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Imgur Updates TOS, Banning NSFW Content

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Re: Imgur Updates TOS, Banning NSFW Content

#361

Post by DHPersonal »

causi wrote: post #259
mrjh wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, the content took a HARD turn to the left in the last few years. I don't remember it being anywhere near as political even as recently as 5yrs ago. That suggests either a dramatic change in audience, or some algorithmic change that pushed that content more. I'd love to know what actually happened.

It was always rather left but at least it was clever left. Now it may as well be copied from some octogenarian's Facebook profile. "Like THIS if you think Donald Trump should be in JAIL!" Frankly, hearing grade-school versions of my own opinions parroted back at me ad nauseum is more annoying than if the posts were coming from other end of the spectrum. At least you can make a useful comment on something you disagree…

Five years ago I wasn't as left-leaning as I am now. Perhaps a majority of the users got older and followed a similar path? I wonder if it could've been subreddits like The_Donald being banned that caused an exodus, potentially driving away many or most of the right-leaning users who would get posted to /all.

Re: Imgur Updates TOS, Banning NSFW Content

#362

Post by dokem »

JoshTriplett wrote: post #195
futureshock wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think we live in an increasingly neo-victorian age. It's not just sex. It has become toxic to express a wide range of opinions. For example, the systematic deplatforming of conservatives. (I am a liberal, and my need to state that to be taken seriously is further evidence of all this.)

People aren't systematically deplatforming conservatives. People are systematically deplatforming hate. That that happens to affect one political party more than others is a condemnation of that party, not of the practice of deplatforming hate. Post all the conservative political opinions you want. As long as you stay away from posting hate, personal attacks, and similar, you're not going to lose your Twitter account

Replace 'hate' with "things I don't like" and you'll see why your comment provides no insight. Hate is subjective and political.

Re: Imgur Updates TOS, Banning NSFW Content

#363

Post by saynay »

BitwiseFool wrote: post #349
govolckurself wrote: post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tale as old as time. 1. "We need a better image host!" 2. Makes new image host. 3. Uh oh, hosting costs money. 4. Ads. 5. Lawsuits because illegal stuff. Uh oh, lawyers cost money. 6. "We need a better image host!"

I think Imgur tried to become a social network in its own right. It seems like the owners had ambitions beyond just serving advertisements.

I think that was more because places like Reddit just linking directly to the image meant they couldn't serve ads to pay for it. So they needed to make an incentive for people to directly visit the site, and the most obvious way was to just cut out Reddit as a necessary component to a user discovering more images.

Re: Imgur Updates TOS, Banning NSFW Content

#364

Post by nemothekid »

hbn wrote: post #337
govolckurself wrote: post #307

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can't host something like Imgur for free. No technological advancement can get over the fact that even electricity still costs money. And at their volume, they have nontrivial expenses. I have no idea how or where they're hosted, but my hobbyist hosting budget tops out around $20 a month. Beyond that, either pay me or leave.

I wonder if there's enough demand for a good, free image host that someone could make one that ran completely on community donations. There are plenty of podcasts on Patreon that pull in tens of thousands of dollars per month just from like $5-$20 monthly pledges. That should be enough to not only cover costs but pay devs. Could even give some perks to backers if it was some incentive.

There is a huge graveyard of image hosts - it's not for lack of trying. There are all the pomf.se clones that are community supported (like catbox.moe) which don't even break even from patreon.

The problem I see is that once you get even to the scale of a 10th of size of imgur your hosting bills (storage + bandwidth) will cross into the 10s of thousands per month, which would require you to be in the top 1% of Patreon users. I don't think you'd find people lining up to donate for such a service, especially given there are so many copycats.

Re: Imgur Updates TOS, Banning NSFW Content

#365

Post by Der_Einzige »

AlecSchueler wrote: post #283
Gigachad wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it’s more likely that hosting sexual content involves having to deal with loads of abusive material which is hard to detect and process, and which requires great haste in dealing with. It’s hard to have an army of dirt cheap outsourced moderators sort out regular porn from revenge porn. If you take too long dealing with regular spam, not much happens. If you take too long dealing with this kind of content, yo…

This is the thing entirely. So much of the NSFW content is abusive. The HN crowd is mostly safe from such attacks so this is a real blindspot.

Yes, tech bros are safe from others wanting them for anything outside of their minds.

