Their whole front page has dozens of these same images. And I’m not much of a imgur user to dig around.

  • Thalion@lemmy.ca
    238·
    14 days ago

    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

  • aramis87@fedia.io
    218·
    14 days ago

    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.

      • Techlos@lemmy.dbzer0.com
        7·
        13 days ago

        the fact that he disappeared off the face of the planet after this only reinforces my feeling about deplatforming nazis

    • rustyfish@lemmy.worldEnglish
      19·
      14 days ago

      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.

    • grahamja@reddthat.com
      14·
      13 days ago

      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.

        • Evotech@lemmy.world
          23·
          14 days ago

          Used to be just an image upload site for Reddit mainly . But then enshittyfication happened as usual

          • Landless2029@lemmy.world
            161·
            14 days ago

            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.

            • HobbitFoot @thelemmy.clubEnglish
              12·
              14 days ago

              There isn’t a guarantee that federation protects against enshitification. Email has effectively been captured by a few providers.

              • Swedneck@discuss.tchncs.de
                1·
                11 days ago

                people always say this but at worst “a few” means like 50, which is a damn fucking sight better than every other platform which is ONE provider

                and you can use other providers or even run your own email setup, you’ll just run into problems, which is again a damn fucking sight better than other platforms where the option doesn’t even exist at all.

          • lepinkainen@lemmy.world
            2·
            14 days ago

            They added community features pretty heavily and it wasn’t bad at it. But then they got big and VC money came in.

        • Bongles@lemmy.zip
          9·
          14 days ago

          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.

          • Whats_your_reasoning@lemmy.world
            5·
            14 days ago

            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.

          • ToxicWaste@lemmy.cafeEnglish
            2·
            12 days ago

            i guess there is pixelfed. but i would compare it more to instagram. many lemmy instances allow uploading pictures directly, so you dont necessarily need a separate host.

            but where i see the biggest caveat, is costs. cloud storage is not cheap and pictures are extremely large compared to text. therefore some lemmy instances only keep uploaded pics for a certain amount of time.

            I dont know whether imgur is keeping pictures for ever or not… so i am not sure if it federated imgur would solve the ‘amnesia issue’ of some lemmy instances.

    • LemmyThinkAboutIt@lemmy.zip
      3·
      13 days ago

      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.

  • Mrkawfee@lemmy.world
    84·
    14 days ago

    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.

    • TomMasz@lemmy.worldEnglish
      24·
      14 days ago

      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.

      • Kirp123@lemmy.world
        23·
        14 days ago

        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.

      • mrgoosmoos@lemmy.caEnglish
        4·
        14 days ago

        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

        • Raxiel@lemmy.world
          2·
          13 days ago

          The Imgur upload page included posting it to their community by default as its final step. It wasn’t necessary to get a link but they didn’t make it clear for the longest time.

    • Stern@lemmy.world
      111·
      14 days ago

      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?

  • The Velour Fog @lemmy.world
    16·
    14 days ago

    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.

  • idntknow@lemmy.world
    71·
    14 days ago

    Judging from the amount of middle fingers, I’m gonna go ahead and say that Imgur really doesn’t like you.

      • Evil_Shrubbery@thelemmy.club
        1·
        14 days ago

        Omg, the og imgur, the basically Reddit image upload service with almost none and then minimal ui, so good.
        (A member we flooded the front page with silly thighs of the day from time to time.)

        But we can have nice things.

    • GreenKnight23@lemmy.world
      1·
      14 days 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.