Well it took 10-15 years for imgur to suck like photobucket and the other sucky image hosting sites that came before it.
Imgur was good for serving as a quick cut and paste to share images. It was not good for being Reddit or image sharing and discovery. It filled a need better than anyone else and now it doesn’t.
I don’t see the value in creating an account to upload an image to share it for two people to see it. It’s just an extra step. It’s not just the hassle, it’s that I don’t want a profile of all the images I’ve ever shared.
I was always surprised by how gracious imgur was and wondered how they made money but assumed their costs were super low. And I suppose it was fun while it lasted.
This also makes me really appreciate my $30/year shared web host that’s run without problems for almost 20 years (knock wood). Images posted there never go down. Or at least I get to choose when they go down.
I think everyone would be better off by just paying $50/year for a random host that ran email, cloud storage, images, etc and could be easily ported to any competitor by copying some files and changing DNS.
I was just wondering what had happened to ImageShack, which I remember being popular 15+ years ago. Apparently it's still around but it looks like a paid service now.
I guess something will replace Imgur like ImageShack and PhotoBucket etc were replaced (and similarly like RapidShare was replaced as the go-to file upload site).
I was surprised that nobody has made an Imgur replacement backed by Cloudflare R2. It would eliminate the egress cost issues while being on one of the Internet's greatest CDNs.
I thought about doing it myself, but as the article mentions, there are "Legal realities, such as copyright removal and the risk of CSAM imagery".
Building a web app for uploading and viewing images is easy. Connecting to a payment processor so you can have some sort of "premium" account isn't too difficult. But having to deal with copyright claims and preventing/reacting to CSAM is an absolute oil tanker of worms if you reach the scale that Imgur has. If you choose to allow porn, you have to deal with claims of porn being posted without the permission of the subjects (ie, revenge porn). You can't automate those claims, or you'll end up with the current fuckery of YouTube where legit content creators get their content taken down or demonetized from fraudulent claims.
As far as Imgur itself goes, I knew this day would come. I'm surprised they still allow direct linking of images, as that results in their bandwidth being used for free.
What's interesting these days is how Discord allows direct linking. Waiting for that to go away some day.
This is cyclic and only lasts until someone is done being the money piñata. Service is born. Service gets big. Service owner gets tired and wants to part ways. New owner takes over. Service slowly or all of a sudden dies.
My thought is the only way to fix this is charge users to upload their content, at a rate of ~$2.50/GB. Stick it in the Internet Archive and give them $2/GB (their cost per GB for perpetual storage [1]), and front it with Cloudflare with the other 50 cents (assuming requests for all content eventually trails off theta decay style). Someone has to not be the object store of last resort, but also the wallet. The Internet Archive already has Patron Services to handle DMCA and illegal content moderation of content/items, but would probably want some extra funds to not overburden staff with this task (which is entirely reasonable imho).
I really wish ipfs worked better. Keep the Internet Archive as the object store of last resort, but also provide an easy way for anyone to contribute storage and hosting to the network in a few clicks (with a reasonable expectation that the images they are mirroring are filtered for DMCA / illegal content).
I would happily donate a few terabytes, and a fat internet connection.
Here's the thing. The overwhelming majority of content that people want to share on the likes of Imgur never actually get that much traffic. Ergo, why not just buy a cheap xyz, be it a turn-key appliance, a Pi and roll your own, or do something more sophisticated? Or if they don't want to do that, why not just host it out of your cloud storage provider?
I don't really understand the niche that Imgur is serving. Past a point, it makes far more sense to have it on your own server (local or cloud), your own CloudFlare account in front of it etc. This weird middleground where people aren't making money off of their content, but still want to share it, but don't actually get that much traffic is a weird one.
Why not just stick some ads on it if you're getting that much traffic or stick it on someone else's ad-supported platform? And if it's porn, why not go through a porn site and monetize legitimately? Surely all legitimate and consensual pornography wouldn't have a problem with that, and they would get more traffic on the ads/subs, and thus more money.
A one-time upload fee could work with widespread expectations about how to entrust the money to long-term preservation, and how to report that transparently. I'm reminded of cemetery management which must split plot sale revenue between today's expenses and the trust that cares for the cemetery at least a century after the last one is sold.
>I'm surprised they still allow direct linking of images, as that results in their bandwidth being used for free.
On mobile at least they've got a dark pattern to fix that. Direct links redirect to imgur.io with the same ad-filled infinite scrolling hell the linker tried to save you from.
The best method around it I've found is to edit the url before going there to be imgur.lurkmore.com instead of imgur.com. Hopefully mentioning it doesn't get the site killed. It seems like nitter for imgur. I keep telling friends to stop using imgur but some of them are weirdly stubborn. I use a variety of free image hosts when I link them stuff, never imgur, and yet they refuse to put in even a fraction of the effort in most cases.
