They used to allow you to browse images, and now they don't - desktop mode used to show image grid e.g.: <a href="https://imgur.com/r/nsfw" rel="nofollow">https://imgur.com/r/nsfw</a><p>But images are still hosted there and I presume new images are still added e.g. <a href="https://i.imgur.com/nZHfzdV.jpg" rel="nofollow">https://i.imgur.com/nZHfzdV.jpg</a> (mildly NSFW but in a NSFW reddit).<p>From a desktop browser the first link will show: "As of Oct 2019, Imgur will no longer display NSFW Imgur r/subsections associated with Reddit subreddits. No Imgur content has been deleted or moved, and is still available at its original Imgur URL. As an alternative, you can browse the visual contents of any subreddit using third-party tools such as <a href="https://www.redditery.com" rel="nofollow">https://www.redditery.com</a> and <a href="https://redditgrid.com."" rel="nofollow">https://redditgrid.com."</a>
I only briefly read it but it seems they'll still support uploading legal NSFW for any subreddit just marked as hidden so it doesn't show in their public gallery, which makes sense to me.
A problem with this is that many Imgur links link not to the embedded page (i.imgur.com) but to the display page (imgur.com). Normally this was, at worst, slightly annoying. Now you're forced to login to view the picture.<p>Not only is this a hindrance to users but it actively blocks archiving.
Ah, the only thing more reliable that the lifecycle of a Phoenix is the lifecycle of an image host ...<p>Birth, awesomeness, turns out to be expensive, somewhat less awesome, "no, really, this shit is expensive please give us money", kinda sucky, "hey, we need to monetize, get this porn off of here", really sucky, "Oh, crap, 95% of our use cases were porn. Ooops.", death.<p>"Ready normal people! Ready! Ready! Ready!" <song starts> "The Internet is for porn ..."<p>Countdown until someone creates the next "image host that doesn't suck" in 5 ... 4 ... 3 ...
I find it interesting that advertising on pornographic content in a lot of English speaking countries seems difficult whereas in East Asia it does not really seem to be an issue, or at least I’ve never heard of it being an issue. Is this a thing or am I just ignorant? If it <i>is</i> true, could anyone fathom why?
"Discontinuing support" is nice newspeak for "banning", since there's no technical overhead for NSFW content specifically.<p>Their logic is weird, too - it's not like NSFW subsections make Imgur <i>less</i> "fun and entertaining". Quite the reverse! And it's not as if you could stumble across these - you basically had to type the URL in by hand.
This is probably a good time for someone to create an image host based on IPFS or Swarm as a replacement for imgur for these communities. There's a lot of content on reddit like sorting by Top to see the best posts which is now missing. That's a good chunk of the culture of some subs.<p>The only realistic option is to host media on the same service that's consuming it or hosting the media on a decentralized service that you don't have to worry about being shut down in the future.
Is mixed SFW/NSFW social media more trouble than it's worth? Tumblr did the same thing. Permitting NSFW may enable some promising growth stats in the early stages, but perhaps there isn't a lot of long term value to be extracted from it.
An honest question: Why and who in the payment space penalizes sites for allowing NSFW content? I can't understand why Visa, or Paypal would have moral grounds to block that content if they also process payment for strictly-porn sites.
Yet another blow in the war on porn. Can we just accept that the parents need to be the ones to act as porn gatekeepers via acting as gatekeepers to the internet? Once the kid hits the internet, they're gonna find porn one way or another. Changes like these don't solve anything imho.
For reference how imgur was started 10 years ago:
<a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/reddit.com/comments/7zlyd/my_gift_to_reddit_i_created_an_image_hosting/" rel="nofollow">https://www.reddit.com/r/reddit.com/comments/7zlyd/my_gift_t...</a><p>A prophetic comment in OP:<p>[–][deleted] 21 points 10 years ago
Anyone can make an image hosting service that doesn't suck. But tell me in a year or two if you're still around and not sucking. Then I'll consider it.
How can image services avoid hosting child pornography? If a user submits an image of themselves at age 17 and lies about their age, can the host be held liable for distributing illegal content? That seems like an existential business risk for any site that hosts nsfw. There’s no viable way to check a user’s actual age (when depicted) under current business models. And what is and isn’t nsfw?<p>It all sounds complicated.
I'll be interested to see how they try to tackle this.<p>Are they going to manually identify NSFW images? Scrape known-NSFW subreddits? Look at the Referer header?<p>Can just see folks on Reddit using its own built-in image upload functionality. Imgur has been largely redundant since this was launched (and offers an increasingly poor, ad-ridden UX full of dark patterns), to be honest.
Since you need to log in now, I wonder if they're also keeping track of which users are viewing what content, and what subreddits etc. that content is associated with.