6 ms·

This strikes me as being at least as big a deal as the NSFW bit. For 10+ years, imgur has been many people's go-to way of hosting an image they want to post to

This strikes me as being at least as big a deal as the NSFW bit. For 10+ years, imgur has been many people's go-to way of hosting an image they want to post to a forum or whatever. Many of those people will have paid little attention to whether or not they were logged into imgur when they posted each image. In short, it sounds like a lot of image links are about to break.

jaredandrews 4y ago
Yup! I have used imgur numerous times thru the years when posting Stack Overflow questions, new feature pull requests on open source apps, troubleshooting reddit posts etc. Very sad to think all that visual context will be lost.
DanTheManPR 4y ago
This is going to be incredibly damaging to forums, in the same way that Photobucket's deletions were. Old forum posts are becoming a ghost town of broken image links.
- 3nf 4y ago
  This was already happening (as early as 2019), but on a forum-by-forum referer ban for hotlinked images. Imgur support wouldn't respond to forum owners. https://forums.nasioc.com/forums/showthread.php?t=2912540 https://forums.nasioc.com/forums/showthread.php?t=2912540
Arrath 4y ago
I've used imgur to host many images over the years, never once have I bothered to make an account. Goodbye, old forum post contents.
GavinMcG 4y ago
Effectively monetizing the hosting of images embedded elsewhere seems like a fool's errand—at best, it's possible to subsidize that usage with other revenue streams. The vast majority of people wanting to post images on forums have never financed their posting and the communities themselves haven't managed to either. Photobucket and Tinypic left a lot of litter on forums that survived their era, and Imgur will ultimately do the same.
- fenomas 4y ago
  It seems a bit like they're saying: "ohhhhh, did you people think we were an image hosting site? Heavens no, we're an SNS and always have been. We'll update our rules to clarify this". Which seems... aspirational?
  - raverbashing 4y ago
    Yeah. As aspirational as thinking you can fly and jumping out of a cliff Let's see how it goes
  - Gigachad 4y ago
    They were image hosting for reddit. Once it was obvious reddit would kill their only use case soon, they became a social media platform. A better idea than simply dying. Every platform now has its own image hosting so their service was rapidly becoming irrelevant.
    - account42 4y ago
      > Every platform now has its own image hosting The big ones do. There is stil the long tail of forums and legacy chat platforms that don't do hosting or have extreme limits. That is what will be most affected by this change.
      - Gigachad 4y ago
        Being an image hotlinking service for legacy forums and IRC is not a viable long term business.
        account42 4y ago
        Right, it probably shouldn't be a business at all. But it is something valuable and neither "legacy" forums nor IRC will be going away any time soon.
slg 4y ago
Isn't this the cardinal sin of an image host? They are partially killing links in a way that wasn't previously communicated. And to make it worse, it directly targets what was previously the primary strength of the site, easy and accountless uploads with only a few clicks. Why would anyone use them as an image host again? I wonder if they are hemorrhaging money. This decision gives the impression that they simply don't want to be in the business they're currently in. Such drastic steps usually originate with desperation.
- rrrrrrrrrrrryan 4y ago
  If they want to monetize that old stuff, couldn't they just serve up an ad instead of an image for those ancient images, then display the full image if you visit the actual imgur page by deleting the .jpg extension? Or they could do what Facebook used to do (still does?), and put them on Blu-ray disk cold storage, then load them into one of those giant jukebox-esque machines that grabs the Blu-ray disk whenever someone click an ancient link and spend 60 seconds serving the image up or whatever. Hell, write all the images with their URLs to magnetic tape and donate them to the Internet archive, and let them figure out what to do with them if/when they eventually have the funds. Literally anything would be better than outright deleting those old images.
  - arprocter 4y ago
    They recently changed something - if you follow a link to an image it now loads their page containing the image, and not just the actual file Presumably this was done to show ads on the page
    - 93po 4y ago
      I've seen them do this in some capacity for like a decade
      - arprocter 4y ago
        Strange - I'm pretty sure I used to be able to directly link to an image, and that would be the only thing that loaded (had to 'open image in new tab' after uploading to find the direct link) Possibly they did different things for different IP blocks?

jaredandrews 4y ago

Yup! I have used imgur numerous times thru the years when posting Stack Overflow questions, new feature pull requests on open source apps, troubleshooting reddit posts etc. Very sad to think all that visual context will be lost.

