PSA: Imgur - anonymous image deletion

bobacco

@Strangefan - £4.20 a month. 

Strangefan

Bargain

GoFish

maltingsaudio said:

I can’t understand why , if you want to use an effectively free service, you should object to letting the people who provide it, know who you are? They have to fund it somehow. 

The value of the site is what it generates for its owners,  cash is best, as spending exposure and kudos is a bit tricky.

Sure it will be annoying that previously  unattributed pictures will disappear, but unless it’s of earth shattering importance, it’s done it’s job after the first million views? And if was so important why not credit/ register the image?

You sign up to put your music and videos on the web why not pictures?

I get what you're saying, but Imgur has been "free" and sucessful for about a decade (i've been browsing it for years and years).

Should you be forced to "sign up" to put music and videos on the net?

search  Enshitification for more info on how we can't have nice things.

m_c

RichAC said:

The infrastructure to reliably host and serve millions of photos doesn’t come cheap, and Imgur’s owners need to fund it somehow. The options are selling subscriptions or serving ads (or both).

I don’t have a problem with them enforcing accounts to use the service, especially since they are trying to clean up their act in terms of illicit content. Any service that allows free and anonymous image uploads is going to end up serving some stuff that advertisers won’t want to be anywhere near.

I appreciate that deleting anonymous images will break a lot of forum posts and the like, but an anonymous upload to an image hosting site is about as ephemeral as it gets. 

It's probably not so much to do with advertising, but law enforcement.
In various countries, the hosts can be held liable for any illegal images, especially if they don't take reasonable precautions to prevent and remove them. Having the ability for anybody to anonymously upload images, with no checks leaves your service wide open to abuse, so requiring registration at least makes it a bit less simple to use the service for illicit/illegal purposes.

ICBM

m_c said:

It's probably not so much to do with advertising, but law enforcement.

In various countries, the hosts can be held liable for any illegal images, especially if they don't take reasonable precautions to prevent and remove them. Having the ability for anybody to anonymously upload images, with no checks leaves your service wide open to abuse, so requiring registration at least makes it a bit less simple to use the service for illicit/illegal purposes.

It could be this - a lot of governments, including ours, are trying to ‘clean up the internet’ by putting restrictions on legitimate users, which firstly won’t work (because illegal users will just go around the restrictions) and secondly will cause massive problems for the legitimate users. There’s just been something about Wikipedia possibly being blocked because some content could be considered “pornographic” - anyone who has ever seen actual porn will know how ridiculous this is - and they simply don’t have the resources to check that every single article is compliant with whatever definition becomes the law.

I don’t know what the answer to illegal content on the net is, but I do know that it isn’t this.

crunchman

If it gets to the point where Wikipedia (and presumably a lot of other stuff) isn't available in this country, I will get a VPN.

People up to dodgy stuff will already be using a VPN.   All of the government's regulations are completely pointless.

57Deluxe

On a side swipe: Why did they eff about with Pinterest format ? None of my images display properly anymore...