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The Imgur Apocalypse Is Going To Break Large Parts of the Internet (vice.com) 61

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: Imgur, a popular photo-uploading service that has been informally tied to Reddit since its 2009 founding, will remove two types of content from its platform starting next month: explicit or pornographic imagery, and images uploaded anonymously -- the latter with a lean on unused images, according to the company. While technically banned from Imgur for years through its community rules, adult content hasn't been actively removed (and is incredibly popular). Until now.

The move is also going to be disastrous for the continuity of the internet. Like Photobucket before it, Imgur has been widely used to host millions of photos that are linked to, embedded, or used elsewhere, and lots of these photos were uploaded by people who didn't bother to sign up for accounts. Imgur is especially popular as a host for Reddit, meaning the content of those old posts could suddenly disappear off the internet. The move will likely also break embeds in various forum posts and blog posts all over the internet, creating an unpleasant form of link rot. (The Archive Team, generally a harbinger of shuttering sites, is working on backing up this material, according to an announcement on Reddit.)

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The Imgur Apocalypse Is Going To Break Large Parts of the Internet

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  • by OzPeter ( 195038 ) on Thursday April 27, 2023 @03:04PM (#63481514)

    Where will I get my free internet porn from now? /s

  • by sdinfoserv ( 1793266 ) on Thursday April 27, 2023 @03:09PM (#63481528)
    I wonder how many NFTs will instantly become valueless because they will point to nothing?
  • This is way, way overstated. It will make a bunch of Redit posts that link to outside images instead of embedding them directly not very useful. Those posts A) aren't a large part of the internet and B) won't cause any kind of disaster if they stop working. It's annoying and will hurt people who want to dig through the Redit archives, but this is in no way an "apocalypse" that will "break large parts of the internet".

    • by DarkOx ( 621550 )

      Not only that we are talking about imgur removing NSWF type materials here.

      However important that shot u/BustyBarbie 's under carriage might seem to her and the good congregates of r/pervertsOftheInternet its hardly going to be noticed by anyone in reality.

      • by Anonymous Coward

        Not only that we are talking about imgur removing NSWF type materials here.

        Oh no! Where will I get my New South Wales Facts?!

  • by Rosco P. Coltrane ( 209368 ) on Thursday April 27, 2023 @03:14PM (#63481546)

    and the internet survived. Imgur will simply become as irrelevant as Photobucket has become.

    The Photobucket rug-pulling act did teach quite a few people a valuable lesson [wordpress.com] on the danger of entrusting your data to the cloud. A few years later though, people seem to have become complacent again and place way too much trust on cloud providers once more. Maybe it's high time some high-profile company made them lose access to their content and break content on other platforms like Photobucket did as a healthy reminder of just how terrible an idea the cloud is.

    • by PPH ( 736903 )

      Good luck. Charlie Brown never caught on that Lucy Van Pelt was always going to yank the football away. Leaving him on his ass. ISPs depend on the same level of gullibility. And no one ever went broke underestimating that.

      • People don't really care if the random junk they upload to make a point hangs around forever. Maybe a tiny bit but not enough to pay 50 cents for it.
        • Everything I uploaded to imgur was done anonymously. None of it is porn, just random pics I wanted to show people at various times. Now that option is gone, so they may as well delete the entire site. It will never be used by me again, and it will take me all of a few seconds to find a replacement.

          https://imgur.com/a/B7wkLC3 [imgur.com]

    • by AmiMoJo ( 196126 ) on Thursday April 27, 2023 @05:17PM (#63481922) Homepage Journal

      The problem is that at the time the people posting many of those images didn't think they were very important. They were throwaway, a post that would be quickly forgotten. The forum owners felt the same way and didn't want to spend a lot of money preserving stuff that nobody would care about the day after.

      A small number of those posts became variable later in. Some useful instructions, the origin of a popular meme, a major news event with long lasting repercussions.

      Of course, nobody wants to pay for any of it.

      • That's the real problem with preservation. Not every thing is important and worth saving, but you never know what will eventually be important and worth saving.

      • Of course, nobody wants to pay for any of it.

        I mean, I didn't when I didn't have to. Imgur was fantastic for just uploading a quick linked image to share with someone without having to screencap, save the file, upload it to Discord/Teams/Slack, and deal with the file I didn't need anymore. It was great for things like Discord channels where you can't upload images but can share links. It was the default upload/share option for the ShareX app too, though I turned it off on work computers because when I screencap passwords or network configs I don't ne

  • by GlobalEcho ( 26240 ) on Thursday April 27, 2023 @03:19PM (#63481564)

    Imgur is especially popular as a host for Reddit,...

    Not just Reddit. Imgur was popular way before Reddit was. I've put anonymous imgur images on car ownership forums, mythtv development forums, wifi user forums and so on.

    None of this is super important, but I'm glad the archive people are on it.

    • Not just Reddit. Imgur was popular way before Reddit was. I've put anonymous imgur images on car ownership forums, mythtv development forums, wifi user forums and so on.

      What? Imgur literally spawned out of Reddit by u/MrGrim as a gift TO Reddit. You may have used it for other things, but saying it was popular before Reddit was is just factually incorrect.

  • by fahrbot-bot ( 874524 ) on Thursday April 27, 2023 @03:21PM (#63481570)

    Imgur, ... will remove two types of content from its platform starting next month: explicit or pornographic imagery, ...

