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Discontinuing Support for NSFW Imgur r/subsections Associated with Reddit
- Havoc 7y agoUnfortunate but not surprising. I can see why they wouldn’t be keen on that type of content
- mrgreenfur 7y agoAgreed; but isn't this shooting them in the foot in the same way Tumblr did? I wonder why they did this instead of adding stronger filters / controls to separate the populations
- larrik 7y agoI'm under the impression that this is a far smaller slice of imgur than it was for tumblr.
- OzzyB 7y agoBecause all roads lead to Apple Store's TOS and their anti-adult content stance. Sure they could apply stronger filters but unless they police it well they suffer the prospect of being banned like Tumblr etc. Besides, it's not easy implementing a scalable content filter without user support and if users aren't cooperating then it's probably easier and cheaper to nix the idea completely.
- tyri_kai_psomi 7y agoScratch anti-adult and substitute pro-family. Perspective matters, and that's the approach Apple takes.
- xsmasher 7y agoThat should be read anti-adult-content, not anti-adult.
- tyri_kai_psomi 7y agoIf "ABC Family" channel didn't want to show any content that would come off as "lewd" or "adult" would you call them wanting to maintain a family friendly atmosphere, or anti-adult-content?
- jdnenej 7y agoI sure do love foreign megacorps shoving their "pro family values" on me when I don't have a family. Guess some CEO knows better than I do what I should be doing.
- ryanlol 7y agoHow does adult content hurt families? Over here in the EU we get graphic sex scenes on government funded TV channels in the middle of the day, society has not collapsed (yet?).
- derefr 7y agoThat might be true if the app was rated for all audiences; but most "shows you arbitrary Internet content" apps, including Tumblr, Facebook, and even alternative web browsers, end up rated 18+. It should only be adults using it; Apple's "pro-family" content controls should ensure that.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- vanderZwan 7y agoThey're not removing the NSFW content but making it effectively unlisted, bit of a different situation I'd say
- ohpls 7y agoI only briefly read it but it seems they'll still support uploading legal NSFW for any subreddit just marked as hidden so it doesn't show in their public gallery, which makes sense to me.
- draw_down 7y agoYou also now need to login to their website to see it. Which is quite a hurdle, I’d say.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- mindslight 7y agoIIRC creating an imgur login requires using a "non disposable" email address, ostensibly feeding into the larger surveilliplex.
- benoliver999 7y agoYeah, does anyone browse subreddits using just imgur anyway? So long as you can load images on reddit itself I don't see the problem
- throwaway_bad 7y agoImgur is nice for loading galleries so it's heavily used for nsfw comics on /r/doujinshi
- zenography 7y agoWas
- magashna 7y agoThere is a weird segment of "imgurians" who comment only on imgur posts. They're a bit of a joke on some communities, like /r/repsneakers where users buy replica designer sneakers (aka fakes) and post them to imgur with titles like "Couldn't afford rent this month but got these" and the imgur people flame the imgur comments.
- bsder 7y agoAh, the only thing more reliable that the lifecycle of a Phoenix is the lifecycle of an image host ... Birth, awesomeness, turns out to be expensive, somewhat less awesome, "no, really, this shit is expensive please give us money", kinda sucky, "hey, we need to monetize, get this porn off of here", really sucky, "Oh, crap, 95% of our use cases were porn. Ooops.", death. "Ready normal people! Ready! Ready! Ready!" <song starts> "The Internet is for porn ..." Countdown until someone creates the next "image host that doesn't suck" in 5 ... 4 ... 3 ...
- benj111 7y agoWhat tune are we singing the song to? 'Modern Major General' from HMS Pinafore might fit. Edit: The internet is for porn and has everything that's sexual. From web cams, sex tapes, phat ass, big jugs, erotica homosexual. And if you find a kink absent.... You're one fked up individual. Edit2: Repeated lyrics repeated. (I'm sure Lennon and McCartney didn't get it right 1st time).
- wbl 7y agoYou have missed out on one of the best youtube videos. https://youtu.be/YRgNOyCnbqg https://youtu.be/YRgNOyCnbqg
- pavel_lishin 7y ago> And if you find a kink absent.... it's time to buy a camera
- prvc 7y agoIs mixed SFW/NSFW social media more trouble than it's worth? Tumblr did the same thing. Permitting NSFW may enable some promising growth stats in the early stages, but perhaps there isn't a lot of long term value to be extracted from it.
- rpmisms 7y agoTumblr is dying fast, because they removed their nsfw content.
- Mirioron 7y agoThat's the point the parent poster is making: tumblr had incredible growth at the start and stayed popular, but it was difficult to monetize because of the nsfw content.
