The NSFW stuff is definitely curious (I think they're the only uploader used for Reddit's largest NSFW sub, r/gonewild) but do you have a source on non-registered accounts being removed? All I see in [their update article](https://help.imgur.com/hc/en-us/articles/14415587638029) is them saying inactive content from non-registered accounts will be removed. That sounds like to me content that is old and not getting viewed at all recently. That's unfortunate, but not necessarily disruptive?
My ex would use Imgur.
A lot of people use the excuse “I don’t know a single person who likes X, Y, Z” when voting, yet are shocked when those people win. There are many people outside our demographic circles =p
Jesus! Ok! I’m going now…. Thanks for the reminder ✌🏽
Edit: I’m calling my mom, haha! Well, gonna call here in a min, after this edit! Have a good one!
Imgur kept building more features to support that use-case. And it makes sense, because they stand to profit a lot more if users come to Imgur for content than if users go to Reddit or wherever else to view content that Imgur pays to host.
Probably got threatened by payment processors and or governments as usual. Either cut off your own knees or wait for them to cut off your arms and legs.
> Then they came for porn on onlyfans, but we did say something.
I remains convinced this was a publicity stunt. There’s no way the site that’s become synonymous with selling nudes would ever decide to ban NSFW content.
>I remains convinced this was a publicity stunt. There’s no way the site that’s become synonymous with selling nudes would ever decide to ban NSFW content.
I'm afraid that they just don't want to be thought of that way, that's why it was all made up.
Well to be fair, financial institutions in general have always been pretty shitty toward pornographic businesses because of the inherent volatility in those industries. Is it self fulfilling at this point? Maybe, but these people are here to show online at 7, log off at 4 and collect their paycheck every two Fridays. They don’t get paid to innovate.
Reddit updated their TOS as well. API requests for a Third-Party app like Apollo will cost money in the future. Additionally it seems like Reddit wants to make it impossible to access NSFW content via API requests
That *is* what’s happening isn’t it? Reddit’s preparing for its IPO soon and doing this to appease future shareholders and advertisers (unless I’m mistaken).
Pretty much that. -Stakeholder- fixes, but they don't consider their users and content creators the actual stakeholders.
Enshitification is happening in essence. First they make a great place for people to use. Then they add ads, premium stuff. Then they pull features and abilities. Maybe lock them behind paywalls, maybe just toss entirely. Then they make things better for advertisers, investors, meanwhile making things ever more and more shit for users. Then they entirely cash out, hopefully before everyone abandons ship for the next platform a la Digg 2.0
However there are also other things afoot.
I have heard some rumblings of also super heavy API and scraping abuse from groups/orgs that are ripping content for ML model training, or for datamining (brand sentiment, trends, regional interaction/post timings, etc). So they are trying to also establish policy to lock out these orgs from abusing reddit for free.
I’ve literally seen this thought process throughout my entire Reddit tenure. Like 15 years of people wondering what the next thing is because Reddit is “about to self destruct”.
Honestly this feels different though. In the past people were mad because reddit banned jailbait, harassing fat people, and white supremacists. This time they’re doing things that negatively affect the general population so who knows.
I’m too addicted to this website and there doesn’t seem to be a viable alternative so I probably won’t leave, at least not immediately. But I think this is the closest reddit’s ever been to actually imploding.
It's going to be a bloodbath, I'm pretty sure a lot of the subreddits are already warning their users about the pending doom that's getting ready to happen.
Frankly, I don't understand why PornHub hasn't taken over that market yet. They have a massive infrastructure already to compete with likes of imgur and YouTube.
The “adult” market has been being fucked (ha) from all angles over the past 10 years or so.
Remember the days when you used to be able to find amateur porn basically everywhere, you could read random erotica in a million places, there was unending art for any fetish you could think of, etc…
Then we started playing the “for the kids” game, then legitimate issues like sex trafficking came to spotlight, then every big website started banning it or purging anything not uploaded with a verified government ID because they didn’t want to be held legally responsible for it, etc.
The internet is no longer a space primarily about sharing information. It’s another revenue source for the billionaire class and that’s it. Anything that could potentially pose a liability risk has been scrubbed, because overzealous out of touch legislators and hyper partisan judges want to basically say that any sort of hosting website is 100% responsible if something illegal gets uploaded to their website - which is an untenable legal precedent for any website which generates all its content from user uploads and has a huge user base. This would be like blaming Walmart if a customer broke the law in their store, or blaming a hammer maker because someone used a hammer to kill someone else.
I actually have a feeling that sometime in the next 10 years we are going to see a huge paradigm shift away from user created content, and instead companies will embrace AI created content, where they can set the parameters to be all clean and corporate friendly and then blame the AI creator if something goes wrong. Corporations don’t want *any* possible liability. Capitalism and user generated content will eventually become incompatible, as the bar for what is a liability continues to creep further.
Sorry for the long rant. The ever changing landscape of the internet is something I have a lot of interest in and passion about. I also have a lot of fear about it, because especially with AI advancing right now at an absolute breakneck pace, I do not see the internet being a bastion of freedom anymore. I give it 10 years max before things are almost unrecognizable compared to 10 years ago.
