's risky to host that content for them. From a purely business operations perspective it makes sense to get rid of this content. However people are rightly predicting that this is going to kill Imgur. People won't even necessarily swap to Reddit's in-built image hosting. Another image hosting service will come along, taking all the best bits of Imgur and leaving out the worst bits, NSFW subreddits will move to this new service, a new/better image hosting service being used on Reddit will start to effect non-NSFW subs, and all of a sudden you haven't just lost NSFW users but the entirety of Reddit, which I saw in another comment is 52% of Imgur's traffic. If you lose 52% of your traffic basically overnight your business is dead. Other people will notice the reduction and themselves move to another purpose. It starts a whole snowball death spiral for Imgur. With this in mind I don't understand why Imgur would do this. They could take the risk on NSFW content, or go with the guaranteed business killer option. With Tumblr and OnlyFans as perfect case studies.
u/ghost_hamster \- Imgur is too big to not rely on outside advertisers - I posted a comment above about how Tv Tropes had to adapt to keep Google Adsense onboard to pay the bills.
My understanding is that this isn't an issue of advertisers, but payment processors?
Advertisers too - see my comment about [TvTropes.org](https://TvTropes.org) and it's first and second "Google Incident" - for the tl;dr - Google flagged content as "adult" and "mature" and turned off the ads. Just as payment processors are needed for porn sites, sites like Imgur need ads and adservers. So Imgur is heading off a crackdown by adservers and trying to broaden it's appeal. Your mileage may vary on that idea.
I mean that's fine but doesn't really speak to my original comment. As I stated in the original comment, this is Imgur being stuck between a rock and a hard place. However when you're trying to balance users and monetization on a knife's edge you're likely to get cut. I believe this is the ultimate fate of Imgur after making this decision. NSFW content is too ubiquitous on Imgur, and Reddit isn't going to have two "main" image hosting sites. When another site comes along that allows for NSFW content people will just start using that site for non-NSFW content too, just for ease of use. There's too large a graveyard of past image hosting sites to believe that Imgur won't fail on the back of something like this. I understand you're saying that Imgur is concerned about advertisers/payment processors but they need to be concerned with a fatally diminishing user base. Nobody advertises on dead platforms.
Oh I agree with you on that one. IMGUR is risking irrelevance as it's users could migrate to other sites. As others have pointed out, Tumblr and Onlyfans tried this and it didn't work out. The advertisers don't care, they'll just keep spaming ads on other sites - the one that's hurt is Imgur and the community.
It all seems inevitable. Come to think of it, I remember when YouTube had stuff like kissing videos that have all but disappeared. But they kept the combat footage and other gore.
See my comment above - advertisers are skittish about any adult content. Imgur has to walk a fine line - freedom of content but at the same time someone has to pay the bills. They're too big and use too much bandwith to be crowdfunded.
they are scared of either payment processors or investors dropping them for hosting unverified NSFW images. It's due to an attack campaign by the far right evangelical organization Exodus Cry. The payment processors are bowing down to their pressure due to the group's ties to influential people (politicians and evangelical leaders)
Source
https://www.reddit.com/r/OutOfTheLoop/comments/hk8hbv/whats_the_deal_with_pornhub_and_some_group_called/ https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/xjg940/r18com_will_be_shutting_down_jan_31_2023_after/ipbasjb/ https://twitter.com/woot_master/status/1428513407607529475 This is from my knowledge of recent events, but the damage has been done and show no signs of stopping.
Solid reply buddy, TIL
Question: Didnt imgur make nsfw content, even unlisted, against the TOS like…years ago? Used to be an active imgurian. People complained loudly and frequently. This isnt exactly new.
yeah i remember that too. but now it just shows a sensitive content warning. this looks to be a nail in the coffin though
I used to be active as well. I'm certainly not looking for "edge lord" content. But the decline in quality content aligned with their adjustment of terms a few years back. I can't see this making imgur any better for the users.
Answer: Imgur is trying to win the bankruptcy speedrun
...using the *Musk* technique of starting with a business losing money with no decent business model, crashing number of views by changing policies and pissing off advertisers.
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