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Imgur's community was in revolt

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Re: Imgur's community was in revolt

#111

Post by kstrauser »

hbn wrote: post #107
kstrauser wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

It really was. Apollo was the reddit UI for me. The old reddit web page looks awful on a phone. The new page is a mess of algorithmic disaster on any device. I cannot stand their 1st-party app. When they killed the API, I no longer enjoyed using reddit on my phone, which is where I accessed it 95% of the time. They made it pretty easy for me to stop using the site at all.

OTOH, I had previously posted often enough to get in on the IPO, and that made up for a lot of the annoyances.

Re: Imgur's community was in revolt

#112

Post by beAbU »

AngryData wrote: post #10
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.

Yeah, when imgur came about reddit was 99% text on the site. Hosting images would have been a huge step up in cost considering the user count. Then of course people realized that if imgur can make money on ads thanks to reddit's traffic, reddit could potentially make even more and it has been all down hill from there.

Reddit was a link aggregator till the recent shitty redesign. So image posts were just a post with a URL. You needed RES if you wanted to open the image inline with the post and comments.

Re: Imgur's community was in revolt

#113

Post by duped »

Jleagle wrote: post #44
duped wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What the hell was reddit doing that they didn't immediately implement an image hosting feature to keep users on the platform Reddit was a hub for illegal porn so presumably, they didn't want to face a crackdown for hosting that kind of content. It still is, but nsfw posts are banned from /r/all now.

I don't think any of the porn on Reddit is illegal.

Except for all the revenge porn, creep shots, and the infamous "fappening" over 10 years ago

Re: Imgur's community was in revolt

#114

Post by kjkjadksj »

fckgw wrote: post #100
akho wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It still is the same old imgur for making posts. One button to upload, you get served your album link, right click image for direct link. Same as its been for 15 years. Just used it as such last week.

Re: Imgur's community was in revolt

#116

Post by Aurornis »

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…

> effectively erasing opinions that a fair part of society does hold

There is no widespread opinion that does not have countless corresponding platforms to share it.

I guarantee you cannot find an opinion that cannot be shared on at least one of the major social media platforms right now.

This extinction of free speech does not happen.

Re: Imgur's community was in revolt

#117

Post by kjkjadksj »

justinrubek wrote: post #83
x187463 wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

The answer is most people using imgur to merely post on reddit do just that

Re: Imgur's community was in revolt

#118

Post by [deleted] »

BeFlatXIII wrote: post #92
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…

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.

[deleted]

Re: Imgur's community was in revolt

#119

Post by Aurornis »

BeFlatXIII wrote: post #92
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…

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.

I was there and I couldn't disagree more.

I see more parallels between the people who thrived in the early Reddit cesspool era and the same people who are spreading culture wars, misinfo, and other garbage on Twitter.

The early days of Reddit were a haven for culture war and misinfo people.

Re: Imgur's community was in revolt

#120

Post by tracker1 »

skeezyboy wrote: post #82
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.

stick a comment section on your website and some saddo somewhere will frequent it

Fair enough.. that, or hosting a LamerNews (HN Clone) instance... you get so many drive by spam posts, even just text, it isn't funny. Hard to imagine how bad it can get with images.

On the flip side, it's a real shame so many sites/pages removed comment sections... I had hope for a while that a browser extension for some sort of social media could fill the gap. There was a "free speech" one that had the feature, but the community itself was pretty bad, and there was no comments/shares on the rather technical sites I tend to visit.

Need some sort of cohesion to fill the gap in some way. I saw a bluesky implementation for comments, that used the social media itself in a shared post's replies as comments, which was interesting.

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