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Imgur's community was in revolt
- bslaq 1y agoThis will work as well as the Reddit revolts.
- kstrauser 1y agoThe Reddit revolt worked for me. It broke me of the habit of hanging out there.
- hbn 1y agoIt's crazy how night and day the quality tank was after they essentially killed their API. The good contributors were all pushed away or became less active. And with the official app constantly trying to push posts from random subreddits into people's feeds, you constantly get comments from people who have no idea of the concept of a subreddit, and leave stupid comments cause they don't know the context the post was made in.
- kstrauser 1y agoIt really was. Apollo was the reddit UI for me. The old reddit web page looks awful on a phone. The new page is a mess of algorithmic disaster on any device. I cannot stand their 1st-party app. When they killed the API, I no longer enjoyed using reddit on my phone, which is where I accessed it 95% of the time. They made it pretty easy for me to stop using the site at all. OTOH, I had previously posted often enough to get in on the IPO, and that made up for a lot of the annoyances.
- hbn 1y agoI'm surprised they still support the old web UI which is the only way to make reddit usable these days. Once they pull the plug on that I'll be finally done (though I'm already so inactive it won't make a difference really)
- ratelimitsteve 1y agoCouldn't agree more. Pushing people away from 3rd party apps was a business decision I understand as much as I disliked it (Boost gang gang) but the unusable nightmare of an app they pushed me toward was such an insult that I ended up just off the platform entirely. Any social media site that loses the bathroom loses the war, and Reddit was no longer my #1 for #2s.
- kstrauser 1y agoYou, sir, are a poet.
- theasisa 1y agoI've pretty much ignored the various Reddit revolts. What drove me away from Reddit and Imgur was the constant spam of US politics. The recent Imgur revolt actually made the site better for me (after the middle finger spam ended) - political posts went from ~50% to less than 10%.
- sterlind 1y agothe Reddit revolt drove me to Lemmy. it's methadone to Reddit's heroin, but it doesn't feel like Dead Internet over there.
- jmclnx 1y ago>years-long degradation of the website This is a very true statement, but to me the degradation started many years ago.
- bslaq 1y agoThe degradation started when they began looking at the Accept HTTP header to see if you were clicking a direct link to an image so they could show you a page full of ads instead of just the image. And that happened well before that bloke sold the site.
- BuyMyBitcoins 1y agoI remember a long time ago you’d click on a direct link and it would redirect you to the image’s page. Then, it would superimpose a cat paw beckoning the user to swipe and see other images. I recall people really hating that. Now the site can’t help but show you some tacked-on TikTok style video or animated gif underneath the image you actually wanted to view.
- NSUserDefaults 1y agoHow can something be years-long without having started years ago?
- jmclnx 1y ago>In 2021, a media holding company called MediaLab AI acquired Imgur and Schaaf left To me, the article is saying it started in 2021, but I think it started well before 2021.
- Workaccount2 1y agoWhat's interesting about imgur, and telling of how times changed, was that it was created mostly to fill the gap in unreliable uploading of images to reddit. Which begs the question: What the hell was reddit doing that they didn't immediately implement an image hosting feature to keep users on the platform? Imgur rose to fame because it was the darling image host of reddit users, and it wasn't long before imgur needed to pay hosting costs and started sucking users away from reddit and into their own "imgurian" sharing hub. I guess the internet back then was still in the "Open effort to make the internet awesome for everyone" phase, and hadn't yet gotten to the adversarial "Capture users and never let them leave" phase.
- jtokoph 1y agoMy guess would be cost. I don’t think Reddit had much, if any, revenue at the time and images would likely require orders of magnitude more storage.
- AngryData 1y agoYeah, when imgur came about reddit was 99% text on the site. Hosting images would have been a huge step up in cost considering the user count. Then of course people realized that if imgur can make money on ads thanks to reddit's traffic, reddit could potentially make even more and it has been all down hill from there.
