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.)
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.)
Oh noes (Score:3)
Where will I get my free internet porn from now? /s
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Luckily, I have it all backed up.
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This sort of smells like a reaction to the Pornhub movie, detailing their indifference to KP and nonconsenual content.
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I would like to see you explain why no one should roll their eyes at all this pedantry.
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That's actually not very difficult at all, once you notice and consider who's pushing the conflation.
Let me remind you of teh zuck's "internet.org basics" idea. What's that trying to do, and why? What's google trying to do with its chrome and chromebooks and even SPDY and QUICC, both complex protocols that yield marginal improvements for anyone of lesser size, and why? What are the other "tech giants" trying to do with similar approaches, and again, why?
They're trying to consumerise "the internet" as if i
Re:No it won't break the internet at all (Score:4, Insightful)
I would like to see you explain why no one should roll their eyes at all this pedantry.
*looks up at the address bar*
Hm, it looks like this is still Slashdot...
Re:No it won't break the internet at all (Score:4, Insightful)
If you're going to be a pedant, don't conflate "break core functionality of" with "break significant parts of." As the world wide web accounts for a significant amount of Internet traffic, the web is definitely Internet content. Returning a 404 or a 403 when 200 + content is expected breaks functionality of one very specific part of the web.
Your argument is like taking all 4 wheels off your car and saying your car runs just fine. It does run, but the functionality and utility is reduced.
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It's not going to break anything critical. It will make some pages worthless. This happens all the time. I cannot even begin to count the number of forum pages I've visited to find some kind of automotive information and it turns out the image has been lost to time. Luckily disk space got a lot cheaper since those kinds of sites were created, and now IME most of them are allowing users with accounts and posts to upload images.
If your forum post (or whatever) depends on information that's in an image, then i
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>it's not critical to have worth
what
I submit your comment as evidence
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It's not going to break anything critical. It will make some pages worthless.
Right. But "large parts of the Internet" doesn't have to mean significant percentage of.
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The internet is full of forums. These forums have instructions on how to repair old cars, rebuild a radio, repair your HVAC, whatever. Many of the instructions were written by people who are now dead and illustrated with photos that were on public image hosts.
When Photobucket collapsed hundreds of thousands of man-hours evaporated.All those tutorials became useless.
The web routed around that and rebuilt some of that information, and new information, using Imgur.
It's about to disappear in the same way.
The in
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What happens when Google pulls the plug on Youtube? The *last two decades will disappear* with respect to cultural history.
Ah, well at least *some* good will come of it.
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Seems like most of the times I see an IMGUR link in a forum, it's broken already. The whole idea, IMO, is stupid. If you need a forum where you can reference images within the post, like if you're writing an engine repair guide, use one that can host the images itself, or a document format that does so. Embedding a 3rd party resource, especially one that is free with an anonymously added image with no availability guarantees, makes for a fragile dependency.
Also, who the hell ever thought of IMGUR as a perma
there goes my NFTs (Score:5, Funny)
Re:there goes my NFTs (Score:5, Informative)
NFT's are already valueless.
Re:there goes my NFTs (Score:5, Insightful)
Technically you aren't buying what's at a particular URL, but the particular URI that just happens to also be a URL and also serves as its URN. The URI is just a purchase token on the blockchain.
An eternal web hosting contract seems like it probably shouldn't be covered by a one-time NFT purchase. Download a copy. If you can't, you probably didn't buy anything in the first place.
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For a fee.
You still own the link to that nothing (Score:2)
That can be a valuable asset in itself.
Especially when you can say that it linked to some ugly monkey picture which were automatically generated by the thousands.
Dramatic much? (Score:2)
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".
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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.
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Not only that we are talking about imgur removing NSWF type materials here.
Oh no! Where will I get my New South Wales Facts?!
Photobucket pulled the same shit in 2017 (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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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.
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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]
Re:Photobucket pulled the same shit in 2017 (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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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.
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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
Not just Reddit (Score:3)
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.
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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.
One step closer ... (Score:5, Funny)
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!"
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Reddit has to archive all that porn (Score:2)
Not exactly a new thing... (Score:4, Insightful)
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...
LOL "disastrous for the internet" seriously?? (Score:2)
Somebody is in a porn-infused ego-centric world. ... none.
Consider that perhaps not everybody does things the same as you.
I expect that after this change the impact will be largely
Move along.
Re:LOL "disastrous for the internet" seriously?? (Score:5, Interesting)
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
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The reason would be copyright claims, need a throat to choke.
Nothing is guaranteed in this world, especially free internet services.
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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
Deep link at your peril! (Score:2)
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
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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.
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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.
Link Rot is already a thing (Score:5, Interesting)
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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)
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.)
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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
No problem (Score:2)
I'll just back it all up on my geocities page.
So they want to suicide? (Score:2)
Because that is what removing "incredibly popular" content boils down to.
Decide what's important NOW (Score:2)
I commented about posting about it instead of scraping the important ones...
I learned my lesson (Score:2)
Lazy solutions... (Score:2)
I look forward to all the other equally ill-conceived ways to deal with