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Imgur's community was in revolt

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Re: Imgur's community was in revolt

#91

Post by llm_nerd »

koakuma-chan wrote: post #18
jtokoph wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Isn't storage cheap? Telegram advertises as free unlimited storage.

Storage multiplies and becomes more expensive once you're replicating across regions, backing up into an eternally growing corpus, and so on.

But the biggest impediment by far were internet transport costs. I mean, they're still onerous for a lot of media-heavy sites, but it was much worse at the time. Offloading that to third parties made an incredible amount of sense.

It's actually kind of bizarre that there is an Imgur "community". I know the operation ran at a massive money-losing proposition for quite some time.

Re: Imgur's community was in revolt

#92

Post by BeFlatXIII »

Aurornis wrote: post #76
logifail wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 platfo…

On the other hand, the presence of that kind of content in other subreddits functioned as a highly-effective anti-normie filter on the rest of the site. It kept the kind of people who shit up Twitter away.

Re: Imgur's community was in revolt

#93

Post by mananaysiempre »

Aurornis wrote: post #76
logifail wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 platfo…

This is a prisoner’s dilemma situation. You don’t want to host that content, which is your right. And neither does anyone else. So every place that does try ends up swamped with the undesirables and either stops trying, goes bust, or turns into a poisonous swamp. And thus all the “yes but not here” people collectively end up enforcing a degree of censorship beyond what the law actually requires, or (in other cases) effectively erasing opinions that a fair part of society does hold (thus effectively forcing that part of society to turn into a poisonous swamp).

(Neutral example: at some point in the past the clinics around me started requiring appointments to come in for doctor-prescribed tests. Recently, the closest one did that too, saying that they were the only one remaining and ended up being overloaded with all the people who wouldn’t or couldn’t make an appointment. And thus we’re all worse off now.)

Re: Imgur's community was in revolt

#94

Post by morkalork »

Lots 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...

The company has bought up a bunch of web properties and proceeded to reneg on paying out. Absolutely scum behaviour right there.

Re: Imgur's community was in revolt

#95

Post by i_am_jl »

Havoc wrote: post #90

Can’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

It 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.

Re: Imgur's community was in revolt

#96

Post by mort96 »

mananaysiempre wrote: post #93
Aurornis wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 platfo…

This is a prisoner’s dilemma situation. You don’t want to host that content, which is your right. And neither does anyone else. So every place that does try ends up swamped with the undesirables and either stops trying, goes bust, or turns into a poisonous swamp. And thus all the “yes but not here” people collectively end up enforcing a degree of censorship beyond what the law actually requires, or (in other cases) e…

It seems like you view free speech as "everyone should be provided a platform to speak their mind", more or less. With that view, what you speak of is arguably a problem, sure.

My view of free speech is simply: the government shouldn't arrest you for publishing most things (with only certain mostly-well-defined exceptions). If there are views which are not illegal but which no platform will let you publish, I really don't see the problem. If enough people share those views they can get together and make their own platform. It's not even hard to make a platform anymore, anyone can buy a domain and set up nginx on a raspberry pi.

Freedom from government persecution on the basis of speech is extremely important to me (again, with exceptions). Freedom to publish unsavoury-but-legal content on other people's platforms is completely unimportant to me.

Re: Imgur's community was in revolt

#97

Post by Figs »

A 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.

Re: Imgur's community was in revolt

#98

Post by [deleted] »

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.

[deleted]

Re: Imgur's community was in revolt

#99

Post by fckgw »

hnuser123456 wrote: post #48
birdman3131 wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tinypic maybe? I know we used it a lot on Gaia back in the day.

Might've been Minus

Yeah, that's it! I remember Min.us because they had a larger file size limit so you could actually post GIFs there where longer ones wouldn't upload to Imgur.

Re: Imgur's community was in revolt

#100

Post by fckgw »

akho wrote: post #73
jtokoph wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

They made hotlinking increasingly difficult, turned the site into a social network and sold ads against content. It is no longer a "image hosting site" the way it was back then, it was going bankrupt as well.
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