Image host Imgur announced a change to its terms of service on April 19 that will ban NSFW content, as well as begin deleting an unknown number of older images “not tied to a user account.” The announced changes will take effect on May 15. Imgur did not respond to a request for comment in time for publication.
Imgur was founded in 2009 as a way to host and share images intended for other social networks—for a long time, it was the default way to attach images to Reddit posts, for example, but has also seen widespread use on other sites and forums. While the site has lost prominence following Reddit’s implementation of its own in-house image hosting service, Imgur is still in widespread use. The company itself boasts 300 million unique visitors and “billions” of page views per month, while a Fast Company story in 2013 claimed that the site already had a library of more than 650 million images just four years after its founding.
Imgur’s explanation of its upcoming service update terms primarily focuses on banning NSFW images, “Specifically, this would include explicit/pornographic content,” the post reads. In 2019, Imgur already effectively hid NSFW content related to Reddit’s porn communities – you can still upload and navigate to those posts via a direct link, but no longer access them via Imgur’s gallery navigation. At the time, Imgur claimed that “over the years, these pages have jeopardized Imgur’s user growth, mission, and business.”
Regarding the upcoming change, Imgur says the distinction between the “Community Rules,” which applied to Imgur as a social network itself where you couldn’t access NSFW content, and the “Terms of Service,” which covered all content posted on the site, including those abandoned NSFW posts, “caused some confusion among Imgurians. We hope this change makes policies clearer and more consistent across Imgur.” However, the company still acknowledges the legal liability and monetization issues: “Explicit and illegal content has historically posed a risk to the Imgur community and its business, banning explicit content will allow Imgur to address these risks and protect the future of the Imgur community. .”
Imgur’s announcement rhymes with similar moderation changes on other social networks, especially Tumblr and OnlyFans. Advertisers and credit card processors are notoriously skittish when it comes to pornographic content, and the desire to avoid hosting or even monetizing illegal content is certainly a legitimate concern. Tumblr’s much-publicized ban on pornography, however, blew in its face: The site’s value and user base plummeted, in part due to the removal of the pornography itself, but also due to inaccurate, opaque, and inaccurate moderation. often automated resulting from it. affected the overall user experience. OnlyFans, a user-driven primarily pornographic website, has been trying to ban the porn. That change didn’t last long.
Imgur, for its part, states that “artistic nudity will continue to be permitted, as was previously permitted under the Rules—however, as we are calibrating auto-detection in these early stages, some content that may have been permitted under of “artistic exceptions” above may not apply here.” Imgur appears to recognize the inherent mess of this type of moderation, however, mitigating its effects on user accounts and leaving channels open for appeal: “We will not issue any warning, account suspension or ban in relation to these automated reports — but this may affect what you are allowed to send or upload.”
Afterimage
This change is troubling and quite tentative, but a one-off sentence in the announcement raises a whole other set of issues: “We will focus on removing old, unused and inactive content from our platform that is not tied to a user account.” In essence, this appears to jeopardize any number of those images hosted on secondary sites and forums—Imgur original Reason for being and the source of its ubiquity on the Internet. It’s unclear how extensive or challenging the cleanup will be.
Deleting completely forgotten and never-seen images to save storage space and money doesn’t seem so unreasonable, at least when you judge Imgur as a company, but the possibility remains that this new policy has strict enough criteria for deleting useful or useful content . I can imagine the dark path of broken links and broken images, old forum threads and handy Reddit how-tos rendered garbled. This is an issue that has already surfaced with image sharing websites: ImageShack has previously drawn criticism for not only deleting old images to free up space, but also for linking advertisements to where they previously were. incorporated.
The post-2007 internet is ephemeral, and that extends to gaming—you can still open the server browser of a GoldSrc mod like The Specialists, but good luck if you want access to a matchmade multiplayer shooter from the Xbox 360 generation or , God forbid, a second-rate live service game that has come out in recent years.
It’s another exhibit for the argument that “the Internet is like the Library of Alexandria that burns every day” and comes just weeks after a devastating blow to the preservation and circulation of free information. Though the Internet Archive is appealing the decision, a federal judge in the United States has ruled in favor of publishers over the site’s ebook lending, potentially threatening the entire operation and banning future digital lending frontiers. . Keep your physical media safe, gamers, and maybe consider investing in a home server.
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