It may no longer have the pull of other times, but Imgur It remains one of the most popular image uploading websites in the world. The ability to upload content without opening an account made it very useful, especially for sharing on Reddit. However, starting next month it will implement a drastic change: will prohibit images of nudity, pornography or sexually explicit content.
The determination was announced through an update to your terms and conditions. The change will take effect from the next 15 th of May, and promises to generate a lot of controversy. Let’s remember that, already in 2019, Imgur had decided to “hide” all the NSFW subsections linked to subreddits. However, it was still possible to upload legal sexual content, as long as it was marked as “hidden”.
This time, the company has decided to go all in and banish porn and nudity from your library. Thus, starting next month, everything that no longer complies with the rules of the service will be eliminated. And as we said at the beginning, the biggest impact will be seen in Reddit’s “+18” communities, since much of the adult material shared there is hosted on Imgur.
From the platform it was explained that allowing explicit content was always a risk, both for the community and for your business. Therefore, the decision to ban it seeks to address it and protect users. In addition, from Imgur they indicated that they will implement a mixed system of automated detection and human review to find and remove images that violate your new terms and conditions.
An important point to mention is that the service will continue to allow artistic nudity. However, they have already announced that they expect problems in the first weeks of application of the new policy against porn. What does this mean? That the work of some artists may be identified as prohibited by their automatic tools. At least until they manage to calibrate them optimally.
Imgur Changes Hit Reddit Beyond Porn and Nudity
While Imgur’s most notable change is the ban on porn and nudity, the new policy will have a much broader impact on Reddit. It is that, in addition to the adult material, the platform announced that will remove all “old, inactive and unused” content“ that is not linked to any user account.
As we mentioned at the beginning, one of the things that made Imgur such a popular service was the ability to upload images without creating an account. Especially in a time when Reddit still didn’t allow hosting them natively.
This means that the changes that will go into effect on May 15 will not only affect NSFW subreddits, but also all those of any theme that once depended on the service. Thus, years and years of images shared from Imgur for all kinds of publications —tutorials, memes, etc.— will go down in history..
Those who have explicit material linked to their accounts will be able to download it before the new terms and conditions of service are implemented. It remains to be seen if the ban on porn brings Imgur consequences similar to those suffered by Tumblr at the time. What we can expect is endless broken links on countless subreddits, starting next month.