Well there goes a fundamental internet utility I've taken for granted for years.
It's kinda weird, I was just thinking like yesterday how it feels like Imgur has been around for a good while now and were due to shit the bed and be replaced by something else.
Remember Photobucket?
going through my bookmarks and downloading stuff worth saving is going to take a while
I've been heavily using the accountless upload feature, I'm going to have probably 100s of dead links just from my 24/7 posting alone :sweat:
isn't porn the primary purpose of imgur, this is tumblr all over again
Chuds made like 3 different terrible imgur clones because they weren't allowed to be racist/etc, I wonder how many clones will spawn to accommodate porn
Reddit is going public, so this has to happen. Imgur and Reddit are basically linked together. They are also not allowing any NSFW content to be pulled by the third party API, you have to use the official App or website to view NSFW Reddit posts in future.
Reddit is most likely a hotbed of illegal pornographic content, given that there is no actual proper verification process. And implementing a standardised verification process would be admitting that Reddit and Imgur are part porn websites, which would also be a bad look for investors.
Its Tumblr 2.0, but dumber.
Its destined to tank no matter what happens.
The situation is that Reddit and Imgur have a sizeable amount of likely illegal pornographic content on their servers.
Their options are:
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To ban all the porn. Which it looks like they are trying to do. On paper this is the best option for investors, as it protects the investment. However in the real world this can piss off the userbase and tank the website by loosing a sizeable amount of users (see Tumblr).
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To continue without any changes. This is also guarantees the investment tanking, all it takes is one Anderson Cooper style jailbait investigation into Reddit to destroy the investment.
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To implement proper verification for pornographic content, like pornhub and onlyfans did. But as I said, the investors don't want it to be public knowledge that they are investing in a porn website in some way, and Reddit implementing proper verification processes will make that public knowledge. Thus also devaluing the investment.
There is no way to win for the investors .
"There is no way to win for the investors" where's my tiny violin?
Yeah it's great that they get fucked over. Reddit has dug its own grave with its :ancap-good: attitude towards NSFW content, and now that they have to actually follow the laws to make money, they're fucked.
Some of the laws are dumb sure, but some of the laws should be basic stuff any website should implement if they are going to allow porn on it.
This is really sad though because it is also going to kill hundreds of legitimately good kink communities. It's going to hurt a bunch of sex workers considerably too, who have relied on promoting themselves via reddit communities for some time now.
That is very sad, and it's not the fault of the kinksters or sex workers, it's Reddit's fault for not implementing any meaningful verification and then deciding to go public for rea$on$.
This is the unfortunate reality with doing business online, you are at the whims of these companies. Everytime the YouTube algorithm changes a bunch of channels die. As for sex work, when onlyfans temporarily changed it's policies a bunch of creators got forced off of the website.
the investors don’t want it to be public knowledge that they are investing in a porn website in some way
I'd bet this is a small part of it, with the largest part being an actual verification process would be costly.
Why is option one bad for investors? If you have 100 million pre-ban users you can't invest in and 20 million of them leaves because of the porn ban that still gives you 80 million users you can invest in.
It's the same thing with requiring user accounts. Hosting a billion images for random people for free is less interesting from an investment perspective than hosting 200 million images for registered user that you can extract more data from and maybe even sell a premium subscription to.
Services that makes the internet convenient, accessible and anonymous are not necessarily a good capitalist investment. Stuff like somewhere you can upload images to is more like a public utility in nature than a capitalist business.
Yes, on paper that is how it should work. But look at what happened to Tumblr after they banned porn. Form a 1 billion dollar valuation to only being worth a few million.
Aren't valuations of tech companies pure fairy tales in the first place? Did someone get actual real money or of doing it?
Yahoo got Tumblr for a real 1.1 billion US dollars, then Verizon bought Yahoo and sold Tumblr to the people that own WordPress for 3 million if I remember correctly. During that time Tumblr got removed from the apple app store and Google play store because of the prevalence of child porn on the website. The following attempts to ban explicit content on the platform ticked off the userbase as it would often incorrectly flag content. Apparently this caused Tumblr's traffic to drop by a third.
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I bet it's the same problem tumblr and pornhub had. They're realizing they've got a bunch of illegal pornography on their computers and they would rather they didn't.
moderation
this would require hiring people to moderate so it's impossible
Bingo. And once you hire those people you have to explain why you are still failing to take down illegal shit. Refusing to staff up saves you on money AND liability.
Stricter moderation would mean an onlyfans style verification involving IDs and consent forms. Which would be admitting that Reddit and Imgur are part porn sites. With Reddit going public, this is the last thing investors would want. They are investing in a social media style link aggregator, not onlyfans free (at least that's what they want to portray publicly).
In short the whole Reddit going public is fucking everything up.
2257, baby! Reddit and imgur are both Secondary
providersProducers as are their users. Strange the DOJ has never cared. :thinkin-lenin:I mean a lot of Reddit porn is no longer a secondary provider thing, lots of people create Reddit accounts to post nude images of themselves and nothing else. The images are either hosted on Reddit themselves or Imgur.
Wait, sorry, it's Secondary Producer, not provider. Secondary Producer is actually a legal term under 2257 that indicates their role as a host obligates them to keep certain identification on hand of all models pictured in the porn. The same goes for the people who share the images, even if they're not the creators of the image. It's a fucked law that's gone in an out of limbo since it's inception.