Is there a solution for training models to detect CSAM images? I'm imagining some kind of cooperation with the FBI, who I assume have an extensive dataset, where there models could be trained off FBI data without ever sharing the images.
Or, is there some kind one way mask that could be applied to the image such that the FBI could mask their CSAM dataset and release it and people could train detection models on the masked data, then just mask inputs during inference?
I feel like being extremely aggressive about detection and removal is scalable solution here.
You could use a GAN style network to generate CSAM using the detection network as a discriminator, so I assume anyone giving out the model would be reluctant to do so without legal agreements and a strong ability to enforce them.
I wonder if you could use an off the shelf API like Google Cloud Vision or AWS Rekognition to detect both underage images + nudity and use that as a rough detector of CSAM.
That article points to an attempt to archive the images, https://wiki.archiveteam.org/index.php/Imgur. This is a good idea in general, but we need a reliable mechanism. Foundations with massive budgets are a great centralizing and stable archiving location, but I always worry that we need decentralized services too. Ideally all these archiving project would have both (a rich and powerful central repository as well as decentralized copies on random people's computers).
What are the odds that archiveteam.org can make it work? The continual desire to censor naked pics on the internet so replicates the behavior of various idiots censoring literature and art over the ages.
The solution is to pay for the storage you are using and store files on your own domain, one that you are willing to pay for a lifetime and/or even have a contract with relatives to maintain it if you want that content to survive you.
I have an imgur account, and I have uploaded some images as anonymous as well. I've always treated those as throwable content. I would never publish anything that I deem permanent in a third party server or gloud service.
In this case you'd need to make copies of the Internet Archive (archive.org).
The Archive Team "only" organises the scrapping as far as I'm aware (volunteers run some servers, write code to scrap the service, etc) and then other volunteers run the VMs that do the scrapping. Then they upload the content to the Internet Archive and this imgur backup will end up on the IA's Wayback Machine.
According to the project tracker[0], 4TB or 3.55M items have been saved so far (15 hours), over 40M in waiting, but according to their IRC[1] more URLs will be added later.
TFA mentions Photobucket. I still occasionally stumble upon once-informative posts (e.g. repair guides) on niche phpBB forums that were stripped of all meaning when the images broke.
At least for imgur it should be possible for forum operators (and users, if they use some browser to redirect URLs) to search and replace old imgur links with links to the Wayback Machine as the Archive Team is saving many of the files.
- 202304: the year and month the archive was done (2023, 04). It will redirect you to the copy closest to that date instead of showing the latest, which might be a good backup or not (eg: a 404 page).
- id_: shows the file as it was saved, no wayback machine toolbar, can be hotlinked.
For pages, instead of "id_", either don't use it and you'll get a page with the toolbar or use "if_" as it corrects the path to css/js/etc without displaying the toolbar.
Unless said forums serve pornography, only thing they have to do is create an imgur account and reupload to that account and swap the id of the image. This is easily scripted.
But more viable option is to pay for the hosting of the image, either by hosting the files directly or by using a storage solution. A 6$/TB s3 storage from Wasabi seems like a good start.
For photobucket, the images are still there, they're not visible unless the poster is paying for them, but there are browser extension that allows to bypass that (I'm using one called Photobucket Hotlink Fix on Chrome). Though that's from what I remember, I haven't checked if it's still working or if things have changed on photobucket's side of things
Understandable somewhat - I always wondered like how they afforded all the bandwidth etc to host all those images and allow the direct linking. As with reddit, nuts to all the lurkers. Want to use a service, at least log in to it even if not going to pay.
I was eternally grateful for that direct linking option, very useful on forums etc and even paid for an account. Then they removed the pay option years ago. Never understood it. I want to give you money! They had their reasons and it simplified some things but whatever.
Someone mentioned reddit buying them, yeah that should have been on the table from the start when reddit started hosting their own images, but I guess someone shot it down in the name of independence.
What's stopping Reddit from making a copy of every Imgur-hosted image linked to on Reddit, hosting it themselves, and thus ensuring that nothing is broken for Reddit users? Or just buying Imgur, for that matter?
Context is already lost on posts past a few years given the proportion of deleted accounts and comments. I'm not sure if there's much to be gained from archiving the images themselves.
I wonder what type of CEO committees green-lights these projects. We gonna buy a project, and then make it kill itself. One obviously can be detached from the fiscal realities so much, that company buzzword policy and virtue signaling are more worth in the context of career survival. Was there ever somebody fired for the tumbler fiasco?
The kind that doesn't have to bear the consequences of the decision. The CEO is fine, he has a golden parachute no matter what happens. It's the employees who are out of work and unable to find work who end up suffering.
