[HN Gopher] The Imgur Apocalypse Is Going to Break Large Parts o...
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The Imgur Apocalypse Is Going to Break Large Parts of the Internet
Author : pseudolus
Score : 37 points
Date : 2023-04-27 18:05 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.vice.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.vice.com)
| Cpoll wrote:
| TFA mentions Photobucket. I still occasionally stumble upon once-
| informative posts (e.g. repair guides) on niche phpBB forums that
| were stripped of all meaning when the images broke.
| daedric7 wrote:
| Didn't this happen before? Wasn't it Tumblr?
| weare138 wrote:
| Yup. Tumblr banned adult content after Verizon bought it.
| Turned out that's what most people were using Tumblr for.
| Pretty much killed it overnight.
| astrange wrote:
| It's still going under Automattic and still profitable. Is
| somewhat smaller, but since Twitter is going badly it might
| grow again.
| PicassoCTs wrote:
| I wonder what type of CEO committees green-lights these
| projects. We gonna buy a project, and then make it kill
| itself. One obviously can be detached from the fiscal
| realities so much, that company buzzword policy and virtue
| signaling are more worth in the context of career survival.
| Was there ever somebody fired for the tumbler fiasco?
| commandlinefan wrote:
| > what type of CEO committees
|
| The kind that doesn't have to bear the consequences of the
| decision. The CEO is fine, he has a golden parachute no
| matter what happens. It's the employees who are out of work
| and unable to find work who end up suffering.
| frozenport wrote:
| Where furries a substantial source of income or just non-
| monetizable traffic?
| hacknewslogin wrote:
| That's kinda what happened to Radioshack. The orders from
| the top took the company in directions that main customer
| base wasn't interested in. It lost a lot of it's uniqueness
| and quickly deflated. I worked at one for a few years right
| before they closed most of their stores. It was pretty sad
| seeing the store empty more and more often.
| jstarfish wrote:
| You've got questions, we've got cell phones.
| Sohcahtoa82 wrote:
| I was surprised that nobody has made an Imgur replacement backed
| by Cloudflare R2. It would eliminate the egress cost issues while
| being on one of the Internet's greatest CDNs.
|
| I thought about doing it myself, but as the article mentions,
| there are "Legal realities, such as copyright removal and the
| risk of CSAM imagery".
|
| Building a web app for uploading and viewing images is easy.
| Connecting to a payment processor so you can have some sort of
| "premium" account isn't too difficult. But having to deal with
| copyright claims and preventing/reacting to CSAM is an absolute
| oil tanker of worms if you reach the scale that Imgur has. If you
| choose to allow porn, you have to deal with claims of porn being
| posted without the permission of the subjects (ie, revenge porn).
| You can't automate those claims, or you'll end up with the
| current fuckery of YouTube where legit content creators get their
| content taken down or demonetized from fraudulent claims.
|
| As far as Imgur itself goes, I knew this day would come. I'm
| surprised they still allow direct linking of images, as that
| results in their bandwidth being used for free.
|
| What's interesting these days is how Discord allows direct
| linking. Waiting for that to go away some day.
| KomoD wrote:
| > there are "Legal realities, such as copyright removal and the
| risk of CSAM imagery".
|
| Cloudflare has a feature that can notify you of CSAM as far as
| I know, won't eliminate the problem but certainly helps.
