Their whole front page has dozens of these same images. And I’m not much of a imgur user to dig around.
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
.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.
you remember that video/gif of Nazi Richard Spencer that’s been circulating for a few years now?
This? https://images.gr-assets.com/hostedimages/1671596634ra/33747797.gif
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.
Something similar happened to me.
“Your post has been taken down because of racism. You receive a warning.”
“What about it was even racist?!”
“Thank you for contacting us. The post was racist because it had racism in it. We slurp balls and smell farts.”
Or something like that. Can’t remember the specifics. It was clear to me that it was either a bot or someone not properly speaking the language.
Does anyone know any alternatives? I don’t care about the memes (or pictures to be precise). They kinda suck anyway but the videos are sometimes kinda cool.
Why doesn’t pixelfed work for them?
Pixelfed, in my head, is more like Flickr or Instagram.
Imgur is just a meme picture site.
Used to be just an image upload site for Reddit mainly . But then enshittyfication happened as usual
Enshittification is always the end of most online platforms that aren’t federated because hosting costs money. Maintaining costs people. Which is more money. Especially as you scale out with popularity.
First step is ADs. But ad blockers prevent that revenue stream.
Second is monetization. (Reddit Gold or some premium BS)
Third is selling out.
There isn’t a guarantee that federation protects against enshitification. Email has effectively been captured by a few providers.
When I first got to Lemmy i always thought a fediverse imgur would be neat. As the other comment said, imgur has been going down this path for a while, so i ended up leaving quite a while ago and never pursued the idea. Plus I’m not really knowledgeable enough to do it myself.
I left Imgur when I left Reddit, since the only thing I ever used it for was hosting things to post on Reddit. Funny, I must have gotten spoiled to Lemmy instances self-hosting images, because I forgot Imgur even existed until I saw this post today.
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
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 remember the imgur Community being referred to as sewer people on reddit.
A weird form of arrogant elitism
Also fucking rich considering the source. Didn’t imgur start as a Reddit image host?
Isn’t that the joke? That Imgur was basically just infrastructure for Reddit, until people started to live there…?
Yes, but nobody visited imgur except to upload files. The people subsisting off of our contextless uploads were like morlocs!
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.
It was weird sometimes. Say you uploaded an image as a visual aid to a point being made on Reddit. It would make no sense without context, but you put it on Imgur because that’s what Imgur was made for. Shared on Reddit, the image successfully aided whatever you were trying to communicate. Mission accomplished!
But later you’d look back at the Imgur link, and find a bunch of annoyed Imgur-users complaining that your post made no sense.
It was like finding out the mice in the walls had built a shrine to me.
LOL
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.
Lol same here. I wish Imgur stayed a simple image hosting site
It’s life if the underground rats of New York built their own society lol
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 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
This is why we can’t have nice things, at least not for more than a few years.
The AI company that purchased it gutted US staff and the users are revolting.
The internet as we knew it is truly dead, huh?
The old web is dead. The fediverse lives.
Alive, but not growing.
The real world is still here, too!
Yeah, but who would wanna live there?
I feel part of that MAY have been my fault
You don’t have to take responsibility for that one. Your clones played a part too.
Yeah…… and that’s exactly why I’m still here.
The what?
The new world struggles to be born
And AT Protocol!
let’s go back to kermit and zmodem.
And my axe!
i think it more like an evolutionary process, those who make the wrong decisions perish, and those who made the right ones will remain
That’s all it’s ever been. These nations rise and fall like villages in the Ice Age. We just have media and systems to make it look like everything is all organized and “professional” now, and it kind of is sometimes, but at the end of the day we’re still living on the same uncaring planet by the same rules.
Shedding some skin. Let’s leave a warm fire burning for those who wish to flee here.
and the users are revolting
Yeah, they’ve always been a little off, haven’t they?
Everyone is in their own way.
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.
My wife subscribes to Imgur…
Time to hit the lawyer and divorce the gym
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’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.
Thanks for the recommendation!
News articles are saying Medialab, imgur’s parent company, is using AI to moderate posts and it upset people.
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 (https://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 lead to a mass exodus. Even their discord server shut down 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.
All posts are political
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.
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
LOL. LMAO, even.
Get fucked, Imgur!
Remember when imgur was just a fun little service made for us to post images on reddit?
Remember […] reddit?
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.
Yeah Reddit needed to decide it should not be at the whim or mercy of some other service when there is a disagreement over content policy.
Yeah, the motivation was fairly straightforward. And it wasn’t just that one sub that was causing problems like that. There were other pretty shitty subs that created the same kind of liability for Reddit. It only made sense that they would eventually start hosting their own images, especially after they realize they could monetize it.
Pepperidge farms remembers.
people look at Imgur?
Millions used to.
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.
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 increase the size of my wang.
Now I’m wondering if you can attach a projector to a Wang terminal…
