This is cyclic and only lasts until someone is done being the money piñata. 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), and front it with Cloudflare with the other 50 cents (assuming requests for all content eventually trails off theta style). Someone has to not be the object store of last resort, but also the wallet.

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.

Here's the thing. The overwhelming majority of content that people want to share on the likes of Imgur never actually get that much traffic. Ergo, why not just buy a cheap xyz, be it a turn-key appliance, a Pi and roll your own, or do something more sophisticated? Or if they don't want to do that, why not just host it out of your cloud storage provider?

I don't really understand the niche that Imgur is serving. Past a point, it makes far more sense to have it on your own server (local or cloud), your own CloudFlare account in front of it etc. This weird middleground where people aren't making money off of their content, but still want to share it, but don't actually get that much traffic is a weird one.

Why not just stick some ads on it if you're getting that much traffic or stick it on someone else's ad-supported platform? And if it's porn, why not go through a porn site and monetize legitimately? Surely all legitimate and consensual pornography wouldn't have a problem with that, and they would get more traffic on the ads/subs, and thus more money.

A one-time upload fee could work with widespread expectations about how to entrust the money to long-term preservation, and how to report that transparently. I'm reminded of cemetery management which must split plot sale revenue between today's expenses and the trust that cares for the cemetery at least a century after the last one is sold.

> 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.

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.

You could use a GAN style network to generate CSAM using the detection network as a discriminator, so I assume anyone giving out the model would be reluctant to do so without legal agreements and a strong ability to enforce them.

I wonder if you could use an off the shelf API like Google Cloud Vision or AWS Rekognition to detect both underage images + nudity and use that as a rough detector of CSAM.

It’s a hard problem when literally one day separates a picture of someone being regular porn or child porn.

>I'm surprised they still allow direct linking of images, as that results in their bandwidth being used for free.

On mobile at least they've got a dark pattern to fix that. Direct links redirect to imgur.io with the same ad-filled infinite scrolling hell the linker tried to save you from. The best method around it I've found is to edit the url before going there to be imgur.lurkmore.com instead of imgur.com. Hopefully mentioning it doesn't get the site killed. It seems like nitter for imgur. I keep telling friends to stop using imgur but some of them are weirdly stubborn. I use a variety of free image hosts when I link them stuff, never imgur, and yet they refuse to put in even a fraction of the effort in most cases.