That quickly flipped, as /r/NSFW became the most popular subreddit. You could avoid it by browsing as a guest or by curating your feed, but porn was everywhere.
Early Reddit also had a strong attitude about minimal moderation. The early days were characterized by a feeling that anything goes as long as it wasn’t illegal or too extreme to defend. Combined with the popularity of porn on the website it created strange situations where a lot of subreddits were focused on things like legal-enough photos of underage children. There were also a lot of weird alt-right and white supremacist forums. There was an unofficial (if I recall correctly) “Subreddit of the Day” that attracted controversy because it actually highlighted one of the “jailbait” subreddits and even a white supremacist subreddit.
So if you were there at the time, it was obvious why Reddit wasn’t going to host their own images: It would have been a legal nightmare with all of the porn (copyrighted material), the creepy underage stuff, and white supremacist memes
Reddit did a decent job of containing this stuff out of view of the average user and later removing it from the site. It took many years.
If you peeked at /r/all or browsed new during the early days it would have been clear why image hosting would have been out of the question at the time.
Early reddit skewed heavily towards people who make shit online; fitting for a site made by people making shit online.
Q: Wouldn't most of us want to defend the right to publish content that's "not illegal"?
I don’t want to host that content, though. That’s also my right.
As I discovered on the early days on Reddit, I don’t even want to be on a site where content is a free-for-all because you could go from scrolling through programming topics to encountering sexualized imagery of minors by scrolling if you weren’t careful.
This is the problem with every hardcore free speech platform: They attract the people who only come to post that content, while everyone else who doesn’t want to see it starts leaving. Then after some time, the majority of your content is catering to those niches.
I see more parallels between the people who thrived in the early Reddit cesspool era and the same people who are spreading culture wars, misinfo, and other garbage on Twitter.
The early days of Reddit were a haven for culture war and misinfo people.
(Neutral example: at some point in the past the clinics around me started requiring appointments to come in for doctor-prescribed tests. Recently, the closest one did that too, saying that they were the only one remaining and ended up being overloaded with all the people who wouldn’t or couldn’t make an appointment. And thus we’re all worse off now.)
My view of free speech is simply: the government shouldn't arrest you for publishing most things (with only certain mostly-well-defined exceptions). If there are views which are not illegal but which no platform will let you publish, I really don't see the problem. If enough people share those views they can get together and make their own platform. It's not even hard to make a platform anymore, anyone can buy a domain and set up nginx on a raspberry pi.
Freedom from government persecution on the basis of speech is extremely important to me (again, with exceptions). Freedom to publish unsavoury-but-legal content on other people's platforms is completely unimportant to me.
It’s never been true before, let alone realistic. It’s only with the past several decades of networked computing that humans have been able to so vastly amplify the reach of an individual or group opinion.
Just because it’s easier than ever to publish speech doesn’t make having one’s speech published any kind of right.
There is no widespread opinion that does not have countless corresponding platforms to share it.
I guarantee you cannot find an opinion that cannot be shared on at least one of the major social media platforms right now.
This extinction of free speech does not happen.
I fear we're headed this way generally. There's a kind of person who likes to plan everything ahead of time. As we hit capacity limits (e.g. overtourism), those planners are going to book all the available capacity. We're going to either have to adapt to be like them, or be locked out of experiences.
I'm very not happy about it.
Do something unique, something new, something odd. You won't have any competition from ahead bookers and you can have experiences they'll never imagine.
It’s not just the planners either. It’s the people who are unreasonable and it’s the people who lack any external center of concern. By way of example: it used to be easy to get in touch with my physician. As the practice she works for has grown, they’ve made it all but impossible for physicians and patients to have a conversation privately and without an intermediary, except when you’re in the exam room or a physician places an outgoing call.
As their practice grew, so too did the number of people who believed they should or could (defensibly) go directly to their doctor about every little thing. People made unreasonable demands. So the practice reacted to protect the physicians at the cost of their accessibility to patients, other than booking a visit.
Did you know that movie ratings aren't based on any law? There's no law on any book, anywhere, that prevents theaters from allowing children under 18 to view R-rated movies. Instead, the MPAA and the theaters enforce a fairly rigid soft-censorship regime to avoid what would definitely be a legally mandated, government-run censorship regime.
So, while you are _strictly_ correct and Reddit is legally "allowed" to choose its current heavy handed censored approach, they were never really legally "allowed" to avoid it, either.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Controversial_Reddit_communiti...
- "Street fashion" subs, where photos were NOTICEABLY of underage girls taken on the street candidly, usually from a long distance (telephoto lens), and everyone talked about "fashion" in ways you figured out pretty fast were not about fashion. There were a number operating at the same time as a sort of redundancy as they would vanish from time to time.