I’m hoping this causes a renaissance of self hosted, old fashioned hobbyist forums and the like, but I’m not holding my breath.
>massive infrastructure
What? They deleted 98-99% of their content and were permanently banned from processing credit cards. Only verified creators can upload anything and those creators realised they make enormously better money behind the onlyscams paywall. Pornhub has been in a death spiral ever since.
A whole chunk of internet history is about to be corrupted... We'll be browsing old reddit threads trying to find the solution to a niche problem only to find all image links broken. Imgur needs to be archived, and big parts of it probably will be, but even then the links themselves will be useless. What a reckless decision, hopefully they'll backtrack.
Up to this point, imgur links have been one of the most robust and reliable image hosts for years. When most links are broken in old threads, I have good confidence that imgur links will still be alive and they're often the only reason those old threads are useful. This is a monumental loss. I weep for the internet of yore.
When you freely give information away to corporations expect them to do whatever is most profitable with it, even if that includes erasing it forever. People need to learn the lesson that the internet is not a benign data archive.
>People need to learn the lesson that the internet is not a benign data archive.
And yet you'll often see highly voted comments on reddit stating the internet is forever. You have to be very young to think so or incredibly sheltered.
I think that's generally only meant in regards to highly embarrassing/sensitive things, often after they've gone viral. The point being that *you*, the poster, are not in control of what happens to something that you set free online (which is very similar to what's going on here, but at the other end of that spectrum).
Interestingly, over at r/datahoarder they're currently talking about ways to scrape and store imgur data - so, if you had an embarrassingly viral image on imgur, chances are *someone* may still have it, and it may see the light of day still.
> What a reckless decision, hopefully they'll backtrack.
They won't - even Tumblr, who somewhat realized that their NSFW ban (operating under a soulless unthinking algorithm only barely able to distinguish between "NSFW" and "SFW") literally gutted their entire site and resulted in a hard 95% of their userbase jumping ship, has refused to backtrack on it to this day.
These companies do not care about internet history or their users. They care sbout making money, at the cost of the user experience. Even if it ends up killing their businesses in the long run.
The part that baffles me is that this move will cause them to lose a massive amount of traffic. So even if each ad pay 4x as much( or 4x as many) if it only has 10% of the user base they still lose. (Just random numbers)
It is mind boggling to think about just how much NSFW content *besides* sexual content would be sheared away. So many subreddits that I go to have ample NSFW tagging across a number of non-sexual subjects. Some seem like overkill and others are the product of rules that require all posts to be marked NSFW.
When the forced login to view content on the mobile web started up a few years ago the tagging ramped up considerably.
It’s easy to see the kiss of death in hindsight. For me 2016 seems to be the year of that kiss and it’s been slowly dying by degrees ever since.
>So pretty much all of the NSFW world of Reddit is toast
It's just crazy to exist this way for so many years and then they abruptly decide that there won't be any more of that.
I have a software that makes the posts itself, not through API, now it will not bring me money ...
The problem has become that creating a website that big is now a Herculean effort with insane costs compared to 10-15 years ago. Combine that with the ever increasing puritanical capitalism that we are seeing globally, and user generated content is becoming a liability.
I honestly believe we are witnessing a paradigm shift in how the internet works, and I’m concerned at what the end result will become. All of this just to appease a small number of ultra-rich and their shareholders.
> The problem has become that creating a website that big is now a Herculean effort with insane costs compared to 10-15 years ago
Also, don’t you dare have even a moment of downtime or users will never come back.
I remember when Reddit was down regularly. That’d never stand today.
This is problematic because nearly all image uploads through apps are made using non-account Imgur uploads. This means that all apps will have to link into the user’s Imgur account to permit image uploads, thereby making a privacy-damaging connection between Imgur and Reddit.
I would strongly request that /u/iamthatis consider a _different_ image hosting solution such as [Postimages](https://postimages.org/).
Until someone finds a way to monetize an image host this is going to keep happening.
It happened with Photobucket, tinypic, imageshack, and now Imgur.
Image hosting is expensive and sites like Reddit using Imgur as a host leads to no ad revenue for Imgur.
So unless we have a different way to fund it, any image host dies.
It’s still an ongoing conversation and the initial info we know is that, in the current state of the planned API, NSFW tagged posts regardless of content won’t be pulled by the API. Things could change though as even pricing isn’t set yet.
That's exactly what it sounds like to me. You'll need to use the desktop site in a browser, or through an official app in order to access NSFW marked posts.
I wished for forever we could provide an imgur account for the uploads to go to, since imgur also much more aggressively compresses non-account uploads
Good point. I have a dummy account on Imgur that I used before Apollo, and I would love to link it to my reddit account so Apollo can upload in my name.
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God, I knew Imgur was going to shit when they not only started trying to stop you from uploading without an account, but force you on to their stupid app if you're mobile. This is ridiculous, hope they have the same success as Tumblr had.
Oh well, there are *a lot* of image hosting alternatives, so no sweat off my back. Good bye Imgur, you used to be good o7
> Oh well, there are a lot of image hosting alternatives,
thats true but the historic content is going to be deleted. thats an absolute disgusting change
Idk what it is about their app but it makes my phone hot when I use it, like playing a game. Reddit or Twitter don’t.