Re: Imgur Updates TOS, Banning NSFW Content

#366

Post by Auracle »

saurik wrote: post #241
red_admiral wrote: post #239

I wonder what triggered this - legislation? Their payment processor? The ad network they get their revenue from? In my experience, this kind of change happens much more often for money reasons than for moral reasons. I think Tumblr's TOS change happened because their credit card processor became uncomfortable at them being essentially "in the porn business" - and indeed, seeing how much smaller Tumblr's business was…

> I think Tumblr's TOS change happened because... https://www.salon.com/2019/08/16/did-banning-porn-make-tumbl... > Porn was banned from Tumblr soon after the social network was removed from Apple’s App Store. Child pornography was found on the site, one consequence of the site’s relaxed content moderation approach. Instead of banning specific sites with child pornography, all not-safe-for-work content was banned.

I don’t see how someone could have that many uploads a day without child porn slipping through - especially when child porn is defined as porn of anyone under the age of 18.

Re: Imgur Updates TOS, Banning NSFW Content

#367

Post by TheRealPomax »

govolckurself wrote: post #252
sizzle wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean the site is ad infested and slow as hell to load, such a fall from their former grace when they were seen as an internet darling next to photobucket type sites when options for uploading and hotlinking were limited due to bandwidth constraints. I think Reddit started hosting their own content or whatever the redgif site is seems to have taken over Imgur for a while now and the images/vids load lightning fast i…

Tale as old as time. 1. "We need a better image host!" 2. Makes new image host. 3. Uh oh, hosting costs money. 4. Ads. 5. Lawsuits because illegal stuff. Uh oh, lawyers cost money. 6. "We need a better image host!"

The image hosting part is half the story, "having a community that was predominantly fun" was the other half. But they've gone out of their way to make sure the site's a hellscape shithole without adblocking with every possible action getting gamified. So ironically the only thing that's left of the original pretty great website is the image hosting part. EULA notwithstanding (because as much as people yell, NSFW makes up barely any of the front page content, so clearly the site's own community doesn't care whether it's there or not)

Re: Imgur Updates TOS, Banning NSFW Content

#368

Post by rm_-rf_slash »

phendrenad2 wrote: post #87

The pendulum has clearly started to swing back to sexual repression. Society has started to see sexual freedom and expression as grotesque. Now the only question is how far it'll swing.

We really ought to update Napoleon’s quote about malice and stupidity to something like “never attribute to moral preening that which can be explained by financial incentives”

Re: Imgur Updates TOS, Banning NSFW Content

#369

Post by hbn »

nemothekid wrote: post #364
hbn wrote: post #337

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder if there's enough demand for a good, free image host that someone could make one that ran completely on community donations. There are plenty of podcasts on Patreon that pull in tens of thousands of dollars per month just from like $5-$20 monthly pledges. That should be enough to not only cover costs but pay devs. Could even give some perks to backers if it was some incentive.

There is a huge graveyard of image hosts - it's not for lack of trying. There are all the pomf.se clones that are community supported (like catbox.moe) which don't even break even from patreon. The problem I see is that once you get even to the scale of a 10th of size of imgur your hosting bills (storage + bandwidth) will cross into the 10s of thousands per month, which would require you to be in the top 1% of Patreo…

Well I was going off what the above parent comment was saying, that recent advances in compression + cheaper hosting should make it more viable. I don't know much about what any of those costs cause I've never run anything that needs a lot of serving costs at scale. So I'm guessing even with that it's still too expensive?

On the other hand, I think Imgur also pushed way more traffic upon itself by trying to make itself into another social media site. Like, if it just stayed an image host it probably could have stayed more niche and wouldn't have had thousands of casual internet users scrolling through images all day at work.

Re: Imgur Updates TOS, Banning NSFW Content

#370

Post by transcriptase »

dataengineer56 wrote: post #150
throwaway2990 wrote: post #93

I wish imgur would go away entirely. It’s such a toxic community of people. If you are not aligned with their doctrine you get spammed with downvotes and some of the most hateful replies I’ve ever seen. You report it but it stays there.

I'll never understand people who actively use Imgur as if it's a social network.

A few years back someone posted this comment about the imgur “community” which I thought was apt:

“They are like rats living in a sewer. They feed off of the shit that gets pumped through it but have no concept of the fact that it’s simply a piece of infrastructure for a large city above them.”

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