- elsonrodriguez 7y agoIt was difficult to monetize because rather than resetting advertiser expectations for what it means to engage with tumblr's user base, they destroyed their product instead.
- Mirioron 7y agoYou say that, but I'm sure many platforms have tried doing that for a long time. 4chan, for example, struggled with this from the start and as far as I know, they haven't come up with a solution that isn't porn ads.
- djsumdog 7y agoWe don't have the internal charts of advertisement revenue and engagement. What if they had tried a lot and that line kept shifting down and down, with small bumps here and there with limited sales successes? What if the execs at Verizon were like, "We don't want to keep going down that route .. we don't want those types of advertisers .. we need to not be afraid of associating this more with the Verizon brand?" I have a feeling there was a lot of internal push back and fourth, but they were either losing too much money or only getting advertisers they weren't comfortable with. It's more complicated that just advertisers expectations.
- jchw 7y agoI find it interesting that advertising on pornographic content in a lot of English speaking countries seems difficult whereas in East Asia it does not really seem to be an issue, or at least I’ve never heard of it being an issue. Is this a thing or am I just ignorant? If it is true, could anyone fathom why?
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- robjan 7y agoJust checked. Most adverts are for paid porn and toys, not other goods and services. Is this not the same in the West?
- jchw 7y agoI’m more referring to sites like Pixiv as an example, which, while they are not in the business of pornography, do in fact host a fair bit of it. One difference is that Pixiv requires you to be logged in to see NSFW content, much like the new Imgur changes, but I suspect this is for other reasons. I haven’t checked to see if doing that actually shows different things in terms of advertisements. OTOH, I’ve never heard of any advertisers pulling out of an entity due to pornographic content in Japan.
- londons_explore 7y agoJust tried Pixiv.. Hit the OAuth with Google button, and after OAuthing, it then asks for your Google password... That isn't how OAuth is supposed to work...
- jchw 7y agoIt does what? Are you sure?? I haven’t tried OAuth on Pixiv but they have a fairly good engineering culture and would be surprised if they are asking for your Google password. Edit: I just tried. The password it’s asking for is the one that will be associated with the Pixiv account that is created. Whether that is how federated login should work is arguable, but it’s a fairly common pattern.
- TheNorthman 7y agoA problem with this is that many Imgur links link not to the embedded page (i.imgur.com) but to the display page (imgur.com). Normally this was, at worst, slightly annoying. Now you're forced to login to view the picture. Not only is this a hindrance to users but it actively blocks archiving.
- basch 7y agoThe embedded page still appears to require sign in, see the link above. When I click the link, it converts to the non embedded page, then I have to edit the url back to the direct link.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- djsumdog 7y agoThe notice made it seem like you would either have to login or click an over 18 verification modal. Hopefully they won't requiring logging in.
- stevekemp 7y agoTo be honest I've noticed that links to specific images (i.imgur.com/blah.jpg) get rewritten once they hit some specific traffic-threshold. imgur rewrites them so they can serve you adverts, and modal dialogs telling you to install their application. imgur started out well, as a fast and simple image-host, but like all the others it tries to recoup money by serving adverts and getting up to increasingly shady things. Soon it will be time for the cycle to repeat and a new host launch itself; no doubt with a cute tagline saying they'll even host nsfw content.
- lol768 7y ago> To be honest I've noticed that links to specific images (i.imgur.com/blah.jpg) get rewritten once they hit some specific traffic-threshold. I didn't realise they had a traffic-based condition that did this, too. Wow. They've been pretty hostile with this sort of thing for a while. Look at this behaviour: # Mobile UA $ curl -v -H "Accept: text/html,application/xhtml+xml,applciation/xml;q=0.9,*/*;q=0.8" -H "User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Android 10; Mobile; rv:68.0) Gecko/68.0 Firefox/68.0" https://i.imgur.com/6WAZZpN.jpg < HTTP/2 302 < retry-after: 0 < location: https://m.imgur.com/6WAZZpN?r # Desktop UA $ curl -v -H "Accept: text/html,application/xhtml+xml,applciation/xml;q=0.9,*/*;q=0.8" -H "User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:71.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/71.0" https://i.imgur.com/6WAZZpN.jpg | file - < HTTP/2 200 < last-modified: Wed, 18 Sep 2019 20:45:26 GMT < etag: "21d323ddb1c1926ab0d7a5bb9786c996" < content-type: image/jpeg ... /dev/stdin: JPEG image data, baseline, precision 8, 2250x1500, components 3 Notice that they redirect mobile users to https://m.imgur.com/6WAZZpN?r https://m.imgur.com/6WAZZpN?r. I've noticed they do this in order to serve them ads, encourage them to install their PUP on their device (as you mention) and break their ability to zoom on the image (the image embedded is thumbnail size). They use UA sniffing to disguise this behaviour from technical users on desktop. They also detect if you're using curl and spoofing a mobile UA (which sends Accept: * / *), in which case this dark UX pattern is disabled.