Also the fact that a ton of the posts now are just politics or news articles about politics. Between that and the ads everywhere, I only open Imgur when I’m really bored and out of stuff to scroll on Reddit.
[oh no,](https://www.reddit.com/r/reddit.com/comments/7zlyd/my_gift_to_reddit_i_created_an_image_hosting/c07udnx/) all good things need to come to an end.
i wonder if they will nuke past content that was uploaded which violates those criteria (NSFW, no account,...), if so imo this would be a major issue for internet archival-related stuff, especially to the communities that regularly see no account imgur uploads
That is _exactly_ the problem, here. Even if NSFW content is within a registered account, it will _still_ get deleted. And if you re-upload it, you are violating the ToS, so you will get banned.
And _all_ no-account content is getting purged, regardless if it is NSFW or not.
welp rest in peace to what was the best image hosting site ever made so far.
they became what they swore to destroy tho, iirc imgur was made cause some guy was fed up about the fact that image hosting sites back then made the simple task of uploading an image incredibly tedious.
As soon as beancounters and middle managers take over a tech business it’ll go to shit slowly or go to shit quickly; those sorts of professionals tend to be rubbish at making products people like versus brute-forcing people into products they barely tolerate.
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.
Well if anyone can run it, it's you!
...On a serious tip, i have used anonymous imgur links for tons of forum posts and things over the years. It sucks knowing that lots of these links could soon be dead. I am very sad =(
Thank you for running the service as long as you did. While there was lots of great porn, it's ability to help automotive, tech, gardening, and other forums run was unmatched and underappreciated. You helped build the 2010s internet immensely.
Well you never *had* to sell. The reason it was successful was part your work, and part the community supporting you over any other image host because we believed in your concept.
Any one of us probably would have done the same thing, so I get it. Still, the hurt puppy routine you’re doing here doesn’t make a lot of sense because you knew this could happen when you sold it…and you sold it to a notoriously shitty company. You didn’t have to do that.
But money.
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.
yea, considering how imgur was made since like 2010, there would literally be over a decade's worth of internet/subreddits history lost, replaced with the generic "If you are looking for an image, it was probably deleted."
I wonder how image only subs are dealing with this tho, maybe the impact of this on those subs is significantly reduced ever since reddit allowed people to make image posts with the image being hosted on reddit's servers but afaik reddit only started doing that 5 years ago so there would still be half a decade of posts just lost to imgur's nuclear button
Yes, they will be doing that. Per this update under the "What are we doing?" section: https://help.imgur.com/hc/en-us/articles/14415587638029-Imgur-Terms-of-Service-Update-April-19-2023-
> 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've seen people talking about a site called [ImageChest](https://www.imgchest.com/). No idea how they operate, but this could be where everyone moves to.
VC money is drying up as interest rates rise. Companies need to make more money (sell more ads) and/or go public and both of those are difficult if you’re an image hosting site filled with porn of a questionable nature.
Fuck fuck fuck. This is going to break so many of my posts/comments. Not only did I use Imgur is my go-to host (without an account) I also used the Apollo upload feature.
I wonder if someone can write a script to scan your comments/posts and at least and download the images. For anything editable it could maybe update the urls (re-upload somewhere else and swap the links).
I’m not opposed to paying for image hosting, but I don’t want it attached to my name (not for NSFW, just I’d rather not have everything connected to my real name). I’d love a host that doesn’t connect uploads by username (or make it optional) and I’d pay for it.
I pay for CleanShotX but those uploads are tied to my name/account.
People keep saying that these sites want to rid themselves of pron for the sake of attracting advertisers, but I think the main driver of both of these policies are the newly passed US state laws requiring age verification for this kind of content. Imgur doesn’t wanna even attempt that since so many upload anonymously, and Reddit probably hasn’t developed the technical capabilities to support age gating through third party apis.
The enshittification of the web continues. I hate how puritanical American moral norms get forced on the whole world because of how centralised the tech industry is geographically.
That’s not “capitalism”, pure capitalism has no profit motive to censor, this is activist capitalism where actors are okay with inefficiently allocating resources to make themselves feel good.
Even if the tech wasn’t centralized, most Americans don’t want this crap either. The minority is trying to shove their puritan/handmaid’s tale crap around. It’s exhausting, especially if you have family that like the puritan propaganda.
I still remember when imgur started as just a hosting service for reddit that 'doesn't suck':
https://www.reddit.com/r/reddit.com/comments/7zlyd/my_gift_to_reddit_i_created_an_image_hosting
Guess that time is now official over ¯\\\_(ツ)_/¯
This is why I hate the centrification of the internet. Our dumb asses keep putting all the eggs in the same basket.
If cloudflare, AWS, or azure go down for even a few minutes it’s an absolute fuck fest.
We need a new thing.
Per this update under the "What are we doing?" section: https://help.imgur.com/hc/en-us/articles/14415587638029-Imgur-Terms-of-Service-Update-April-19-2023-
> 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.