- bluedino 1y agoIt was interesting seeing all the image hosts in the old days. ImageShack, PhotoBucket, etc They'd either die because they couldn't afford the server bills or die because they went commercial. Some left gaping holes in forums etc when they changed.
- morkalork 1y agoWhat was really funny was people image leaching off of blogs and personal sites and the owners replacing the image based on the referral header to troll the forum users.
- ChrisMarshallNY 1y agoA famous article on that: https://ascii.textfiles.com/archives/1011 https://ascii.textfiles.com/archives/1011
- dylan604 1y agoThe fact that the image is still available is amazeballs in and of itself. It's left up to you to decided if you want to see which version of the grim reaper is available.
- ChrisMarshallNY 1y agoJason Scott is still quite active in the tech community. He’s one of the principals of archive.org, so that makes it less surprising.
- cosmic_cheese 1y agoYep, I did this. I had some art I’d made posted on my blog, and several somebodies liked it enough to make it the background of their MySpace page and use it as forum avatars/signatures. Pretty sure I saw a couple people using it in eBay listings too. What made it bad is that they were using the full high resolution originals, not the thumbnails, which ate bandwidth like crazy. So I did the referrer-based leech protection and started serving those users a tiny fake error dialog image, which was much more tame than what some people used. It’s funny how quickly those people stopped embedding, even without the image being anything shocking or objectionable.
- freefaler 1y agoNothing is free, servers must be paid. On top of that owners want to make money. We can enjoy free services while the investors money last, but in the end every long-term service must find a way to pay the bill. (And some owners are more greedy than others) It's the same with AI chatbots/API costs, heavily subsidized now and much more expensive in the future.
- angst_ridden 1y agoIt's not like Imgur didn't finance with ads. They did that for a long time. Dunno if it paid the bills. The latest kerfuffle is because they were bought and the new owners fired all the moderators in favor of "AI moderation."
- transcriptase 1y agoI remember when imgur was created as a fast, no login-pushing, non-scummy alternative to ad-ridden clickjacking hosts that censored nsfw and controversial content. Then it became all of that on steroids except with a comment section and a weird community that didn’t realize they were living in the plumbing of other platforms like Reddit.
- ebiester 1y agoThey knew. Most of them migrated from another community. They migrated on the community reputation of MrGrim and his community cultivation.
- hbn 1y agor/IgnorantImgur proved that no, a good chunk of them did not know (looks like that sub is private now in protest of API changes but I'm sure you can find some old content hosted other places)
- jabroni_salad 1y agoWe knew. The situation is the opposite-- external users did not understand the interface and constantly posted things that were meant to be private onto the public feed.
- jacobgkau 1y agoYou got downvoted, but anyone who's used Imgur within the past decade or so has to have seen indications of this. I remember around 2016 when I went to upload some photos for a Reddit post, I found the two different profiles (old-style and new-style) confusing. I could post something private on the old profile or the new one, but if I wanted to bring a post from the old one to the new one, it would get set to public, and also re-post it with a new timestamp... things like that. Once Imgur stopped being a dedicated image hosting service, you had to go out of your way to lock down your posts if you wanted to use it as a dedicated image hosting service. Which I can see being confusing for both sides of the party.
- 1y ago
- jdlyga 1y agoHow did it come to this? Wasn't imgur a free owner operated service for uploading images to reddit?
- muppetman 1y agoIt was, then reddit did their own image hosting and Imgur had to shift to keeping their own community, and slowly introducing ads (the reason Imgur was started in the first place was because the found was sick of bad image sharing sites with ads) Eventually the Imgur founder sold it, and here we are today.
- duiker101 1y agoThat was a long time ago. In 2014 they took a bite of the poisoned apple and received 40 mil. I can imagine that's where the rat race began, till they sold to this MediaLab company in 2021. I can imagine anything of value, both culturally and technologically, is just being squeeze for any possible penny.
- egypturnash 1y agoThis story is five days old and the revolt appears to be over. I don't see a single middle finger on Imgur's front page.
