Imgur's community was in revolt

I remember when imgur was created as a fast, no login-pushing, non-scummy alternative to ad-ridden clickjacking hosts that censored nsfw and controversial content.

Then it became all of that on steroids except with a comment section and a weird community that didn’t realize they were living in the plumbing of other platforms like Reddit.

They knew. Most of them migrated from another community. They migrated on the community reputation of MrGrim and his community cultivation.

We knew. The situation is the opposite-- external users did not understand the interface and constantly posted things that were meant to be private onto the public feed.

stick a comment section on your website and some saddo somewhere will frequent it

It was always obvious that imgur being a service that just provided image hosting and asked nothing was unsustainable.

I'm impressed they ever managed to turn it into something.

You got downvoted, but anyone who's used Imgur within the past decade or so has to have seen indications of this. I remember around 2016 when I went to upload some photos for a Reddit post, I found the two different profiles (old-style and new-style) confusing. I could post something private on the old profile or the new one, but if I wanted to bring a post from the old one to the new one, it would get set to public, and also re-post it with a new timestamp... things like that.

Once Imgur stopped being a dedicated image hosting service, you had to go out of your way to lock down your posts if you wanted to use it as a dedicated image hosting service. Which I can see being confusing for both sides of the party.

Imgur was a simple image host for forums and Reddit long before there was anything resembling a feed or even “users”. The interface was an upload button that gave you a URL that nobody else would have unless you shared it or someone guessed.

It was plumbing. And then a community formed inside it and wondered why things kept randomly showing up from above.

It’s actually pretty amusing and you sort of proved my point.

r/IgnorantImgur proved that no, a good chunk of them did not know

(looks like that sub is private now in protest of API changes but I'm sure you can find some old content hosted other places)

That issue exists because of the community that spawned on top of what was built just to be a utility. Not the people using it for its original intended purpose.

Fair enough.. that, or hosting a LamerNews (HN Clone) instance... you get so many drive by spam posts, even just text, it isn't funny. Hard to imagine how bad it can get with images.

On the flip side, it's a real shame so many sites/pages removed comment sections... I had hope for a while that a browser extension for some sort of social media could fill the gap. There was a "free speech" one that had the feature, but the community itself was pretty bad, and there was no comments/shares on the rather technical sites I tend to visit.

Need some sort of cohesion to fill the gap in some way. I saw a bluesky implementation for comments, that used the social media itself in a shared post's replies as comments, which was interesting.