Submitted 7 months ago by bytesonbike@discuss.online to nostupidquestions@lemmy.world
https://discuss.online/pictrs/image/4d232c6a-488a-48d6-b9a4-5010287b0afd.png
Their whole front page has dozens of these same images. And I’m not much of a imgur user to dig around.
I’m glad I got away from imgur. What I wanted was simple: an image hosting service that didn’t try to be something it’s not, or change its UI every five seconds. Been using imgbb, I like it.
imgur used to be really good, minimal ui, super fast.
But we can’t have nice things.
Thanks for the recommendation!
The people who created imgur sold it to MediaLab. ML had been struggling with bills in general, and they lost a couple lawsuits regarding content. In a completely unrelated move, they banned NSFW content, fired the community moderators and local development teams and replaced them with AI and overseas workers, resulting in unequal rules enforcement and broken infrastructure. Videos wouldn't upload, wouldn't play, or freeze partway through. Uploads would disappear without notice. A barely-nsfw post would be deleted and the user warned, while other more NSFW posts made it to the front page. Etc, etc. In short, there's been a lot of simmering discontent with the platform for a while now.
So, you remember that video/gif of Nazi Richard Spencer that's been circulating for a few years now? Back when that first came out, naturally some people posted it to imgur - and the content teams deleted the posts and warned the users, who promptly posted screenshots of the warnings, causing even more users to upload Richard Spencer getting punched in the face. They got deleted/warned, pretty much just causing a cascade of Nazi-punching content, until literally the entire popular feed was just Nazis getting punched.
Well, later last week, notifications failed on imgur for some reason - no notifications when you got a reply, or your post reached the front page or got an award, or the people you were following posted something - just dead silence. We were patient, but it started to annoy people. A couple people uploaded images complaining about the lack of notifications, only to have their posts deleted or hidden and in a couple cases they got warned. And it's pretty much spiralled exactly like the punching Nazis meme: notifications remained down, posts complaining about it got taken down, posts complaining about MediaLab's censorship got taken down, and then the entire front page became this.
Notifications are back on now, though they seem less frequent than normal, and new content is starting to reach the front page but users are still pissed. There have been repeated discussions about moving elsewhere, but no consensus has emerged yet. PixelFed doesn't scratch the same itch, a bunch of people moved to discord but others don't want to, some people just disappeared or stopped posting. And that's where we are, as of this morning.
Companies killing forums and communities by choice or apathy is so disheartening. They have so much control over what we see and talk about everyday, and they can even just turn the community off by providing poor service.
Internet Historian could make a video on this in 3 years lol
That’s some rather unrealistic optimism unless someone slipped some speed in his coffee.
Damn, thanks for the write up! I had been on imgur since 2011, same time I joined reddit and only this year finally stopped using it. It seems to have rapidly gotten worse this year, now I know all the details.
you remember that video/gif of Nazi Richard Spencer that’s been circulating for a few years now?
the fact that he disappeared off the face of the planet after this only reinforces my feeling about deplatforming nazis
Why doesn’t pixelfed work for them?
Pixelfed, in my head, is more like Flickr or Instagram.
Imgur is just a meme picture site.
I’m old enough to 'member Imgur launching, around Christmastime as I recall. It was a way to make posting images on Reddit easier. How small and cozy the internet seemed back then.
It seemed like imgur was the only hosting site for Reddit for the longest time. Then Reddit started self-hosting and imgur seemed to disappear.
Isn’t that all imgur is used for?
Not anymore. They turned it into it’s own social media. They have comments and stuff and apparently a lot of them really hate reddit lol.
not in the last 5-8 years lmao
I remember like 5 years ago hosting stuff there through/for reddit and there are a whole bunch of imgur user comments on the images angry and confused about why it was there
like tf you guys going on about this is a reddit image, I got nothing to do with it
I remember when Mr Grim announced on Reddit that he was creating Imgur to replace all the shit image hosting sites. And now here we are
It’s the circle of life.
Selfhosting and federated services cain be a pain sometimes but at least it doesn’t do this
Yep we’re all used to enshittification by now
I remember being perplexed a few years back when a coworker started talking to me about “imgur posts” and “imgur comments”. I was like, “the image hosting site?”