The first part of that law sounds good, the second part about sharing the images sounds pretty messed up. But Reddit or Imgur implementing proper verification processes to obtain such documentation would be a public admission that they are a porn site on some level, which would also be terrible for investors. So I guess that's why they're going to try ban all porn before Reddit goes public. Like Tumblr all over again.
It's one of those laws that sounds good, but was just rehashing previous laws and creating another stick for the law to go after people who weren't breaking previous laws. Standard think of the children shit, packaged around being able to harass enemies of the state when they can't go after them for anything else. It's pretty much unused since it's creation back during the Bush years, except to send a message. In other words, imgur and reddit have been breaking this law since they've first allowed adult content, without any repercussions. Which should tell you how much the state actually cares about underage porn.
I mean yes, Reddit is going public for investors, Imgur was invented as a Reddit image host in the beginning. And Reddit is full of illegal porn. Verification on porn subs is done by moderators that don't even work for Reddit, all it requires is a nude photo with the date and subreddit name on a piece of paper for most. There is no actual age or person verification. All it will take it another Anderson Cooper style jailbait investigation to tank their investment.
There's shooting yourself in the foot, and then there's shooting yourself in the head
I haven't seen this level of self-destruction since Tumblr did kind of the same thing.
Welp, there go literal millions of old :reddit-logo: posts and answers.
Liveleak.com used to be the anti-Youtube and would host anything. But, after Trump, we can't have anyone exposing the truth any more. I remember seeing Al-Qaeda in Syria using missiles that the US supplied them. Major black eye, there. But no more! You can either post on Youtube and get censored, or one of those other platforms and get 34 views.
LMAO just recently I was thinking about the moment when I learned that there was such a thing as an "imgurian", people who actually treated imgur as a social media website. It was hilarious, like finding out that there were sentient rats discussing the merits of your garbage.
sentient rats discussing the merits of your garbage
LmAo, incredible characterization
It gives me the very distinct feeling of looking into an ant farm.
I think it was originally created as an image host for :reddit-logo: use. I'm guessing it's 90% porn.
Nowadays you have to provide yours and the model's ID cards, show that she signed a porn consent form, then register to pay tax on any money they pay you.
I mean that should be the bare minimum and instituted when the internet first got popular in the 90s. Its actually absurd that it took until the 2020s for websites to implement that. Porn websites dug their own grave here by trying to be super lax on the rules and only enforcing them when third parties forced them too. It is an extremely flimsy business model to run websites without proper verification and I'm surprised it lasted this long.
Previously everyone was anonymous on the internet.
This is going away, and indeed has already gone away on the Chinese internet (intranet). All apps require real-name verification and if you get banned, you stay banned. Forever.
The new trend of having to show ID for anything is going to suck.
Abolishing anonymity to own the pedophiles (we like it this time apparently)
REEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE 50% OF MY FEMBOY PORN AND 100% OF MY HENTAI IS GOING TO BE DESTROYED, ROT IN HELL FINANCIER CUCKS
Can I interest you in an application to the volcel vanguard citizen? :volcel-judge:
gotta save the good shit to your hdd, never count on hyperlinks staying up!
That thread is a very uncomfortable read
this comment on Tumblr being banned, is just uhh
Probably the closest thing to the burning of the library of alexandria we'll ever experience. Still mourning the loss of all that magnificent art-hoe poon
Redditors just whining about the "morality police" and mourning the "loss of Pornhub". These redditors are unironic "coomers". As much as I hate that word, it is what they are.
No redditors, Reddit, like pornhub, like Tumblr, fucked itself over by allowing any idiot with a camera and an internet connection to post porn they made to their websites. Obviously a system like this is ripe for abuse, no matter what your :ancap-good: beliefs say. Reddit should have implemented proper verification processes from day one, or at least sometime over the past decade, if they had any common sense.
there’s nothing implying that a significant portion of the “coomers” you’re complaining about don’t agree with you there.
Except for the fact that they are constantly talking about the "loss of Pornhub" because of the verification measures. Saying that the website became worse afterwards.
https://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/12sac2y/-/jgymyl8
That whole comment thread is it.
https://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/12sac2y/-/jgyx5yq
Another one
https://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/12sac2y/-/jgxy5xo
Another one, 600+ upvotes
Another comment I found
Pornhub deleted millions of videos and implemented a verification system. They were still banned by payment processors. You have a better chance of reaching consensus with terrorists than anti-porn religious nutjobs.
Wtf is that
They clearly disagree
proper verification processes
But capitalism though. That would have cut down on profit for Imgur and Reddit.
It was part that and part of the fact that Reddit's founders were unironic libertarians. They didn't even believe in basic moderation from an ideological perspective until the website got forced into it.
They didn’t even believe in basic moderation from an ideological perspective
Haha. I didn't know that. There should be a name for that. For voters who ultimately end up shooting themselves in the head - it's leopard ate their face. Maybe for libertarians it could be bears ate their face.
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In the mid-2000s in a small New Hampshire town called Grafton there was an experiment was called the "Free Town Project". It later became the "Free State Project"). The goal was simple: take over Grafton's local government and turn it into a libertarian utopia. The movement was cooked up by a small group of ragtag libertarian activists who saw in Grafton a unique opportunity to realize their dreams of a perfectly logical and perfectly market-based community.
A Libertarian Walks Into a Bear: Author Matt Hongoltz-Hetling on the Free State Project - Vox
The Vox article is an interview with the author.
