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.
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.
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.
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.
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)
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
Internet Historian could make a video on this in 3 years lol
That’s some rather unrealistic optimism unless someone slipped some speed in his coffee.
This? https://images.gr-assets.com/hostedimages/1671596634ra/33747797.gif
the fact that he disappeared off the face of the planet after this only reinforces my feeling about deplatforming nazis
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.
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.
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.
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.
I read “first step is active directories” and was super confused lol
You and me both… I’ve switched to ADDS for OG win server AD though.
They added community features pretty heavily and it wasn’t bad at it. But then they got big and VC money came in.
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 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.
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.