DanTheManPR 4y ago

This is going to be incredibly damaging to forums, in the same way that Photobucket's deletions were. Old forum posts are becoming a ghost town of broken image links.

3nf 4y ago
This was already happening (as early as 2019), but on a forum-by-forum referer ban for hotlinked images. Imgur support wouldn't respond to forum owners. https://forums.nasioc.com/forums/showthread.php?t=2912540 https://forums.nasioc.com/forums/showthread.php?t=2912540

Arrath 4y ago

I've used imgur to host many images over the years, never once have I bothered to make an account. Goodbye, old forum post contents.

GavinMcG 4y ago

Effectively monetizing the hosting of images embedded elsewhere seems like a fool's errand—at best, it's possible to subsidize that usage with other revenue streams. The vast majority of people wanting to post images on forums have never financed their posting and the communities themselves haven't managed to either. Photobucket and Tinypic left a lot of litter on forums that survived their era, and Imgur will ultimately do the same.

fenomas 4y ago
It seems a bit like they're saying: "ohhhhh, did you people think we were an image hosting site? Heavens no, we're an SNS and always have been. We'll update our rules to clarify this". Which seems... aspirational?
- raverbashing 4y ago
  Yeah. As aspirational as thinking you can fly and jumping out of a cliff Let's see how it goes
- Gigachad 4y ago
  They were image hosting for reddit. Once it was obvious reddit would kill their only use case soon, they became a social media platform. A better idea than simply dying. Every platform now has its own image hosting so their service was rapidly becoming irrelevant.
  - account42 4y ago
    > Every platform now has its own image hosting The big ones do. There is stil the long tail of forums and legacy chat platforms that don't do hosting or have extreme limits. That is what will be most affected by this change.
    - Gigachad 4y ago
      Being an image hotlinking service for legacy forums and IRC is not a viable long term business.
      - account42 4y ago
        Right, it probably shouldn't be a business at all. But it is something valuable and neither "legacy" forums nor IRC will be going away any time soon.

slg 4y ago

Isn't this the cardinal sin of an image host? They are partially killing links in a way that wasn't previously communicated. And to make it worse, it directly targets what was previously the primary strength of the site, easy and accountless uploads with only a few clicks. Why would anyone use them as an image host again? I wonder if they are hemorrhaging money. This decision gives the impression that they simply don't want to be in the business they're currently in. Such drastic steps usually originate with desperation.

rrrrrrrrrrrryan 4y ago
If they want to monetize that old stuff, couldn't they just serve up an ad instead of an image for those ancient images, then display the full image if you visit the actual imgur page by deleting the .jpg extension? Or they could do what Facebook used to do (still does?), and put them on Blu-ray disk cold storage, then load them into one of those giant jukebox-esque machines that grabs the Blu-ray disk whenever someone click an ancient link and spend 60 seconds serving the image up or whatever. Hell, write all the images with their URLs to magnetic tape and donate them to the Internet archive, and let them figure out what to do with them if/when they eventually have the funds. Literally anything would be better than outright deleting those old images.
- arprocter 4y ago
  They recently changed something - if you follow a link to an image it now loads their page containing the image, and not just the actual file Presumably this was done to show ads on the page
  - 93po 4y ago
    I've seen them do this in some capacity for like a decade
    - arprocter 4y ago
      Strange - I'm pretty sure I used to be able to directly link to an image, and that would be the only thing that loaded (had to 'open image in new tab' after uploading to find the direct link) Possibly they did different things for different IP blocks?