Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Imgur's community was in revolt

404media.co

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 165 posts

Re: Imgur's community was in revolt

#41

Post by BuyMyBitcoins »

bslaq wrote: post #4
jmclnx wrote: post #2

>years-long degradation of the website This is a very true statement, but to me the degradation started many years ago.

The degradation started when they began looking at the Accept HTTP header to see if you were clicking a direct link to an image so they could show you a page full of ads instead of just the image. And that happened well before that bloke sold the site.

I remember a long time ago you’d click on a direct link and it would redirect you to the image’s page. Then, it would superimpose a cat paw beckoning the user to swipe and see other images. I recall people really hating that.

Now the site can’t help but show you some tacked-on TikTok style video or animated gif underneath the image you actually wanted to view.

Re: Imgur's community was in revolt

#42

Post by coldpie »

BuyMyBitcoins wrote: post #36
ajsnigrutin wrote: post #21

Webdevs, why, why o why, do you have to ask me to subscribe to the newsletter before you even let me read the first 5% of the article? Do you really thing people read the first sentence and then go "yes, i definitely want to receive spam from this website! here's my email address!" or what?

Modal windows are just popups reborn.

It blows me away that none of the web browsers are trying to fix this. We eliminated popups back in the 90s/2000s, but now they're back again and no one cares.

Anyway, install the Kill Sticky bookmarklet, it gets rid of all the incompetent webdev crap like popups and those stupid sticky headers/footers: https://www.smokingonabike.com/2024/01/20/take-back-your-web...

Re: Imgur's community was in revolt

#43

Post by Aurornis »

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 anything goes as long as it wasn’t illegal or too extreme to defend. Combined with the popularity of porn on the website it created strange situations where a lot of subreddits were focused on things like legal-enough photos of underage children. There were also a lot of weird alt-right and white supremacist forums. There was an unofficial (if I recall correctly) “Subreddit of the Day” that attracted controversy because it actually highlighted one of the “jailbait” subreddits and even a white supremacist subreddit.

So if you were there at the time, it was obvious why Reddit wasn’t going to host their own images: It would have been a legal nightmare with all of the porn (copyrighted material), the creepy underage stuff, and white supremacist memes

Reddit did a decent job of containing this stuff out of view of the average user and later removing it from the site. It took many years.

If you peeked at /r/all or browsed new during the early days it would have been clear why image hosting would have been out of the question at the time.

Re: Imgur's community was in revolt

#44

Post by Jleagle »

duped wrote: post #38
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 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.

Re: Imgur's community was in revolt

#45

Post by giraffe_lady »

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…

I was a mod of a few semipopular subs back then and this is accurate. Understating it even.

Re: Imgur's community was in revolt

#46

Post by Aurornis »

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.

Illegal posts were never allowed, but I imagine any site focused on sharing porn is going to become filled with copyrighted content.

They also had a lot of severely creepy subreddits involving underage children or adult photos talents and shared with consent.

It was really bad. I left the site for years because that type of content was everywhere.

Re: Imgur's community was in revolt

#47

Post by euazOn »

1123581321 wrote: post #28
ajsnigrutin wrote: post #21

Webdevs, why, why o why, do you have to ask me to subscribe to the newsletter before you even let me read the first 5% of the article? Do you really thing people read the first sentence and then go "yes, i definitely want to receive spam from this website! here's my email address!" or what?

404 does it because they don’t like AI scraping. https://www.404media.co/why-404-media-needs-your-email-addre...

I call BS on that. I can get the entire text of the article by just viewing the source, no email address needed. Even if it was somehow needed, it's trivial for a scraper to circumvent that.

Re: Imgur's community was in revolt

#48

Post by hnuser123456 »

birdman3131 wrote: post #24
whywhywhywhy wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What the hell was reddit doing that they didn't immediately implement an image hosting feature Maybe partly because it wasn't Imgur that added image hosting to reddit it was more reddit always had images they were just on ImageShack, PhotoBucket and there was another reddit darling one who's name escapes me before imgur which I think added ads or started deleting images that caused Imgur to be created. So Imgur was…

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

Might've been Minus

Re: Imgur's community was in revolt

#49

Post by dylan604 »

ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #30
morkalork wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

A famous article on that: https://ascii.textfiles.com/archives/1011

The fact that the image is still available is amazeballs in and of itself. It's left up to you to decided if you want to see which version of the grim reaper is available.

Re: Imgur's community was in revolt

#50

Post by mock-possum »

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.

Ohhhhhh think again
Post reply on HN