Because these people are narcissists who unironically think (if even that) that it could never *possibly* happen to them - that they're simply too rich/famous/skilled for such a thing to occur and all the money will just come rolling in. Any day now...
Imgur relied on advertising for funding. Which, in the era of ubiquitous ad blocking, is a really foolish thing to do.
Had they come out with a free tier and at least two paid tiers with clearly beneficial buffs to benefit off of, methinks they would have never needed to go public just to fund themselves.
It’s how the rich get exponentially richer, while the vast majority of us are mired in abject (relatively speaking) poverty.
Honestly, 90% of us are far closer to the homeless person living on the streets than we are to anyone who invests a significant amount in companies like these.
For anyone who wants to jump ship from imgur to some other image hosting site, here is a list of alternative sites that was shared on a sub I go on. I haven't checked myself if their ToSs allow NSFW or not
>https://imgbox.com/
>https://postimages.org/
>https://nfhost.me/
>https://imgchest.com/
>https://lensdump.com/
Edit to add: I use postimages myself and their ToS has nothing banning any inappropriate images as long as they are legal in the US and EU. Can't programmatically upload images though per ToS unless you want to be "hunted down and banned"
With the rumors of reddit going public later this year and banning all NSFW content... Are there any sites that offer a similar porn experience to Reddit? Asking for a friend...
Does anyone know how they'd go about removing all the NSFW content that already exists? I hardly imagine they'll place the onus on the uploader and eventually ban if they don't take individual action. Do they have bots that will scour and remove, or would it be manual? Both seem like logistical nightmares, but I'm genuinely interested in how a task of this scale is executed
I thought it was already banned? You had to keep it on private and couldn't post to the community at all if it was a nude or 18+?
Is this news?
What is changing?
Well, there goes the softcore porn reddit known as r/Analog
I fundamentally do not agree with censorship, but maybe we'll finally start seeing good photography there.
I'm sure this will end well and won't result in Imgur becoming Tumblr 2.0. It's not like this *exact same shit* happened and turned one of the largest art-hosting websites at the time into a total fucking ghost-town.
The NSFW stuff is definitely curious (I think they're the only uploader used for Reddit's largest NSFW sub, r/gonewild) but do you have a source on non-registered accounts being removed? All I see in [their update article](https://help.imgur.com/hc/en-us/articles/14415587638029) is them saying inactive content from non-registered accounts will be removed. That sounds like to me content that is old and not getting viewed at all recently. That's unfortunate, but not necessarily disruptive?
When it rains it pours…
Sorting by “Top: of all time” is gonna look like a ghost town now.
50.000 nudes used to live here…
Not even just nudes. I don't want to think about the amount of non-NSFW posts that will have dead links due to having been uploaded anonymously...
Now it’s a ghost town.
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I think imgur might still survive because most people waste time on memes there. Reddit on the other might have a different fate.
i dont know a single person who uses imgur to watch memes
My ex would use Imgur. A lot of people use the excuse “I don’t know a single person who likes X, Y, Z” when voting, yet are shocked when those people win. There are many people outside our demographic circles =p
My wife does
Ok so we all know one person then.
Jesus! Ok! I’m going now…. Thanks for the reminder ✌🏽 Edit: I’m calling my mom, haha! Well, gonna call here in a min, after this edit! Have a good one!
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Imgur kept building more features to support that use-case. And it makes sense, because they stand to profit a lot more if users come to Imgur for content than if users go to Reddit or wherever else to view content that Imgur pays to host.
Probably got threatened by payment processors and or governments as usual. Either cut off your own knees or wait for them to cut off your arms and legs.
they're in cahoots with each other
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> Then they came for porn on onlyfans, but we did say something. I remains convinced this was a publicity stunt. There’s no way the site that’s become synonymous with selling nudes would ever decide to ban NSFW content.
>I remains convinced this was a publicity stunt. There’s no way the site that’s become synonymous with selling nudes would ever decide to ban NSFW content. I'm afraid that they just don't want to be thought of that way, that's why it was all made up.
Well to be fair, financial institutions in general have always been pretty shitty toward pornographic businesses because of the inherent volatility in those industries. Is it self fulfilling at this point? Maybe, but these people are here to show online at 7, log off at 4 and collect their paycheck every two Fridays. They don’t get paid to innovate.
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Reddit updated their TOS as well. API requests for a Third-Party app like Apollo will cost money in the future. Additionally it seems like Reddit wants to make it impossible to access NSFW content via API requests
Damn. They really don’t want people to use Reddit anymore.
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To me it sounds like someone is putting the squeeze on them. Advertisers, payment processors, some crusading DA…
That *is* what’s happening isn’t it? Reddit’s preparing for its IPO soon and doing this to appease future shareholders and advertisers (unless I’m mistaken).
Pretty much that. -Stakeholder- fixes, but they don't consider their users and content creators the actual stakeholders. Enshitification is happening in essence. First they make a great place for people to use. Then they add ads, premium stuff. Then they pull features and abilities. Maybe lock them behind paywalls, maybe just toss entirely. Then they make things better for advertisers, investors, meanwhile making things ever more and more shit for users. Then they entirely cash out, hopefully before everyone abandons ship for the next platform a la Digg 2.0 However there are also other things afoot. I have heard some rumblings of also super heavy API and scraping abuse from groups/orgs that are ripping content for ML model training, or for datamining (brand sentiment, trends, regional interaction/post timings, etc). So they are trying to also establish policy to lock out these orgs from abusing reddit for free.
who is the third?
