Reddit, Imgur, and the Internet’s memory loss

a reddit About to suffer great memory loss: Imgur, an image, video, and GIF hosting service that originated within the social network, will remove all adult (NSFW) content from its platform, as well as posts not associated with user accounts; The changes will take effect on May 15, 2023.

Imgur’s change of heart, purging content to become more commercially viable, is another case of “amnesia” in the history of the Internet, in which much of the content posted over the past 14 years would disappear overnight.

Imgur Announce the change In Terms of Service last Wednesday (19). One of the reasons given for the change in behavior was that while users were allowed to post NSFW content, there were restrictions on posting in the form of entire galleries, or photos, videos, and adult GIsFs as comments on other posts.

Basically, Imgur allowed pr0n solo posting, but many didn’t know it, and were flagged for violating terms and community guidelines. In this format, it was equally important to upload content directly, through the website or through applications, or through the services served by the platform, of which Reddit was the main one.

In fact, Imgur was born inside Reddit. In 2009 Alain Schaaf announce A new image hosting service when I was studying computer science at Ohio State University; The platform was described as an alternative to the (at the time) large free repositories, such as ImageShack and Photobucket, with the developer promising that their product would “not be rubbish” like the others.

The initial idea behind Imgur was for it to be a flexible and democratic hosting service, which would accommodate any and all content, even adult content, with the freedom to post directly through a Reddit profile, where storage is automatic and not tied to local account creation. It was used as the official repository of the social network until 2016, when it launched its own service, which does not accept pr0n.

This was done because the platform at that time sought to get rid of the ghost of the past Promote to sub friends Basically criminal, as is ar/jailbait (deleted in 2011); Reddit only managed to clear its bar with Apple and Google recently, as official mobile apps hit the respective stores in 2015, with powerful anti-pr0n filters.

Although the option to not display NSFW is active by default, it is possible to turn it off even on the iPhone, unlike what happens with other applications, such as Telegram, which blocks all groups identified as 18+ on Apple devices.

Launched in 2009, Imgur was born as a more flexible option than competitors

Although it lost its place as the default image server, Imgur continued to be actively used by the Reddit community, and by other external users, mainly because it never prevents the posting and storage of pr0n content; In fact, almost all adult sub ads are based on the service, which makes advertising on the platform quite problematic.

In the official announcement, Imgur’s intent to become a profitable business is clear, though it says the action to delete 18+ illegal posts (possibly copyright-infringing material, such as scans of magazines and books, which still A huge source of trouble), “to protect society and its business”. Investors, banks and payment processors such as VISA, MasterCard and others have already shown through the attack on OnlyFans (which did not work) that they are not fans of pr0n.

The big problem for users is that Imgur’s decision to remove all pr0n and unrelated content from registered accounts puts at risk a huge collection of images, photos, original art, GIFs, videos, and animations that have been stored for 14 years. The publicly available time to save the contents, one month, is very short, and many of the contents have been published without an owner affiliation with them. When the deadline expires, a large portion of Reddit will, in their posts, be showing many broken links.

Imgur warns that artistic nudity will still be allowed, but it doesn’t guarantee anything, because the moderation system will be via AI, and this can lead to false positives. That is, the site recommends that its users not use it to save suggestive content.

This isn’t the first time this has happened and it won’t be the last. Both ImageShack and Photobucket, the platforms that Imgur was designed to be different (and it wasn’t), at one point deleted content posted by free accounts when they transitioned to a subscription format; To add insult to injury, ImageShack They started showing ads on broken links, and turning several old social media posts into showcases.

This Reddit post contained an image stored on ImageShack, which I deleted and replaced with an advertisement (Credit: Reproduction/Reddit)

With Tumblr it was the same. After Apple banned the app from the App Store, accusing the network of containing child pornography, Verizon, then owner of the platform through the purchase of Yahoo!, dismantled all pr0n and NSFW content, except for news, artistic content, or photo-documentaries.

Obviously, the public fled in droves, because the bulk of Tumblr’s reach was pr0n. The site was later sold to a WordPress owner for a ridiculous $3 million (Marissa Mayer, former CEO of Yahoo!, paid $1.1 billion), with a promise to never take back 18+ content (which is why PornHub/MindGeek couldn’t buy it), but today , it is possible to post nudity again. Pr0n, not yet.

As a matter of fact, the Internet has in the past decade “evolved” into a volatile memory entity, such as a slice of RAM, which only stores what is there while connected. Over time, we’ve seen a lot of content lost to history, from various hosting services, including the aforementioned ImageShack and Photobucket, which although still active, wiped out all photos and videos posted by free accounts, when they closed free access. .

This understanding can be extended to the SaaS (Software as a Service) format, which companies seek to evolve into XaaS, where the user does not own any software, game, or other product, which remains active only as long as it is profitable. His chapter takes on countless contents, which, often, cannot be archived.

At the same time, web memory preservation initiatives, and the industry’s growing amnesia reduction, are facing resistance. Nintendo, for example, is a notorious opponent of everything that refers to emulation and archiving of its products and games, even for research purposes; actually Internet Archive recently lost A battle against publishing houses in the United States, for the practice of e-book lending, in what justice has understood as piracy.

The Imgur issue exacerbates the forgotten scenario of today’s Internet, where nothing is archived forever, for one reason or another.

source: computer games