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Imgur Updates TOS, Banning NSFW Content

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Re: Imgur Updates TOS, Banning NSFW Content

#51

At some point imgur built a front page. Initially it mirrored reddits front page. And then it diverged, and very strangely for an image hosting site, most of the content on the front page was text. Often about current events, engaging in a superficial way (so, falling into the traps that HN is set up to avoid) but sometimes just tweet screenshots. This i guess is another move away from image content for imgur. Dunno.

There's this weird world of people who get their memes from Imgur directly and don't know about reddit or their other sources Looks like the shadow theatre has a captive audience

Imgur is how I found Reddit, but that was a long time ago

Re: Imgur Updates TOS, Banning NSFW Content

#52

I'm still waiting for the day when people will stop being absurdly neurotic about sexuality and just let people share their stuff as long as it's age flagged appropriately. It's so absurd that the most normal thing on earth is put into the same moderation category as harassment or hate speech.

> just let people share their stuff as long as it's age flagged appropriately.

Sure, you can do that on Twitter already, plenty of depraved porn on that platform. Imgur doesn't have to allow that. It's not like there is a lack of places on the internet where you can post porn.

Re: Imgur Updates TOS, Banning NSFW Content

#54

Many social networking sites (YouTube, Twitter, Tumblr, etc.) prohibit sexual content, racism and unauthorised use of trademarks in their terms and conditions, but in practice they've mostly left it alone, so I doubt Imgur will be so thorough.

Twitter [0] explicitly allows sexual content:

> You can share graphic content and consensually produced adult nudity and sexual behavior content within your Tweets, provided that you mark this media as sensitive.

But since we're on the topic, one social media service that you didn't mention is TikTok. I haven't seen anyone write about this and find it a bit fascinating. Although TikTok claim that sexual content isn't allowed, a lot of adult sex workers continuously skirt or outright ignore the rules. Some sex worker's strategy seems to be to continuously create multiple new accounts, as new accounts have a time period and size limit where growth and reach is really easy in order to get creators initially hooked. Two trends I've encountered are women flashing their vaginal lips through a see-through dress with a backlight and women flashing their breasts on reflective background items while seeming to engage in some mundane activity. But even the sex workers that don't engage in blatant TOS violations clearly create content to lead you towards their OnlyFans page. A breakdown of the evolution of the sex worker advertisement meta on TikTok is a YouTube video waiting to be made, especially as TikTok dies off and the strategies no longer remain viable as a vehicle for growth. A modern-day version of Aella's classic "Maximizing Your Slut Impact: An Overly Analytical Guide to Camgirling" [1].

[0] https://help.twitter.com/en/rules-and-policies/media-policy

[1] https://knowingless.com/2018/11/19/maximizing-your-slut-impa...

Re: Imgur Updates TOS, Banning NSFW Content

#55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reddit has also recently announced moves in regards to NSFW content[1] by limiting data access to mature content more aggressively than they currently do. It seems like an area a lot of platforms are struggling with and seem to opt for a complete ban. [1] https://www.reddit.com/r/reddit/comments/12qwagm/an_update_r...

FWIW, Reddit's new limits are about 3rd party use of their data/APIs. As a regular user, it doesn't really change anything (unless you consume Reddit NSFW content exclusively through a 3rd party app, I guess), so a pretty different case than Imgur's change here, which fundamentally shifts their user-base.

3rd party reddit apps rival reddit's own app in terms of popularity, and will be significantly hamstrung by these changes if NSFW content can only be accessed in the official app. Lots of non-porn content is marked NSFW. It may end up having a much larger impact than reddit corporate anticipates.

Re: Imgur Updates TOS, Banning NSFW Content

#56

I'm still waiting for the day when people will stop being absurdly neurotic about sexuality and just let people share their stuff as long as it's age flagged appropriately. It's so absurd that the most normal thing on earth is put into the same moderation category as harassment or hate speech.

You have petabytes of porn available with incredible ease, every interst and fetish you can imagine

A terabyte of new porn will be generated while you are reading this

You can go your whole life consuming porn for hours a day and never see the same content twice, for free

Not sure what your complaint is

Re: Imgur Updates TOS, Banning NSFW Content

#57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You sure? Twitter is notoriously known for asking for users phone number in every account, its practically impossible to have an active account without adding your phone number.

I don't know about you, but I personally have 5 Twitter accounts and 20+ Reddit accounts (sometimes you want to have different perspectives on an issue, have different front pages, or maybe manufacture a consensus). Only the main Twitter account has been asked for a phone number - I think they actually know about alt accounts and don't mind you having them as long as you don't do anything crazy with them. Don't worry…

I had a dozen Twitter accounts, but they were made in a different era, nowadays they make it harder to sign up without a phone number tho you can still add bot secondary accounts to the main one.

Re: Imgur Updates TOS, Banning NSFW Content

#58
I don't understand why Imgur did the following on https://imgurinc.com/rules , which I'd assume would be vetted by a lawyer...

Caption on example photo of mocking an obese person sitting on a too-small metal folding chair, consequently with a little butt crack visible (maybe at an MtG event):

> This buttcrack isn't intended to stimulate erotic feelings, so it's ok.

Two sections later, this photo itself seems to hit about half of the section:

> No hate speech, abuse or harassment.

Including:

> attacks on people based on their [...] age, disability or medical condition*

> harassment in the forms of [...] or inciting the community into support or disdain for a person, organization or community*

> content that attacks, bullies, or harasses non-public people

> any image taken of or from someone without their knowledge or consent for the purpose of harassment, [...]

> Posts that might be taken down may include: [...] negative stereotypes, [...] malicious personal attacks on non-public individuals, [...] “fat people hate,” [...] photos taken of a non-public figure without their knowledge to make fun of them

Then this section claims to tend to err on the side of taking down content:

> It's important to keep in mind that not everything that's mean or insulting is hate speech. That said, the line between unintentional and serious attacks is sometimes difficult to identify, so we're likely to err on the side of taking abusive content down.

Yet they're including a harassing image in the same rules page, captioned as "ok".

This seems sloppy to me. And, when it's in the context of a historically risky move of a major NSFW hoster going anti-NSFW, I wonder whether that part has been worked through meticulously.

Kudos to Imgur for surviving this long. I remember when they were effectively Reddit's image CDN, with the norm seeming to be Imgur-served images embedded with `img` elements in Reddit pages. I'd wondered how that worked, financially, and whether there were deals with Reddit, or it was just unofficially symbiotic. Imgur has been an important part of the Web for a long time, and hopefully they've figured out a good/necessary direction for 2023, and will execute well on it.

Re: Imgur Updates TOS, Banning NSFW Content

#60
post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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 ultima…

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?

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