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Imgur's community was in revolt

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Re: Imgur's community was in revolt

#71

Post by ratelimitsteve »

logifail wrote: post #63
Aurornis wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was an early Reddit user. Very early Reddit was a popular spot for programming discussion because it was mostly tech people using it. That quickly flipped, as /r/NSFW became the most popular subreddit. You could avoid it by browsing as a guest or by curating your feed, but porn was everywhere. Early Reddit also had a strong attitude about minimal moderation. The early days were characterized by a feeling that anyth…

> The early days were characterized by a feeling that anything goes as long as it wasn’t illegal or too extreme to defend. Q: Wouldn't most of us want to defend the right to publish content that's "not illegal"?

A right to publish it? Yes. An entitlement to a platform that will handle the publishing for you? Only if the owners of that platform freely agree to do so.

Re: Imgur's community was in revolt

#72

Post by pavel_lishin »

x187463 wrote: post #56
internet2000 wrote: post #20

Imgur having a "community" is still the strangest part of this story.

Discovering 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.

I 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.

Re: Imgur's community was in revolt

#73

Post by akho »

jtokoph wrote: post #8
Workaccount2 wrote: post #5

What'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 neede…

My 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.

And yet imgur, with no revenue at all, managed to fill that gap.

Re: Imgur's community was in revolt

#74

Post by bsimpson »

Aurornis wrote: post #43
Workaccount2 wrote: post #5

What'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 neede…

I was an early Reddit user. Very early Reddit was a popular spot for programming discussion because it was mostly tech people using it. That quickly flipped, as /r/NSFW became the most popular subreddit. You could avoid it by browsing as a guest or by curating your feed, but porn was everywhere. Early Reddit also had a strong attitude about minimal moderation. The early days were characterized by a feeling that anyth…

Alexis's mom had cancer. He wanted her so see him succeed, so they sold it in the first year to Conde Nast (the published of Wired magazine). Conde had a popular blog called Webmonkey, and there was a reddit feed in the sidebar.

Early reddit skewed heavily towards people who make shit online; fitting for a site made by people making shit online.

Re: Imgur's community was in revolt

#75

Post by datpiff »

gryfft wrote: post #25
whywhywhywhy wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What the hell was reddit doing that they didn't immediately implement an image hosting feature Maybe partly because it wasn't Imgur that added image hosting to reddit it was more reddit always had images they were just on ImageShack, PhotoBucket and there was another reddit darling one who's name escapes me before imgur which I think added ads or started deleting images that caused Imgur to be created. So Imgur was…

I remember waffleimages

that was somethingawful

Re: Imgur's community was in revolt

#76

Post by Aurornis »

logifail wrote: post #63
Aurornis wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was an early Reddit user. Very early Reddit was a popular spot for programming discussion because it was mostly tech people using it. That quickly flipped, as /r/NSFW became the most popular subreddit. You could avoid it by browsing as a guest or by curating your feed, but porn was everywhere. Early Reddit also had a strong attitude about minimal moderation. The early days were characterized by a feeling that anyth…

> The early days were characterized by a feeling that anything goes as long as it wasn’t illegal or too extreme to defend. Q: Wouldn't most of us want to defend the right to publish content that's "not illegal"?

On your own site or services? Of course.

I don’t want to host that content, though. That’s also my right.

As I discovered on the early days on Reddit, I don’t even want to be on a site where content is a free-for-all because you could go from scrolling through programming topics to encountering sexualized imagery of minors by scrolling if you weren’t careful.

This is the problem with every hardcore free speech platform: They attract the people who only come to post that content, while everyone else who doesn’t want to see it starts leaving. Then after some time, the majority of your content is catering to those niches.

Re: Imgur's community was in revolt

#77

Post by pimlottc »

morkalork wrote: post #22
bluedino wrote: post #6

It 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.

What 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.

aka "hotlinking"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inline_linking

Re: Imgur's community was in revolt

#78

Post by UltraSane »

Aurornis wrote: post #43
Workaccount2 wrote: post #5

What'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 neede…

I was an early Reddit user. Very early Reddit was a popular spot for programming discussion because it was mostly tech people using it. That quickly flipped, as /r/NSFW became the most popular subreddit. You could avoid it by browsing as a guest or by curating your feed, but porn was everywhere. Early Reddit also had a strong attitude about minimal moderation. The early days were characterized by a feeling that anyth…

Just to give you an idea of just how hands off Reddit moderation was at the start there used to be a /r/sexwithdogs subreddit. That was not fun seeing in /r/all one day.

Re: Imgur's community was in revolt

#79

Post by skeezyboy »

x187463 wrote: post #56
internet2000 wrote: post #20

Imgur having a "community" is still the strangest part of this story.

Discovering 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.

i loled and so true

Re: Imgur's community was in revolt

#80

Post by skeezyboy »

delecti wrote: post #57
egypturnash wrote: post #19

This 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.

It 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 c…

they 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
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