It still surprises me that people use Imgur as a social media site. Imgur to me is a place that hosts image to be used on other social media sites. Using imgur as a social media site is like using a url shortener as a social media site. What’s next, Captcha becomes a social media hangout?
I used it that way for years. It’s better for memes than fediverse or Reddit, except for two things:
1 occasionally the user base freaks the fuck out and starts spamming the same thing, like this. I don’t like Nazis, but that also means I don’t want literally everything on my funny picture site to be about keeping them out.
2 increasingly all the popular stuff isn’t memes at all, but shitting on trump and musk. See point 1.
Then they blocked the UK because they didn’t want to put an age field on their registration form (note this is not to do with age verification)
Imgur has been pretty shit at hosting images for other sites for about a decade because it’s trying very hard to keep people captive on its site. They added ways to prevent hotlinking and if I paste an imgur link in a chat, starting with i., supposedly a direct link to the image, the preview will not work and the page the link sends to will always open their whole site around that image. They really really want people to stay on there, and interact, or watch ads. AFAIK they have made that change about a decade ago as they wanted to monetize.
I’m so old I remember the first post. Hey you can host images for reddit here. The other image hosting sites at the time sucked, they were slow, purged content frequently, and were full of ads. I signed up immediately and imgur was good for almost 10 years and nearly the only place images from reddit reddit users were hosted. I think the pressure to monetize combined with reddit’s own image hosting push sent them into the enshitification death spiral.
If you save the images to your account, you can repost them when the thread calls for it.
eg I have a photo of my foot when I broke it off at the ankle. It comes up occasionally and the link is still usable years later. You also have more control over visibility (and posting to Imgur users etc, ie don’t).
For throwaway memes you’ll never want to share again, treating it like a url shortener is great.
I was also looking to support good non advertising startups at the time, the 2000s we were still excited about what an open web would become, before enshitification became the norm.
It still surprises me that people use Imgur as a social media site. Imgur to me is a place that hosts image to be used on other social media sites. Using imgur as a social media site is like using a url shortener as a social media site. What’s next, Captcha becomes a social media hangout?
I used it that way for years. It’s better for memes than fediverse or Reddit, except for two things: 1 occasionally the user base freaks the fuck out and starts spamming the same thing, like this. I don’t like Nazis, but that also means I don’t want literally everything on my funny picture site to be about keeping them out. 2 increasingly all the popular stuff isn’t memes at all, but shitting on trump and musk. See point 1.
Then they blocked the UK because they didn’t want to put an age field on their registration form (note this is not to do with age verification)
Imgur has been pretty shit at hosting images for other sites for about a decade because it’s trying very hard to keep people captive on its site. They added ways to prevent hotlinking and if I paste an imgur link in a chat, starting with i., supposedly a direct link to the image, the preview will not work and the page the link sends to will always open their whole site around that image. They really really want people to stay on there, and interact, or watch ads. AFAIK they have made that change about a decade ago as they wanted to monetize.
At least there won’t be bots with Captcha
As social media? I’m getting old. It used to just be an image hosting site.
I’m so old I remember the first post. Hey you can host images for reddit here. The other image hosting sites at the time sucked, they were slow, purged content frequently, and were full of ads. I signed up immediately and imgur was good for almost 10 years and nearly the only place images from reddit reddit users were hosted. I think the pressure to monetize combined with reddit’s own image hosting push sent them into the enshitification death spiral.
I never signed up, mainly because there was never any need to sign up. You could just go there, paste an image, and get a link to it.
Why would you sign up? It would be like signing up to use a URL shortener.
If you save the images to your account, you can repost them when the thread calls for it.
eg I have a photo of my foot when I broke it off at the ankle. It comes up occasionally and the link is still usable years later. You also have more control over visibility (and posting to Imgur users etc, ie don’t).
For throwaway memes you’ll never want to share again, treating it like a url shortener is great.
I was also looking to support good non advertising startups at the time, the 2000s we were still excited about what an open web would become, before enshitification became the norm.