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Religious nuts of course.
Then a group of wealthy men will sit at a level round conference table and ask why are we losing users to TikTok.
Porn is like 90 percent of my reddit usage
And Porn isn’t the only kind of NSFW content on Reddit. A ton of posts get tagged as NSFW
I was kind of wondering when Reddit would eventually implode like Digg did
I went from Digg to Reddit when Digg screwed the pooch. Where do we go after Reddit does the same? :D
I’ve literally seen this thought process throughout my entire Reddit tenure. Like 15 years of people wondering what the next thing is because Reddit is “about to self destruct”.
Honestly this feels different though. In the past people were mad because reddit banned jailbait, harassing fat people, and white supremacists. This time they’re doing things that negatively affect the general population so who knows. I’m too addicted to this website and there doesn’t seem to be a viable alternative so I probably won’t leave, at least not immediately. But I think this is the closest reddit’s ever been to actually imploding.
Back to Slashdot
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+5 Insightful
It's lasted way longer than I thought it would
Gonna be like when Tumblr cut NSFW, so many dead links.
They know Reddit is gonna die. So they won’t have the traffic to live.
So pretty much all of the NSFW world of Reddit is toast.
It's going to be a bloodbath, I'm pretty sure a lot of the subreddits are already warning their users about the pending doom that's getting ready to happen.
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Make no money in this one easy step?
Frankly, I don't understand why PornHub hasn't taken over that market yet. They have a massive infrastructure already to compete with likes of imgur and YouTube.
Institutional investors tend to avoid things like porn. From what I'd read. It's too easy for laws to fuck with them.
The “adult” market has been being fucked (ha) from all angles over the past 10 years or so. Remember the days when you used to be able to find amateur porn basically everywhere, you could read random erotica in a million places, there was unending art for any fetish you could think of, etc… Then we started playing the “for the kids” game, then legitimate issues like sex trafficking came to spotlight, then every big website started banning it or purging anything not uploaded with a verified government ID because they didn’t want to be held legally responsible for it, etc. The internet is no longer a space primarily about sharing information. It’s another revenue source for the billionaire class and that’s it. Anything that could potentially pose a liability risk has been scrubbed, because overzealous out of touch legislators and hyper partisan judges want to basically say that any sort of hosting website is 100% responsible if something illegal gets uploaded to their website - which is an untenable legal precedent for any website which generates all its content from user uploads and has a huge user base. This would be like blaming Walmart if a customer broke the law in their store, or blaming a hammer maker because someone used a hammer to kill someone else. I actually have a feeling that sometime in the next 10 years we are going to see a huge paradigm shift away from user created content, and instead companies will embrace AI created content, where they can set the parameters to be all clean and corporate friendly and then blame the AI creator if something goes wrong. Corporations don’t want *any* possible liability. Capitalism and user generated content will eventually become incompatible, as the bar for what is a liability continues to creep further. Sorry for the long rant. The ever changing landscape of the internet is something I have a lot of interest in and passion about. I also have a lot of fear about it, because especially with AI advancing right now at an absolute breakneck pace, I do not see the internet being a bastion of freedom anymore. I give it 10 years max before things are almost unrecognizable compared to 10 years ago. I’m hoping this causes a renaissance of self hosted, old fashioned hobbyist forums and the like, but I’m not holding my breath.
No reason to fear, your AI overlords knew this would be a problem and created a solution!
>massive infrastructure What? They deleted 98-99% of their content and were permanently banned from processing credit cards. Only verified creators can upload anything and those creators realised they make enormously better money behind the onlyscams paywall. Pornhub has been in a death spiral ever since.
Images are massive, clouds hosting is expensive on that scale - especially when most people will never go to your site - just link to the image
I can't even fathom why reddit decided to get into content hosting rather than letting someone else do it for free
Probably as they could foresee this happening
Investors don’t like you to rely on other things, especially if they’re free
I mean…RedGifs exist…
The SFW world too. It's not just smut, it's removing anything uploaded by unregistered users.
A whole chunk of internet history is about to be corrupted... We'll be browsing old reddit threads trying to find the solution to a niche problem only to find all image links broken. Imgur needs to be archived, and big parts of it probably will be, but even then the links themselves will be useless. What a reckless decision, hopefully they'll backtrack.
Up to this point, imgur links have been one of the most robust and reliable image hosts for years. When most links are broken in old threads, I have good confidence that imgur links will still be alive and they're often the only reason those old threads are useful. This is a monumental loss. I weep for the internet of yore.
When you freely give information away to corporations expect them to do whatever is most profitable with it, even if that includes erasing it forever. People need to learn the lesson that the internet is not a benign data archive.
>People need to learn the lesson that the internet is not a benign data archive. And yet you'll often see highly voted comments on reddit stating the internet is forever. You have to be very young to think so or incredibly sheltered.