- robocat 7y agoThey used to allow you to browse images, and now they don't - desktop mode used to show image grid e.g.: https://imgur.com/r/nsfw https://imgur.com/r/nsfw But images are still hosted there and I presume new images are still added e.g. https://i.imgur.com/nZHfzdV.jpg https://i.imgur.com/nZHfzdV.jpg (mildly NSFW but in a NSFW reddit). From a desktop browser the first link will show: "As of Oct 2019, Imgur will no longer display NSFW Imgur r/subsections associated with Reddit subreddits. No Imgur content has been deleted or moved, and is still available at its original Imgur URL. As an alternative, you can browse the visual contents of any subreddit using third-party tools such as https://www.redditery.com https://www.redditery.com and https://redditgrid.com." https://redditgrid.com."
- keketi 7y agoClicking https://i.imgur.com/nZHfzdV.jpg https://i.imgur.com/nZHfzdV.jpg yields "Sign in required - This page may contain erotic or adult imagery. You'll need to sign in if you still want to view it.". Opening the same URL by copying and pasting it to the address bar shows the image without needing to sign in.
- TheCapn 7y agoImgur does something goofy with the referer that you've clicked a link from. I'm by no means a competent web programmer or understand how linking/referrers/etc. work but at one point I had a little doodad in GreaseMonkey/Tampermonkey that pulled imgur images in and plopped them on your Facebook page. What I found was that if the page referrer was Facebook, you got nothing, the imgur site attempted to redirect you back through to their galleries, but if you used the link directly you'd get the image. I never figured out exactly what's happening, I used a code snippet that stripped out the referrer info and everything started working.
- throwaway_bad 7y agoI think you can do it without extensions in firefox since they let you configure your own referrer-policy: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Headers/Referrer-Policy https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Headers/Re... (search for "about:config") But even in my own APIs I check for referrers to make sure they are actually coming from my site so I assume this will break some pages.
- cryptozeus 7y agoWth is this on hn ?
- danielhlockard 7y agobecause imgur is a tech company, and one of the largest image hosts on the internet?
- sodosopa 7y agoNow. But in a year, they’ll be as dead as Tumblr.
- Sargos 7y agoThis is probably a good time for someone to create an image host based on IPFS or Swarm as a replacement for imgur for these communities. There's a lot of content on reddit like sorting by Top to see the best posts which is now missing. That's a good chunk of the culture of some subs. The only realistic option is to host media on the same service that's consuming it or hosting the media on a decentralized service that you don't have to worry about being shut down in the future.
- djsumdog 7y agoIPFS seems like a really good solution. I've read other posts on here on how it's difficult to setup websites on IPFS, but just straight up media (images and video) seem like a perfect use case.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- shantly 7y agoPractical IPFS image hosting looks an awful lot like image hosting without IPFS. Most of your traffic's gonna be through gateways, not over IPFS proper. You've still gotta have always-on servers pinning (storing) everything for reliability. There also doesn't seem to be a good way to make mobile devices—most of the clients out there—useful parts of the distributed network.
- hombre_fatal 7y agoHN throws IPFS around a lot as if it's free storage + free bandwidth. But as you point out, you still must run an origin server. At which point it's just a slower, crappier CDN where you stand up your other CDN nodes yourself. Your content doesn't just magically spread to random nodes once you broadcast it.
- thescribbblr 7y agoWill people use a service for NSFW contents? I doubt.
- mrunseen 7y agoImgur blocked in Turkey so I've been using imgurp.com/[imagelink] proxy. Thinking about if this effects my usage of Imgur?
- taurath 7y agoI’ve noticed they’re intentionally reducing image quality on mobile with ad blockers lately as well.
- paulie_a 7y agoWell imgur is going to die really quick
- Endy 7y agoSo, I guess Imgur has now just about announced their inevitable death. If you uploaded pics there, I suggest getting them before they end up gone.
- bluetidepro 7y ago> ...I guess Imgur has now just about announced their inevitable death. That's extremely dramatic to say. Did you even read the full post? They aren't doing anything unreasonable, compared to say Tumblr, and what they did. All they are doing is putting NSFW content behind a login. Nothing is getting deleted, or not allowed anymore.
- throwaway2048 7y agoTumblr put stuff behind a login before eventually purging it.
- sodosopa 7y agoYeah I read the same thing and it’s a repeat of when Tumblr, Tripod, Yahoo Groups, etc all started their paths to remove NSFW content.
