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Imgur's community was in revolt
81–90 of 165 posts
Re: Imgur's community was in revolt
#82I 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.
stick a comment section on your website and some saddo somewhere will frequent it
Re: Imgur's community was in revolt
#83Imgur 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.
Imgur has had its own community for over a decade. This really isn't a good comparison; who stores their coats in someone else's closet and expect for nobody else to interact with it?
Re: Imgur's community was in revolt
#84I 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.
It was always obvious that imgur being a service that just provided image hosting and asked nothing was unsustainable.
I'm impressed they ever managed to turn it into something.
Re: Imgur's community was in revolt
#85What'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…
Doesn't beg the question. There's a whole evolving history there. Reddit didn't need to 'keep users on the platform' because they weren't leaving it. Most images on imgur shared on reddit (and a billion forums elsewhere) were direct links to the images, they weren't going to any sort of imgur landing page or whatever. Imgur just slowly developed that later and surprisingly developed its own also-ran community onsite.
Similarly over on twitter without any image hosting capabilities let third party sites like twitpic host images for years before evetually developing their own service. Twitpic eventually caved under the load of hosting so much stuff without income and it was good that Twitter was successful enough to take it all on directly.
Re: Imgur's community was in revolt
#86This will work as well as the Reddit revolts.
the Reddit revolt drove me to Lemmy. it's methadone to Reddit's heroin, but it doesn't feel like Dead Internet over there.
Re: Imgur's community was in revolt
#87Imgur, 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.
Re: Imgur's community was in revolt
#88I 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.
We 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.
You 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.
Re: Imgur's community was in revolt
#89It 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.
SomethingAwful was infamous for doing this and sending goatse. You could get banned on forums back in the day if you hotlinked images to SA, so... effective strategy, it seems.
Re: Imgur's community was in revolt
#90Can’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