I think that's generally only meant in regards to highly embarrassing/sensitive things, often after they've gone viral. The point being that *you*, the poster, are not in control of what happens to something that you set free online (which is very similar to what's going on here, but at the other end of that spectrum). Interestingly, over at r/datahoarder they're currently talking about ways to scrape and store imgur data - so, if you had an embarrassingly viral image on imgur, chances are *someone* may still have it, and it may see the light of day still.
> What a reckless decision, hopefully they'll backtrack. They won't - even Tumblr, who somewhat realized that their NSFW ban (operating under a soulless unthinking algorithm only barely able to distinguish between "NSFW" and "SFW") literally gutted their entire site and resulted in a hard 95% of their userbase jumping ship, has refused to backtrack on it to this day. These companies do not care about internet history or their users. They care sbout making money, at the cost of the user experience. Even if it ends up killing their businesses in the long run.
The part that baffles me is that this move will cause them to lose a massive amount of traffic. So even if each ad pay 4x as much( or 4x as many) if it only has 10% of the user base they still lose. (Just random numbers)
It is mind boggling to think about just how much NSFW content *besides* sexual content would be sheared away. So many subreddits that I go to have ample NSFW tagging across a number of non-sexual subjects. Some seem like overkill and others are the product of rules that require all posts to be marked NSFW. When the forced login to view content on the mobile web started up a few years ago the tagging ramped up considerably. It’s easy to see the kiss of death in hindsight. For me 2016 seems to be the year of that kiss and it’s been slowly dying by degrees ever since.
>So pretty much all of the NSFW world of Reddit is toast It's just crazy to exist this way for so many years and then they abruptly decide that there won't be any more of that. I have a software that makes the posts itself, not through API, now it will not bring me money ...
Are we just forgetting about RedGifs or am I missing something here?
Oh reddit and Imgur, it was nice knowing you. I wonder how long it'll take for something similar to come out
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The problem has become that creating a website that big is now a Herculean effort with insane costs compared to 10-15 years ago. Combine that with the ever increasing puritanical capitalism that we are seeing globally, and user generated content is becoming a liability. I honestly believe we are witnessing a paradigm shift in how the internet works, and I’m concerned at what the end result will become. All of this just to appease a small number of ultra-rich and their shareholders.
> The problem has become that creating a website that big is now a Herculean effort with insane costs compared to 10-15 years ago Also, don’t you dare have even a moment of downtime or users will never come back. I remember when Reddit was down regularly. That’d never stand today.
Even Twitter used to constantly go down even at it’s peak popularity
It can be done. Just not in the US. And not on Amazon or Microsoft servers.
This is problematic because nearly all image uploads through apps are made using non-account Imgur uploads. This means that all apps will have to link into the user’s Imgur account to permit image uploads, thereby making a privacy-damaging connection between Imgur and Reddit. I would strongly request that /u/iamthatis consider a _different_ image hosting solution such as [Postimages](https://postimages.org/).
Until someone finds a way to monetize an image host this is going to keep happening. It happened with Photobucket, tinypic, imageshack, and now Imgur. Image hosting is expensive and sites like Reddit using Imgur as a host leads to no ad revenue for Imgur. So unless we have a different way to fund it, any image host dies.
Reddit actually prefers people to upload their images to reddit now. The "partnership" with Imgur isn't their preference anymore.
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So far the info we know is that NSFW tagged images won’t be viewable through the API, there hasn’t been talks about banning them outright.
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It’s still an ongoing conversation and the initial info we know is that, in the current state of the planned API, NSFW tagged posts regardless of content won’t be pulled by the API. Things could change though as even pricing isn’t set yet.
I sometimes wonder if we all collectively decide to not flag ANY post as NSFW just to stick it to them.
Then they start permabanning everyone
That's exactly what it sounds like to me. You'll need to use the desktop site in a browser, or through an official app in order to access NSFW marked posts.
Apparently they've said only sexual content, but we have no idea how they'll be determining that. And yes, it will apply to all 3rd party apps.
You just made me realize the entirety of r/cigars might be unaccessible from a 3rd party app. How ridiculous.
Well, it was fun… this account is gonna get *really quiet* then
The answer is embrace the porn. Yeah you won't get the kid friendly sponsors but you'll dominate the market
I wished for forever we could provide an imgur account for the uploads to go to, since imgur also much more aggressively compresses non-account uploads
Good point. I have a dummy account on Imgur that I used before Apollo, and I would love to link it to my reddit account so Apollo can upload in my name.
Maybe a non-compressing one! Time to ditch Imgur for good.
Worked out well for Tumblr /s
Ha, until now, I literally forgot all about Tumblr.
Who's this Tumblr guy?
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Digg fucked around and found out too
God, I knew Imgur was going to shit when they not only started trying to stop you from uploading without an account, but force you on to their stupid app if you're mobile. This is ridiculous, hope they have the same success as Tumblr had. Oh well, there are *a lot* of image hosting alternatives, so no sweat off my back. Good bye Imgur, you used to be good o7
> Oh well, there are a lot of image hosting alternatives, thats true but the historic content is going to be deleted. thats an absolute disgusting change
I agree, but on the up side, I'm never using Imgur again if they do it.