I think big question with these actions should be were there monetizable traffic in first place. That is would the site die either way, and banning of porn is just the most realistic attempt to get more adds available.
That's kinda what happened to Radioshack. The orders from the top took the company in directions that main customer base wasn't interested in. It lost a lot of it's uniqueness and quickly deflated. I worked at one for a few years right before they closed most of their stores. It was pretty sad seeing the store empty more and more often.
Maybe one that wasn't really a user of the product and though it was the right decision for the company? Or someone ran some numbers and came to the conclusion that users who there for the porn didn't bring enough ad revenue? Or that removing the porn could lead to better ad contracts? Or maybe was pushed by the board?
I used to follow some art blogs on Tumblr; it was pretty good for that, and I prefer the curated approach vs. a purely user-generated approach such as e.g. Reddit or deviantart, where searching for good stuff often feels like trying to find a needle in a turdstack.
Some of this was "adult". Quite a bit of it was deleted. I stopped used Tumblr.
What I'm trying to say is: "adult" doesn't necessarily mean "porn", at least not according to Tumblr's definition (which is fine, it's their site and they get to set the rules).
The irony is that social medias let underage publish sexualized but not totally nude content but remove aggressively informationnal content from doctors, sex therapists, feminists, pelvic floor physical therapists. The fact you see genitals pictures or drawing doesn't make something pornographic.
And then you realize that millions of women and men around the world don't even know how a human body really work, potentially take wrong decisions, live an unfulfilled/disappointing sexual life all this because of lack of access to information and an history of myths and obscurantism.
It is a much bigger problem than kids looking at tits and genitals really [1]
[1] which they eventually manage to do anyway regardless of all adults efforts.
I have been searching for stuff the last few days and have come across more broken or empty Imgur links than live ones. As recent as late-2020 images are already deleted.
It’s a real bummer to see this happen. I hope some day there’s some sort of canonical image host that can be maintained through donations of money and hosting.
Also, I very much pity whoever is in charge of trying to turn a profit by setting fire to such a big chunk of the internet’s history.
I've never used Imgur so I am curious about one thing. When people upload images to Imgur do they have a login to do this or it is anonymous? If a login is used then I think Imgur should give people the option to 301 redirect their uploaded image to another site so they can manage their files elsewhere and not break as many links. Then technically they are not hosting the files. Maybe give people some time to modify the sites they are embedded in before removing the 301's or replacing with 410's.
You could do it via an account, in which case you could easily manage your images after the fact.
Or you could upload anonymously, in which case it would give you a magic delete link, which you could use later to delete the image. Of course if you failed to save that link at the time of upload then you lost all control of the image.
Both were possible. From my understanding only the images uploaded by anonymous account are taken down. Imgur still exist as an image/video social media.
"We will be focused on removing old, unused, and inactive content that is not tied to a user account from our platform as well as nudity, pornography, & sexually explicit content,"
What’s the issue with removing old unused and inactive content? Some people used imgur for sharing one off pictures or screenshots. The porn thing is not an issue either as imgur is more of a friendly community of genuine people. It will do just fine.
Reddit doesn't allow uploading of images or videos in NSFW subs so most of that content is hosted on imgur. I reckon this will be a massive blow against both sites. Not only for the purged archive but also fewer future visitors to imgur when the site is replaced for NSFW and thereby all other content in the long run. Photobucket used to be the goto site. Then imgur replaced it. Another site will replace imgur.
Speaking of old content. That's a massive issue for everyone. Most forums depend on external services for sharing images. This will kill tutorials, progress diaries and close to most images in forums. It's like purging all movies from music predating 1990. It will have a major impact.
I hope they dont overkill it and only delete irrelevant images. Imgur is my refuge and would hate to see it retire like tumblr. But i do see a point in deleting useless content.
> What’s the issue with removing old unused and inactive content?
$$$
I imagine there's probably a LOT of images that were uploaded, viewed by 1 or 2 people, and then never viewed again, and never WILL be viewed again. But they still have to store them, and that storage costs money.
Imgur was good for serving as a quick cut and paste to share images. It was not good for being Reddit or image sharing and discovery. It filled a need better than anyone else and now it doesn’t.
I don’t see the value in creating an account to upload an image to share it for two people to see it. It’s just an extra step. It’s not just the hassle, it’s that I don’t want a profile of all the images I’ve ever shared.
I was always surprised by how gracious imgur was and wondered how they made money but assumed their costs were super low. And I suppose it was fun while it lasted.
This also makes me really appreciate my $30/year shared web host that’s run without problems for almost 20 years (knock wood). Images posted there never go down. Or at least I get to choose when they go down.
I think everyone would be better off by just paying $50/year for a random host that ran email, cloud storage, images, etc and could be easily ported to any competitor by copying some files and changing DNS.
SaaS ultimately lets you down.