    From Scrubs [wikipedia.org]:

    Dr Cox: I'm fairly sure if they took porn off the internet, there'd only be one website left, and it'd be called "Bring Back the Porn!"

  • It's the only reason why anyone goes to reddit.
  • by Whatanut ( 203397 ) on Thursday April 27, 2023 @03:39PM (#63481620)

    How is this some great disaster for old forum posts and such that link to long forgotten images on a random hosting provider?

    This is pretty much how the internet has been for as long as it's existed. Some service pops up, becomes popular, hosts lots of things, goes away, gets replaced by something else. That's just the way this thing evolves.

    Sorry that the random image link you put in a post 10 years ago is no longer going to be available if someone looks through those archives. Nobody ever said it would be permanent. Especially if you're linking to something hosted off-site from where you posted it to begin with. Using a free service, even...

    People will get mad about this. People will find something new. Life goes on...

  • Somebody is in a porn-infused ego-centric world.
    Consider that perhaps not everybody does things the same as you.
    I expect that after this change the impact will be largely ... none.
    Move along.

    • by Ksevio ( 865461 ) on Thursday April 27, 2023 @05:10PM (#63481898) Homepage

      The big problem is not just the adult content, it's the unregistered content. For years many people just uploaded images to imgur without an account because there was really little reason to create one, then linked those pictures to other places. Now imgur is just dumping all that for some reason

      • The reason would be copyright claims, need a throat to choke.

        Nothing is guaranteed in this world, especially free internet services.

      • The big problem is not just the adult content, it's the unregistered content. For years many people just uploaded images to imgur without an account because there was really little reason to create one, then linked those pictures to other places. Now imgur is just dumping all that for some reason

        Am sure the reasons include possible legal reasons and money.

        Popular free services are not cheap :P

  • Ahhh, deep linking. The bane of small-time web site operators, as I was back in the day. You can check the referrer, but it's still out there so a determined deep-linker will not be deterred, although a major site like Reddit isn't going to pull those kinds of tricks. You can expire the link, make it require some key on your page, but then you've got to generate content dynamically even if you really just have a static page at heart and... reminds me of why I said "screw it" to being a small time domain

    • I want my forum posts (car forums, tech forums, audio forums, gun forums, bike forums, etc) with pictures to continue to work long after I have forgotten about them. That is why I only link to images I keep under my own domain. If others want to link to them, I don't care. Bandwidth is not a big deal like it was back in the days of dialup, but if you come across a post of mine from a decade ago with embedded images, I can guarantee they still work.

    • That's not really image leeching or deep linking, imgur was specifically created as an image host that let you anonymously upload pictures and even gave you code to embed them offsite.

      Though I'll agree that this was obviously coming as they weren't going to host your shit for free forever. Surprising it lasted that long.

  • by speedlaw ( 878924 ) on Thursday April 27, 2023 @03:57PM (#63481696) Homepage
    I have an old Lexus. The web has many resources to help someone with my problem. I've become resigned to the fact every time I find the correct Do It Yourself for a job, the diagrams and photos will come back 404. Ok, the post I'm reading dates from 2004 (the car is a 1995) so I'm not surprised a 20 year old link is dead...
    • I have an old Lexus. The web has many resources to help someone with my problem. I've become resigned to the fact every time I find the correct Do It Yourself for a job, the diagrams and photos will come back 404. Ok, the post I'm reading dates from 2004 (the car is a 1995) so I'm not surprised a 20 year old link is dead...

      We've all seen this movie. The far future, and somehow they don't know anything about our time. "We know of the great Arnold Schwarzenegger and our stories tell us of his role in the great war. But we know not what he looked like, or where he came from. Only that he and his twin brother Danny DeVito were among the earliest robots to give birth to human children and rebel against the aliens hunting humans for sport."

      But seriously, there'll probably always be an article somewhere explaining calculus. B

  • Compromise (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Tablizer ( 95088 ) on Thursday April 27, 2023 @04:46PM (#63481834) Journal

    Why don't they just randomly display ads in place of orphaned photos, with a note to reload to see the image, along with a URL to get more info?

    (Ideally clicking on the ad would do these, but it's tricky to make remotely linked image links act like hyperlinks.)

    • by Anonymous Coward

      I feel like photobucket tried this, but my memory is bad.

      Many hosters have tried to force people to visit the main site to view the image (imgur included) which is basically the same.

      I suppose either the methods are too aggressive and market share dies, or circumvention is too easy and why bother.

      As I write that, I realize that's basically the last stage of Cory Doctrow's enshittification [pluralistic.net]. It was good, people came, shit grows, people leave.

      Hopefully the next un-shitty generation of the cycle is born soon. T

  • I'll just back it all up on my geocities page.

  • Because that is what removing "incredibly popular" content boils down to.

  • So, you posted about it instead of scraping the important ones.
    I commented about posting about it instead of scraping the important ones...
  • I learned my lesson years ago when Dropbox pulled this link-rot shit and completely threw my work-flow into chaos. Never again will I trust another site to host my material.
  • One forum I'm a member of implemented a solution for this kind of thing... it took imgur embeds, and converted them into local images. Except the system was shit, and lots of images just got blackholed. Then the admins decided fuck it, we're not fixing it or putting it back the way it was, you can just embed them here (also randomly broken unless you upload them to one thread then embed them in another) or find a different image host.
    I look forward to all the other equally ill-conceived ways to deal with

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