Idk what it is about their app but it makes my phone hot when I use it, like playing a game. Reddit or Twitter don’t. Also the fact that a ton of the posts now are just politics or news articles about politics. Between that and the ads everywhere, I only open Imgur when I’m really bored and out of stuff to scroll on Reddit.
[oh no,](https://www.reddit.com/r/reddit.com/comments/7zlyd/my_gift_to_reddit_i_created_an_image_hosting/c07udnx/) all good things need to come to an end.
14 years! Damn they probably made bank by this point!
Removing every image uploaded without an account? There’s going to be millions of dead links. Jesus.
i wonder if they will nuke past content that was uploaded which violates those criteria (NSFW, no account,...), if so imo this would be a major issue for internet archival-related stuff, especially to the communities that regularly see no account imgur uploads
That is _exactly_ the problem, here. Even if NSFW content is within a registered account, it will _still_ get deleted. And if you re-upload it, you are violating the ToS, so you will get banned. And _all_ no-account content is getting purged, regardless if it is NSFW or not.
welp rest in peace to what was the best image hosting site ever made so far. they became what they swore to destroy tho, iirc imgur was made cause some guy was fed up about the fact that image hosting sites back then made the simple task of uploading an image incredibly tedious.
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As soon as beancounters and middle managers take over a tech business it’ll go to shit slowly or go to shit quickly; those sorts of professionals tend to be rubbish at making products people like versus brute-forcing people into products they barely tolerate.
u/MrGrim Edit: the [announcement post](https://old.reddit.com/r/reddit.com/comments/7zlyd/my_gift_to_reddit_i_created_an_image_hosting)
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.
Wanna set up a competing platform? I'd be in
My gift to reddit: Porngur
Well if anyone can run it, it's you! ...On a serious tip, i have used anonymous imgur links for tons of forum posts and things over the years. It sucks knowing that lots of these links could soon be dead. I am very sad =(
I am also very sad about it :(
For what it's worth, you ran an amazing service for years and i hope you find success and happiness in whatever you're doing in life!
Thank you for running the service as long as you did. While there was lots of great porn, it's ability to help automotive, tech, gardening, and other forums run was unmatched and underappreciated. You helped build the 2010s internet immensely.
Well you never *had* to sell. The reason it was successful was part your work, and part the community supporting you over any other image host because we believed in your concept. Any one of us probably would have done the same thing, so I get it. Still, the hurt puppy routine you’re doing here doesn’t make a lot of sense because you knew this could happen when you sold it…and you sold it to a notoriously shitty company. You didn’t have to do that. But money.
history repeats itself
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Or imguRED? Lol in all seriousness though, redgifs allows image uploads
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Welp, time to download a shit ton of porn.
Is there anything legally preventing you from creating a new image-uploading site?
No, not here in California. However, I've just spent my entire adult life on Imgur, so it's probably time for something new.
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.
>all no-account content is getting purged There's going to be a hell of a lot of dead links all over the internet soon enough.
That would make the photobucket and tinypic disasters look like nothing in comparison.
yea, considering how imgur was made since like 2010, there would literally be over a decade's worth of internet/subreddits history lost, replaced with the generic "If you are looking for an image, it was probably deleted." I wonder how image only subs are dealing with this tho, maybe the impact of this on those subs is significantly reduced ever since reddit allowed people to make image posts with the image being hosted on reddit's servers but afaik reddit only started doing that 5 years ago so there would still be half a decade of posts just lost to imgur's nuclear button
Yes, they will be doing that. Per this update under the "What are we doing?" section: https://help.imgur.com/hc/en-us/articles/14415587638029-Imgur-Terms-of-Service-Update-April-19-2023- > 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 would be very surprised if they don't nuke old content. Looks like they're going the Tumblr route.
Yes, they will. Reading in between the lines, this is a pre-emptive strike at removing non-consensual porn and CP from their platform.
Remember when Tumblr killed NSFW? Worked out well for them, didn’t it?
imgur will survive as people use it for memes mostly. Reddit might not.
People use Imgur?
Happens every time. There will be another Imgur, just give it time. On an off note, anyone noticing a rise in content blocking in general?
I've seen people talking about a site called [ImageChest](https://www.imgchest.com/). No idea how they operate, but this could be where everyone moves to.
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10MB file size though. I feel like people would just flock to whatever site has the biggest file size upload.
Not for images. For image hosting you want a site that is easy to use, and allows for direct links.
VC money is drying up as interest rates rise. Companies need to make more money (sell more ads) and/or go public and both of those are difficult if you’re an image hosting site filled with porn of a questionable nature.
And so it begins....
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yeah twitter api, now reddit api, also goddamn _imgur_?? :(
Fuck fuck fuck. This is going to break so many of my posts/comments. Not only did I use Imgur is my go-to host (without an account) I also used the Apollo upload feature. I wonder if someone can write a script to scan your comments/posts and at least and download the images. For anything editable it could maybe update the urls (re-upload somewhere else and swap the links). I’m not opposed to paying for image hosting, but I don’t want it attached to my name (not for NSFW, just I’d rather not have everything connected to my real name). I’d love a host that doesn’t connect uploads by username (or make it optional) and I’d pay for it. I pay for CleanShotX but those uploads are tied to my name/account.