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| This is cyclic and only lasts until someone is done being the
| money pinata. Service is born. Service gets big. Service owner
| gets tired and wants to part ways. New owner takes over.
| Service slowly or all of a sudden dies.
|
| My thought is the only way to fix this is charge users to
| upload their content, at a rate of ~$2.50/GB. Stick it in the
| Internet Archive and give them $2/GB (their cost per GB for
| perpetual storage [1]), and front it with Cloudflare with the
| other 50 cents (assuming requests for all content eventually
| trails off theta decay style). Someone has to not be the object
| store of last resort, but also the wallet. The Internet Archive
| already has Patron Services to handle DMCA and illegal content
| moderation of content/items, but would probably want some extra
| funds to not overburden staff with this task (which is entirely
| reasonable imho).
|
| Or use u/stavros' imgz.org [2].
|
| [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31149703
|
| [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28676468
| xur17 wrote:
| I really wish ipfs worked better. Keep the Internet Archive
| as the object store of last resort, but also provide an easy
| way for anyone to contribute storage and hosting to the
| network in a few clicks (with a reasonable expectation that
| the images they are mirroring are filtered for DMCA / illegal
| content).
|
| I would happily donate a few terabytes, and a fat internet
| connection.
| ALittleLight wrote:
| Is there a solution for training models to detect CSAM images?
| I'm imagining some kind of cooperation with the FBI, who I
| assume have an extensive dataset, where there models could be
| trained off FBI data without ever sharing the images.
|
| Or, is there some kind one way mask that could be applied to
| the image such that the FBI could mask their CSAM dataset and
| release it and people could train detection models on the
| masked data, then just mask inputs during inference?
|
| I feel like being extremely aggressive about detection and
| removal is scalable solution here.
| asspocalypse wrote:
| [dead]
| cogitoergofutuo wrote:
| It's a real bummer to see this happen. I hope some day there's
| some sort of canonical image host that can be maintained through
| donations of money and hosting.
|
| Also, I very much pity whoever is in charge of trying to turn a
| profit by setting fire to such a big chunk of the internet's
| history.
| rnk wrote:
| That article points to an attempt to archive the images,
| https://wiki.archiveteam.org/index.php/Imgur. This is a good idea
| in general, but we need a reliable mechanism. Foundations with
| massive budgets are a great centralizing and stable archiving
| location, but I always worry that we need decentralized services
| too. Ideally all these archiving project would have both (a rich
| and powerful central repository as well as decentralized copies
| on random people's computers).
|
| What are the odds that archiveteam.org can make it work? The
| continual desire to censor naked pics on the internet so
| replicates the behavior of various idiots censoring literature
| and art over the ages.
| jasonladuke0311 wrote:
| I have been searching for stuff the last few days and have come
| across more broken or empty Imgur links than live ones. As recent
| as late-2020 images are already deleted.
| CodeWriter23 wrote:
| Guess the new guys don't know they purchased monthly active
| users.
| gumballindie wrote:
| "We will be focused on removing old, unused, and inactive content
| that is not tied to a user account from our platform as well as
| nudity, pornography, & sexually explicit content,"
|
| What's the issue with removing old unused and inactive content?
| Some people used imgur for sharing one off pictures or
| screenshots. The porn thing is not an issue either as imgur is
| more of a friendly community of genuine people. It will do just
| fine.
| suddenclarity wrote:
| Reddit doesn't allow uploading of images or videos in NSFW subs
| so most of that content is hosted on imgur. I reckon this will
| be a massive blow against both sites. Not only for the purged
| archive but also fewer future visitors to imgur when the site
| is replaced for NSFW and thereby all other content in the long
| run. Photobucket used to be the goto site. Then imgur replaced
| it. Another site will replace imgur.
|
| Speaking of old content. That's a massive issue for everyone.
| Most forums depend on external services for sharing images.
| This will kill tutorials, progress diaries and close to most
| images in forums. It's like purging all movies from music
| predating 1990. It will have a major impact.
| Sohcahtoa82 wrote:
| > What's the issue with removing old unused and inactive
| content?
|
| $$$
|
| I imagine there's probably a LOT of images that were uploaded,
| viewed by 1 or 2 people, and then never viewed again, and never
| WILL be viewed again. But they still have to store them, and
| that storage costs money.
| gumballindie wrote:
| Indeed, what i meant is that i agree with imgur and dont
| think it will follow tumblr.
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(page generated 2023-04-27 23:01 UTC)