- CSAM investigation type subs, where users who REALLY knew the lingo and details of CSAM talked about how they were investigating CSAM elsewhere on the internet ... like they were amateur police, but it was kinda indistinguishable from them being connoisseurs. They also would tell each other very suspicious stories about their investigations, like something a jr. high student would make up because they don't know how the world works. It was like they thought they were setting up some sort of plausible deniability or something...
- Gamergate and that whole bizzaro world spanned subs but it was absolutely insane how emotionally charged the devotes were about something as inconsequential as ... video game reviews.
There's a good reason the phrase "it's about ethics in games journalism" was used to mock gamergaters. It was so transparently not about that in the slightest. I'm not one of those "gamergate caused trumpism" domino meme people but they are related phenomena. GG was a revanchist political movement based on using the novel organization structures of social media to harass women and minorities out of gaming culture.
"Emacs, Ruby and magic mushrooms. None of which I ever got around to trying." -bityard
We have super geniuses.
(Thank you, MisterTea.)
Initial comments of “oh neat!” quickly turned into “oh no!” and the toy site didn’t last long as it was. I think Imgur had some kind of detection (possibly automatic+manual) of illegal material going on, but it (the manual side of it?) would occur some time after posting.
Maybe partly because it wasn't Imgur that added image hosting to reddit it was more reddit always had images they were just on ImageShack, PhotoBucket and there was another reddit darling one who's name escapes me before imgur which I think added ads or started deleting images that caused Imgur to be created.
So Imgur was more just the most successful in a long line of image hosts and the only one to successfully transplant reddit users to their own thing.
ImageShack removed images that became too popular, which created maximal outrage with the most people, just as content was going viral. Images hosted on ImageShack would randomly get corrupted, and it'd be difficult to reach support to fix this. ImageShack was annoying. You'd try to go directly to the .jpg URL and it'd load the HTML website with lots of ads. In order to upload to ImageShack, you'd have to register an account and potentially pay money.
Imgur was a breath of fresh air. They didn't do any of those things. It was just the simple reliable free image upload service people wanted. So it took over ImageShack's role almost overnight. Imgur eventually rolled in their own exploitation, but they did it a lot more moderately than ImageShack.
The problems are like you stated. We even see this happen with invalid dcma complaints in moderation-heavy environments. There are certainly safety rails such as rate limited reports per user, etc., but then you need some moderation anyway.
But if the legal requirement is, "take down media if the fbi comes knocking", maybe it's just easier to deal with it that way if there is no budget for moderation.
But the biggest impediment by far were internet transport costs. I mean, they're still onerous for a lot of media-heavy sites, but it was much worse at the time. Offloading that to third parties made an incredible amount of sense.
It's actually kind of bizarre that there is an Imgur "community". I know the operation ran at a massive money-losing proposition for quite some time.
They broke the social contract of being a trusted host, that's the biggest change.
Reddit was a hub for illegal porn so presumably, they didn't want to face a crackdown for hosting that kind of content. It still is, but nsfw posts are banned from /r/all now.
They also had a lot of severely creepy subreddits involving underage children or adult photos talents and shared with consent.
It was really bad. I left the site for years because that type of content was everywhere.
Running an image host takes a lot of effort. You have to deal with removals, content policing, and the other nasties, as well as just having to deal with the sheer volume of data, which was a much larger concern in the 2010 era internet than it is now.
Reddit at the time just wanted to focus on being a link and text post site, much like HN is.
All of those previous Bulletin Board sites did not host images themselves either.
Meanwhile, reddit was a forgotten subsidiary of Condé Nast working out of a corner in Wired's SF office. Jedberg will chime in, but when imgur was founded, reddit's handful of engineers were busy keeping the site from falling over. They didn't have time to build out image hosting.
Similarly over on twitter without any image hosting capabilities let third party sites like twitpic host images for years before evetually developing their own service. Twitpic eventually caved under the load of hosting so much stuff without income and it was good that Twitter was successful enough to take it all on directly.
Image hosting is insanely expensive and they couldn’t afford to do it or were smart enough not to.
Every image host that added paid accounts or ads all over the place had a horrible reputation at the time (see photobucket). They likely wanted to avoid ruining their reputation before going public.
Heck even Imgur caught heat when they needed to start paying the bills.
Which begs the question: What the hell was reddit doing that they didn't immediately implement an image hosting feature to keep users on the platform? Imgur rose to fame because it was the darling image host of reddit users, and it wasn't long before imgur needed to pay hosting costs and started sucking users away from reddit and into their own "imgurian" sharing hub.
I guess the internet back then was still in the "Open effort to make the internet awesome for everyone" phase, and hadn't yet gotten to the adversarial "Capture users and never let them leave" phase.