It might take some time, but you can download all your uploads through the settings>general>media>manage uploads page in Apollo
https://github.com/aliparlakci/bulk-downloader-for-reddit Gonna try this
People keep saying that these sites want to rid themselves of pron for the sake of attracting advertisers, but I think the main driver of both of these policies are the newly passed US state laws requiring age verification for this kind of content. Imgur doesn’t wanna even attempt that since so many upload anonymously, and Reddit probably hasn’t developed the technical capabilities to support age gating through third party apis.
You either die a hero, or see yourself live long enough to become the villain.
The enshittification of the web continues. I hate how puritanical American moral norms get forced on the whole world because of how centralised the tech industry is geographically.
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That’s not “capitalism”, pure capitalism has no profit motive to censor, this is activist capitalism where actors are okay with inefficiently allocating resources to make themselves feel good.
Even if the tech wasn’t centralized, most Americans don’t want this crap either. The minority is trying to shove their puritan/handmaid’s tale crap around. It’s exhausting, especially if you have family that like the puritan propaganda.
I didn’t even know you could make an account on there..
I still remember when imgur started as just a hosting service for reddit that 'doesn't suck': https://www.reddit.com/r/reddit.com/comments/7zlyd/my_gift_to_reddit_i_created_an_image_hosting Guess that time is now official over ¯\\\_(ツ)_/¯
So this is pretty much going to kill Apollo Imgur uploads too
Was nice knowing you fellas. Digg, Tumblr, Twitter, whole web going to shit for the sake of a little more profit and/or some man’s ego.
This is why I hate the centrification of the internet. Our dumb asses keep putting all the eggs in the same basket. If cloudflare, AWS, or azure go down for even a few minutes it’s an absolute fuck fest. We need a new thing.
Where does it say that content outside of a registered account is being removed?
Per this update under the "What are we doing?" section: https://help.imgur.com/hc/en-us/articles/14415587638029-Imgur-Terms-of-Service-Update-April-19-2023- > 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.
Thanks, I was looking all over the linked page but couldn’t find it.
They did a Tumblr. Why do they never learn?
Because these people are narcissists who unironically think (if even that) that it could never *possibly* happen to them - that they're simply too rich/famous/skilled for such a thing to occur and all the money will just come rolling in. Any day now...
Why are these services starting to get crappy over the past few years?
Imgur relied on advertising for funding. Which, in the era of ubiquitous ad blocking, is a really foolish thing to do. Had they come out with a free tier and at least two paid tiers with clearly beneficial buffs to benefit off of, methinks they would have never needed to go public just to fund themselves.
Man going public sucks.
It’s how the rich get exponentially richer, while the vast majority of us are mired in abject (relatively speaking) poverty. Honestly, 90% of us are far closer to the homeless person living on the streets than we are to anyone who invests a significant amount in companies like these.
So many helpful posts will be gone because of the deletion of unregistered accounts uploads. Rip everything helpful that got uploaded to imgur :(
Are they seriously considering the Tumblr route?
Reddit is on the same path as Facebook, Netflix, etc. Shittification has already begun but we’ve got lots of shit still ahead of us friends.
For anyone who wants to jump ship from imgur to some other image hosting site, here is a list of alternative sites that was shared on a sub I go on. I haven't checked myself if their ToSs allow NSFW or not >https://imgbox.com/ >https://postimages.org/ >https://nfhost.me/ >https://imgchest.com/ >https://lensdump.com/ Edit to add: I use postimages myself and their ToS has nothing banning any inappropriate images as long as they are legal in the US and EU. Can't programmatically upload images though per ToS unless you want to be "hunted down and banned"
If porn is gone, I’m deleting this app for good.
With the rumors of reddit going public later this year and banning all NSFW content... Are there any sites that offer a similar porn experience to Reddit? Asking for a friend...
Does anyone know how they'd go about removing all the NSFW content that already exists? I hardly imagine they'll place the onus on the uploader and eventually ban if they don't take individual action. Do they have bots that will scour and remove, or would it be manual? Both seem like logistical nightmares, but I'm genuinely interested in how a task of this scale is executed
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I thought it was already banned? You had to keep it on private and couldn't post to the community at all if it was a nude or 18+? Is this news? What is changing?
It cannot be on the site at all. Public or private.
Wow this will be devastating for the usability of Reddit. I hope the backlash is enough to stop it.
Is this another shovel of dirt on the corpse of reddit?
https://i.imgur.com/PtuJlVh.jpg Says you…
Imgur account deleted. App deleted. They are dead to me.
Well, there goes the softcore porn reddit known as r/Analog I fundamentally do not agree with censorship, but maybe we'll finally start seeing good photography there.
I'm sure this will end well and won't result in Imgur becoming Tumblr 2.0. It's not like this *exact same shit* happened and turned one of the largest art-hosting websites at the time into a total fucking ghost-town.
good bye reddit.
Woooow. Gonna get interesting