- delecti 1y agoIt also shifted a bunch over the course of the protests. After the middle fingers, they moved to porn (mass posting and upvoting clear TOS violations), and then just blackout posts (posting and upvoting solid black images). Somewhere in there was also posts of deliberately large images and videos to overload the servers. I think at this point it has all but died down, but there still seems to be a bit of extra-racy content (which could also just be due to the new AI moderation being worse), and more large files (generally videos with "intergalactic quality" in the title).
- skeezyboy 1y agothey should do what reddit users did and claim that by reposting shit they find online, that they are "creating content" and should be "compensated". laughable
- dang 1y agoOk, we've moved the title into the past above. Thanks!
- internet2000 1y agoImgur having a "community" is still the strangest part of this story.
- jasonjayr 1y agoIt was originally a lot of Redditors, and then once (a) Reddit implemented image hosting, and (b) the 'big change' at Reddit happened a few years ago, the community grew from there.
- diggan 1y agoEvery for-profit business needs to earn money somehow, and if you're just "that service that reddit users use for uploading and viewing images", it's really hard to justify your existence in the first place. And then of course, you add in VC-investments, and suddenly you have external parties forcing you to start extracting as much value from users as you possibly can. Basically, the same story as with every other enshittificated company that happened so far.
- x187463 1y agoDiscovering Imgur has its own community and culture is like finding out a group of people live in your closet. You can almost imagine opening the door to grab a coat only to find a dozen people who swear this is the place they bring various outerwear and talk about such things. When you tell them they're in a coat closet, they may get upset and assure you it's more than that, now.
- pavel_lishin 1y agoI once discovered a community of people in a PhPBB board I administered - they didn't register on the board itself, but one of the plugins allowed a different type of user registration, and a whole sub-forum itself. We had no idea, until one day we stumbled into it by accident. It was very much like discovering a family was living in your closet.
- arthens 1y agoThat is such a fascinating story. I would love to hear more about it.
- ajsnigrutin 1y agoWebdevs, why, why o why, do you have to ask me to subscribe to the newsletter before you even let me read the first 5% of the article? Do you really thing people read the first sentence and then go "yes, i definitely want to receive spam from this website! here's my email address!" or what?
- 1123581321 1y ago404 does it because they don’t like AI scraping. https://www.404media.co/why-404-media-needs-your-email-address/ https://www.404media.co/why-404-media-needs-your-email-addre...
- euazOn 1y agoI call BS on that. I can get the entire text of the article by just viewing the source, no email address needed. Even if it was somehow needed, it's trivial for a scraper to circumvent that.
- 1123581321 1y agoI believe the sentiment they published at that link but it doesn't seem like the right method technically, and it conflates "AI is stealing from us" and "we need financial support," the latter of which has been true for independent journalism much longer than LLMs have trained on the web.
- evilduck 1y agoWebdevs aren't the ones making that decision unless they happen to own the whole company, product managers and marketing demand those popups. Also, unfortunately, they do tend to work better than other options like passively showing signup forms below content or on a dedicated page linked off of something.
- BuyMyBitcoins 1y agoModal windows are just popups reborn.
- m-hodges 1y agoHonestly quite surprised Imgur has a thriving on-site community. I thought it was just a solution to Reddit's original inability to upload photos directly.
- jimt1234 1y ago> MediaLab AI also owns Genius and World Star World Star is run by a bunch of AI bots. That's hilarious. World Star!
- dlcarrier 1y agoAre there any good YouTube videos about the Imgur drama? None of the big sloptubers seen to be following it.
