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Imgur's community was in revolt

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Re: Imgur's community was in revolt

#131

Post by [deleted] »

Aurornis wrote: post #116
mananaysiempre wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

[deleted]

Re: Imgur's community was in revolt

#132

Post by wredcoll »

Aurornis wrote: post #119
BeFlatXIII wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That's what he said: anti-normie.

Re: Imgur's community was in revolt

#133

Post by fnfs2000 »

mrweasel wrote: post #127
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's actually an incredibly interesting but hostile community, though I'm sure they think otherwise. You either fit into that community, or you're going to be meet with an anger I have yet to see in many other places. They community is also extremely naive about everything. I tried to follow their little revolt, and they are absolutely oblivious to the fact that running Imgur is probably crazy expensive and that they…

This is correct. Once the cost to operate Imgur exceeds revenue from ads, all that content is likely to disappear.

Re: Imgur's community was in revolt

#134

Post by tw04 »

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…

> What the hell was reddit doing that they didn't immediately implement an image hosting feature to keep users on the platform?

Image hosting is insanely expensive and they couldn’t afford to do it or were smart enough not to.

Every image host that added paid accounts or ads all over the place had a horrible reputation at the time (see photobucket). They likely wanted to avoid ruining their reputation before going public.

Heck even Imgur caught heat when they needed to start paying the bills.

Re: Imgur's community was in revolt

#136

Post by Modified3019 »

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…

Years ago, someone on r/datahoarder made a toy website that showed a “waterfall” of the newest images being posted to Imgur.

Initial comments of “oh neat!” quickly turned into “oh no!” and the toy site didn’t last long as it was. I think Imgur had some kind of detection (possibly automatic+manual) of illegal material going on, but it (the manual side of it?) would occur some time after posting.

Re: Imgur's community was in revolt

#137

Post by bsimpson »

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…

> started requiring appointments

I fear we're headed this way generally. There's a kind of person who likes to plan everything ahead of time. As we hit capacity limits (e.g. overtourism), those planners are going to book all the available capacity. We're going to either have to adapt to be like them, or be locked out of experiences.

I'm very not happy about it.

Re: Imgur's community was in revolt

#138

Post by MisterTea »

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.

My friend was being lazy years ago hot linking images on ebay, someone else's images of the same item no less, which they got wise to and replaced with hard core porn. He learned to at least steal the image and host it himself...

Re: Imgur's community was in revolt

#139

Post by duxup »

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…

Also the old days of image hosting (and maybe now) was kinda unprofitable ... Reddit didn't have to do it / spend money on it when others were happy to lose money on their behalf.

Re: Imgur's community was in revolt

#140

Post by duxup »

benoau wrote: post #67
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…

You can read a lot more about this on Wikipedia, most would be surprised at just how bad parts of it were - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Controversial_Reddit_communiti...

Some that come to mind to me from the old days (some less old than others):

- "Street fashion" subs, where photos were NOTICEABLY of underage girls taken on the street candidly, usually from a long distance (telephoto lens), and everyone talked about "fashion" in ways you figured out pretty fast were not about fashion. There were a number operating at the same time as a sort of redundancy as they would vanish from time to time.

- CSAM investigation type subs, where users who REALLY knew the lingo and details of CSAM talked about how they were investigating CSAM elsewhere on the internet ... like they were amateur police, but it was kinda indistinguishable from them being connoisseurs. They also would tell each other very suspicious stories about their investigations, like something a jr. high student would make up because they don't know how the world works. It was like they thought they were setting up some sort of plausible deniability or something...

- Gamergate and that whole bizzaro world spanned subs but it was absolutely insane how emotionally charged the devotes were about something as inconsequential as ... video game reviews.

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