- jhare 7y agoruined
- jimbob45 7y agoYet another blow in the war on porn. Can we just accept that the parents need to be the ones to act as porn gatekeepers via acting as gatekeepers to the internet? Once the kid hits the internet, they're gonna find porn one way or another. Changes like these don't solve anything imho.
- Miner49er 7y agoDoes this have anything to do with children? I figured this was for advertising; major cooperations probably don't want their ads associated with porn.
- djsumdog 7y agoYea, it seems more about advertisers than censorship. They need to make money to host thing x and don't want their brand to be associated with thing y.
- BubRoss 7y agoThere is no war on porn and I don't think the imgur is trying to solve anything except for their liability and responsibility to sensitive material that needs to be curated and sectioned off from some users.
- thedaemon 7y agoThere is a war on porn in the UK and Australia to say the ones that I am aware of.
- thescribbblr 7y agoThinking to build a service to host NSFW content. Anyone who would like to join?
- Dig1t 7y agoYeah I'm down that sounds like fun, idk how to PM you though..
- thescribbblr 7y agoAwesome, man! Let's start Email me: mshahi.biz@gmail.com
- lowiqprogrammer 7y agohey I made a place where you can upload images, including NSFW that is similar to Reddit. You can also embed them. https://tiblar.com/ https://tiblar.com/
- lol768 7y agoI'll be interested to see how they try to tackle this. Are they going to manually identify NSFW images? Scrape known-NSFW subreddits? Look at the Referer header? Can just see folks on Reddit using its own built-in image upload functionality. Imgur has been largely redundant since this was launched (and offers an increasingly poor, ad-ridden UX full of dark patterns), to be honest.
- reilly3000 7y agoHow can image services avoid hosting child pornography? If a user submits an image of themselves at age 17 and lies about their age, can the host be held liable for distributing illegal content? That seems like an existential business risk for any site that hosts nsfw. There’s no viable way to check a user’s actual age (when depicted) under current business models. And what is and isn’t nsfw? It all sounds complicated.
- ryanlol 7y agoIt only seems that complicated because you’re applying weird HN pedantry on fairly reasonable laws. This isn’t an existential business risk unless you’re straight up ignoring CAM you’ve been made aware of. This is a constant source of work for these providers, but complicated this is not.
- reilly3000 7y agoNot trying to be pedantic; it just seemed like an interesting problem. I’ll take your word for it that it isn’t interesting:) I don’t know how they make money. Ad rates aren’t that great and bandwidth isn’t that cheap.
- loufe 7y agoAn honest question: Why and who in the payment space penalizes sites for allowing NSFW content? I can't understand why Visa, or Paypal would have moral grounds to block that content if they also process payment for strictly-porn sites.
- Mindwipe 7y agoPaypal doesn't process such payments. Mastercard have a huge list of arbitrary rules. Visa and Mastercard charge significantly extra to process adult payments.
- loufe 7y agoAh thanks for the clarification. Do you know under what pretense they charge the higher rates? I can imagine there is more fraud for adult payments, but would they also charge higher for gambling or other fraud prone payments in that case?
- ekimekim 7y agoOne story I've heard is that adult content payments have a very high rate of chargeback, claiming it was fraud after the fact as a way of saving face when someone else (like a spouse) sees it in their transaction history. But as you say, adult content isn't the only high-risk business but payment processors seem to care much more about it than others. My guess is that it's just exactly what it looks like - a squeamishness to be associated with activities that culture targets as "non-respectable". "If people pay for porn with Paypal, then they'll think of Paypal as a porn payment provider and not want to use Paypal to pay for normal things".
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- nojvek 7y agoDoes stripe do the same too?
- sdrothrock 7y agoSince you need to log in now, I wonder if they're also keeping track of which users are viewing what content, and what subreddits etc. that content is associated with.
- dTal 7y ago"Discontinuing support" is nice newspeak for "banning", since there's no technical overhead for NSFW content specifically. Their logic is weird, too - it's not like NSFW subsections make Imgur less "fun and entertaining". Quite the reverse! And it's not as if you could stumble across these - you basically had to type the URL in by hand.
- sireat 7y agoFor reference how imgur was started 10 years ago: https://www.reddit.com/r/reddit.com/comments/7zlyd/my_gift_to_reddit_i_created_an_image_hosting/ https://www.reddit.com/r/reddit.com/comments/7zlyd/my_gift_t... A prophetic comment in OP: [–][deleted] 21 points 10 years ago Anyone can make an image hosting service that doesn't suck. But tell me in a year or two if you're still around and not sucking. Then I'll consider it.