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PaperclipPerfector  4mo ago (text post)   27246 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 25, 2025

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Imgur (WP) is an image/video/meme sharing board from ca 2010. Its heyday was before reddit introduced native image hosting in 2016.

Browsing imgur has been a somewhat guilty pleasure of mine. Compared to bigger social media platforms, what I really like about it is that imgur does not optimize for maximizing the time I engage with it. While Tiktok would happily provide you with videos most likely to make you stay on the app until you died of thirst, with imgur, you can spend half an hour a day scrolling through the trending (i.e. upvoted) images. If you want to waste more time, you can scroll through the feed of user submissions, but eventually you will just hit the end of that feed.

Like most internet platforms, the people who upvote images on imgur are leaning broadly left. Trans-friendly, Trump-bashing (plenty of it rather stupid, like "Trump is a pedophile"), but a lot of the content is plain unpolitical, like videos of machines producing wire fences or cats behaving in ways humans tend to find funny.

A few days ago, imgur managed to piss off most of the people voting on images. I think they broke notifications, and the parent company medialabs had fired most of the staff and replaced them with AI.

For a day, imgur was full of a photoshopped image of John Oliver giving medialabs the finger and saying "fuck you, business daddy". More recently, people would post/upvote images which either were completely black or would contain NSFW content such as boobs, with the idea that advertisers would not like that.

Compare to the Reddit API restriction protests of 2023, and the demise of freenode in 2021.

I think one difference is that Reddit has more of a moat than imgur, though. For one thing, the software stack to run reddit seems rather less trivial to replace (though rDrama works well enough for themotte). And the reddit communities are organized into different subreddits, which makes moving them a coordination problem. By contrast, a lot of content on imgur is copied from other social media platforms by users, so reposting it on another site would be trivial.

I don’t think the software is make or break. The issue is Reddit having a very online user base who don’t really want to give up on ready access to millions of other people who hang around on forums all day. Getting an entire community to uproot itself and go elsewhere is not easy. Our move took months of planning and I think we still lost somewhere between 40-60% of our active users.

This is why most such protests are met with deafening silence. They know that they have no real option to leave. They can turn the page black as long as they want, Conde Nast doesn’t care because once the users get bored they go back to posting and commenting as usual. It’s basic negotiation— if you can’t live without the product, then the other guy can do pretty much anything he wants. You will whine, but eventually you’ll go along.

It's a pity that Reddit is so solidly entrenched. They still have room for enshittification, unfortunately.

I don't think that Digg ever had nearly as many users. And the bigger ongoing issue is that most Reddit-clones are seeded by weird people, which makes them off-putting. Some might even say the same for this place, though I obviously think more highly of it.

Once they've finished cracking down on power mods, the ability to organize against them will be largely gone.

I would expect Imgur is used something like 95% (if not more) as a regular image hosting site and 5% as an actual social media site and thus expect nothing meaningful to happen. How many people even know that it has a social media element to begin with? I doubt there's that many, if they want an image based social media there's already Pinterest and Instagram.

How many people even know that it has a social media element to begin with?

In the last few years, imgur made it increasingly difficult to share a bare image link. They redirect you to their full site whenever possible, and the "social" features are quite prominent. It's hard to miss.

This change corresponds with my decreased use of the site. The user base is... "Opinionated" and "passionate" would be charitable terms. Wishing death by starvation on me and people like me was popular for a while.

A few days ago, imgur managed to piss off most of the people voting on images.

Given that this is the first time I hear that imgur even has voting, I predict this to be a nothingburger. The tiny portion who use it as social media instead of image host may care but absolutely nobody else.

I used to browse imgur before the Trump era fried everyone's brains, and it was mostly just memes and apolitical posts. When every third post became some deranged enemy screeching I pretty much just stopped.

But whatever imgurcorporate does, I don't really think their grillpilled users are going anywhere. They will write angry comments for a day and then forget about it.

Update:

I must have missed the party because I checked imgur just now and it's back to anti trump posts every third post and random images for the rest.

back to anti trump posts every third post

If you ever find yourself in a fey mood, track the usernames on those. At any given time, 95% of the Trumpposting seems to come from around three dozen accounts that publish dozens of posts per day, with no real pauses for things like sleep.

I did have the feeling that imgur might be astroturfed heavily. It doesn't take much to get to the front page so even a small number of botted accounts can do it.

I'm fully prepared to believe most of the top 1% of posters are mentally ill people collecting disability who wake up from sleep every 2 hours to post.

Man, remember that Cera guy?

The internet used to suck a lot less than it does now.

few days ago, imgur managed to piss off most of the people voting on images.

One of the more interesting aspects of the revolt was users getting temp bans for posting objectionable content.

The objectionable content was screenshots of the site's own ads.

Remember the time /r/fatpeoplehate got banned for posting images of imgur employees? (I think the implication was that they were fat, but this was 10 years ago)

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