- irishmanlondon 1y ago[dead]
- ChrisArchitect 1y agoImgur, great service, lasted this long, amazing. But I always wondered how any of these random image hosts afforded bandwidth (reminds of the other various ones like TwitPic who was saved from being taken offline by Twitter). I mean, I have a gallery of images in there, privately stored, directly linked to here and there around the net, without paying for anything for years. I think at one point I can't even remember now I did pay them a small fee and then they removed that option to go it alone with ads and refused to 'take my money'. Which seemed crazy and still does. It's still weird to me that a whole community exists on Imgur that uses it directly (instead of say using reddit threads to comment on the images like its initial use) and somehow sustains the site. I suppose it was always on a slow degradation path for like the last decade.
- Havoc 1y agoCan’t say I’ve ever seen it as a stand alone platform with a “community”. To me it was always a utility that goes with Reddit or whatever as image host. And when they opted to actively break large parts of Reddit by deleting nsfw images I kinda new the party is over even in its very tangential utility role
- i_am_jl 1y agoIt definitely exists. I use imgur to share stuff with friends, sometimes I forget to mark it private and users will vote and comment. I didn't notice until I got a dog and started posting pictures the community cared about.
- simianwords 1y agoThis is heartwarming for some reason
- violetthrift 1y agoIt is, though the other side of the coin was always uploading an image for your niche hobby sub and being inundated by sneering imgur users who wanted to know why your keyboard looked "stupid." The site developed a reputation (among reddit users) for being full of thoroughly incurious people with very confident opinions on your niche interest.
- mrweasel 1y agoIt's actually an incredibly interesting but hostile community, though I'm sure they think otherwise. You either fit into that community, or you're going to be meet with an anger I have yet to see in many other places. They community is also extremely naive about everything. I tried to follow their little revolt, and they are absolutely oblivious to the fact that running Imgur is probably crazy expensive and that they, as a community, is pretty much impossible to monetize. Almost regardless of how MediaLab was going to attempt to turn a profit, the community would act out in anger. I'm not suggesting that MediaLab handled everything correct, but I also believe that they are running out of options, you can't monetize Imgur without destroying the community.
- morkalork 1y agoLots of comments but nothing talking about all the lawsuits against medialab (mentioned in the fine article): https://www.forbes.com.au/news/innovation/medialab-bought-up-imgur-genius-and-amino-why-are-they-suing/ https://www.forbes.com.au/news/innovation/medialab-bought-up... The company has bought up a bunch of web properties and proceeded to reneg on paying out. Absolutely scum behaviour right there.
- Figs 1y agoA good alternative is catbox.moe It fills the niche imgur originally did (i.e. no bullshit image host) but uses a community funding model instead. I'm pitching in $20 every month to keep it from turning into imgur. If you were thinking of putting something on imgur, please just put it on catbox instead and toss a couple bucks their way once in a while so we can continue to have nice things.
- nozzlegear 1y agoI haven't heard of it before, but it seems to be down after trying to visit it just now.
- bakugo 1y ago> but uses a community funding model instead Sadly, that model is often not sustainable for various reasons. The site recently lost a significant income stream when Patreon rugpulled their account. It was originally started to fill a pretty specific niche for a specific type of community, but has since grown way past that, to the point that it's quite a lot slower than it used to be due to the increased bandwidth usage. If you want it to survive, I would honestly advise against advertising it.
- Figs 1y ago> The site recently lost a significant income stream when Patreon rugpulled their account. The community rallied in response to that and support poured in. Their funding needs are currently met by the community. What matters is that people actually give enough of a shit about it to pitch in. We can have nice things!
- rsynnott 1y agoAS IS TRADITION. Imgur itself was created due to the previous one, er, imgbucket maybe, being terrible. Which in turn...
- 7433678532901 1y agoI has alwas been revolting.
- ImgurRefugee 1y agoHonestly, Imgur’s been falling apart — layoffs, broken stuff, random policy changes, and everyone’s sick of being treated like the product. I just started using https://s3nd.pics https://s3nd.pics and it feels like what Imgur should’ve been: no ads, no data-selling, no weird algorithm. You control what you see, and the vibe is way more community-first. Worth checking out if you’re tired of the same old “platform milks users until it dies” cycle.