So weird
I actually started on imgur before I used reddit at all. I used to browse “i am bored” as a kid/teen. Eventually I thought, man I really only want the funny images, is there something that’s just that? That’s when I found imgur and I was hooked. “Sarah please” and all that.
I remember the imgur Community being referred to as sewer people on reddit.
I’m in the same boat. I only ever used the site as an easy, hassle-free image host. When they steadily increased the hassle and included more and more ads, I stopped using it in the end. No clue that it turned into it’s own social media site, or how that even happened.
They had full-on fan events too 😝
It’s life if the underground rats of New York built their own society lol
I noticed with amusement once that some of my uploads for Reddit had comments, even full discussions and unanswered questions addressed to me. It was like finding out the mice in the walls had built a shrine to me.
Lol same here. I wish Imgur stayed a simple image hosting site
Remember when imgur was just a fun little service made for us to post images on reddit?
Remember […] reddit?
Pepperidge farms remembers.
Who wants to hear my, “Why reddit got image hosting of its own when it did” conspiracy theory? No one? Too bad, posting it anyhow.
Few years ago reddit had a subreddit called fatpeoplehate. It existed to, you guessed it, hate fat people. “Fattie” became an insult du juor. One day they find out an imgur employee is fat, and start in on being shitters. This apparently was the straw that broke the camels back because they finally got banned.
My theory is simple: reddit didn’t ban fatpeoplehate because they went too far. They banned it because imgur threatened to block them and being the image site, this would fuck reddit up. Imagine being a social media site with no pictures. Impossible.
Reddit, not too long after that, adds image hosting. Could it be a coincidence? Sure. Do I think its one? Not really.
Fun addendum, a study was done post-ban and reddit actually became less toxic after the ban. Crazy how denying shitty folks a platform actually makes your site better, whoda thunk?
This isn’t a conspiracy theory. It’s just what happened. And it was obvious to all of us exactly why it happened when it did.
LOL. LMAO, even.
Get fucked, Imgur!
Judging from the amount of middle fingers, I’m gonna go ahead and say that Imgur really doesn’t like you.
Judging from the ads I was seeing on imgur, it also thinks I need to improve the size of my wang.
Now I'm wondering if you can attach a projector to a Wang terminal...
News articles are saying Medialab, imgur's parent company, is using AI to moderate posts and it upset people.
Also that there was an issue with notifications, and there was no communication regarding fixing the issue and medialab laid off a bunch of staff apparently
This would explain why my 11 year old account got banned out of the blue despite me only using it to post videogame screenshots. Cool.
That’s only half the story. They fired the dev team, basic things like notifications broke and nobody was left to fix it. Also their imgur HQ is now gone, which was apparently a whole big thing for users to visit. Also the ads got super shitty, tons of ads ranging from implicit sexual images to outright sex toys or similar. This highlights the hypocricy as “the gif” is banned (knowyourmeme.com/memes/the-hulk-gif)
I almost forgot: They also made extremely shitty decisions like not allowing custom tags anymore and a combination of shitty content moderation and people refusing to tag politic posts as such plus everything without any messages from the non existent dev team above lead to a mass exodus and the shutting down of their discord server where they organized community events like secret santa and live get togethers. They then had to lower the threshold for posts to reach the front page to 50 points. Posts there now get a few hundred upvotes, highlighting the downsizing from tens of thousands of points.
The AI company that purchased it gutted US staff and the users are revolting.
and the users are revolting
Yeah, they’ve always been a little off, haven’t they?
Everyone is in their own way.
The internet as we knew it is truly dead, huh?
The old internet is dead, the new one struggles to be born. Now is the time of enshittification.
Shedding some skin. Let’s leave a warm fire burning for those who wish to flee here.
i think it more like an evolutionary process, those who make the wrong decisions perish, and those who made the right ones will remain
The old web is dead. The fediverse lives.
mrgoosmoos@lemmy.ca 7 months ago
people look at Imgur?
Bongles@lemmy.zip 7 months ago
Millions used to.
Evil_Shrubbery@thelemmy.club 7 months ago
Omg, the og imgur, the basically Reddit image upload service with no and then minimal ui, so good.
But we can have nice things.
GreenKnight23@lemmy.world 7 months ago
I got banned for telling a person that was telling a disabled person to kill themselves to drink bleach.
I never looked back and blocked imgur from DNS for years. I don’t even remember the last time I even went there on purpose.