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Imgur's community was in revolt

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Re: Imgur's community was in revolt

#101

Post by transcriptase »

jabroni_salad wrote: post #55
transcriptase wrote: post #9

I 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.

Imgur was a simple image host for forums and Reddit long before there was anything resembling a feed or even “users”. The interface was an upload button that gave you a URL that nobody else would have unless you shared it or someone guessed.

It was plumbing. And then a community formed inside it and wondered why things kept randomly showing up from above.

It’s actually pretty amusing and you sort of proved my point.

Re: Imgur's community was in revolt

#102

Post by hbn »

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 funny is if their service is working good - i.e. someone linked an image from their site and it displays for the user - you don't even notice the work the host is doing.

But when they pulled an image and you're just shown a placeholder "PhotoBucket - image not available", you actually see their name and logo and have repeated negative associations with them. I know when I hear any of those names I just get pissed thinking about all the old forum posts and rotting internet pages I've stumbled across with the images missing.

Re: Imgur's community was in revolt

#103

Post by AlecSchueler »

internet2000 wrote: post #20

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

I was quite early on Reddit and watched Imgur grow literally from the announcement thread. It got bigger and bigger and I often used it myself.

But I remember one day being at a friend's house and she was asking me about something I'd sent her, "oh did you see that in Imgur she asked?"

"What do you mean did I see it on Imgur? I saw it in Reddit, it's just hoisted on Imgur."

And she was like, "What's Reddit? I love Imgur, I scroll on there every night."

I couldn't believe it, I went and checked and there was indeed a whole community, leaving contents and voting on things and doing all the rest, and many of them never heard of Reddit

You're right, it does feel strange, there's somehow something very uncanny about it.

Re: Imgur's community was in revolt

#104

Post by hbn »

ebiester wrote: post #16
transcriptase wrote: post #9

I 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.

They knew. Most of them migrated from another community. They migrated on the community reputation of MrGrim and his community cultivation.

r/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)

Re: Imgur's community was in revolt

#105

Post by hbn »

jabroni_salad wrote: post #55
transcriptase wrote: post #9

I 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.

That issue exists because of the community that spawned on top of what was built just to be a utility. Not the people using it for its original intended purpose.

Re: Imgur's community was in revolt

#106

Post by nozzlegear »

Figs wrote: post #97

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.

I haven't heard of it before, but it seems to be down after trying to visit it just now.

Re: Imgur's community was in revolt

#107

Post by hbn »

kstrauser wrote: post #29
bslaq wrote: post #3

This will work as well as the Reddit revolts.

The Reddit revolt worked for me. It broke me of the habit of hanging out there.

It'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.

Re: Imgur's community was in revolt

#108

Post by stefantalpalaru »

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…

[dead]

Re: Imgur's community was in revolt

#109

Post by commandlinefan »

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"?

Sadly, no, not most of us. Not even a lot of us.

Re: Imgur's community was in revolt

#110

Post by commandlinefan »

ratelimitsteve wrote: post #71
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"?

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.

That's a popular equivocation when this topic comes up, but that's not quite what's going on (or at least not quite what happened). I'm sure that Reddit's current owners _do_ support censorship, and plenty of it, but the early Reddit owners, admins and even moderators did strongly oppose it. They were pushed into it by heavily implied threats of legal action if they didn't.

Did you know that movie ratings aren't based on any law? There's no law on any book, anywhere, that prevents theaters from allowing children under 18 to view R-rated movies. Instead, the MPAA and the theaters enforce a fairly rigid soft-censorship regime to avoid what would definitely be a legally mandated, government-run censorship regime.

So, while you are _strictly_ correct and Reddit is legally "allowed" to choose its current heavy handed censored approach, they were never really legally "allowed" to avoid it, either.

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