Yeah, when imgur came about reddit was 99% text on the site. Hosting images would have been a huge step up in cost considering the user count. Then of course people realized that if imgur can make money on ads thanks to reddit's traffic, reddit could potentially make even more and it has been all down hill from there.

Not to mention the liability of hosting users' media, which would have needed costly moderation to ensure nothing too illegal made its way in.

How much protection do platforms have against user media submissions? If you implement a dcma/illegal report button tbat instantly takes the media down, maybe even logically, is that sufficient?

It might, but then you’ve created a whole new set of problems: if anyone can take down anyone else’s content with one click, they’ll do it against anybody they dislike just for the hell of it (this was the case on Tumblr for a brief period: the Report button almost automatically banned the user, until they immediately realized this was unworkable). So if you don’t want everyone to ban everyone, you need a moderation team anyway to handle false reports, and you’re right back where you started.

Agreed. I was mostly asking about any legal issues.

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.

fyi it's DMCA

Nowadays just hosting text can get you in trouble if it is too pornographic in nature.

It’s probably now a lot easier to detect porn and automatically reject it. Set the filter to lean towards rejection for edge cases. You will lose out on racy bikini pictures, but maybe that is an acceptable compromise.

Reddit was a link aggregator till the recent shitty redesign. So image posts were just a post with a URL. You needed RES if you wanted to open the image inline with the post and comments.

Isn't storage cheap? Telegram advertises as free unlimited storage.

Storage and bandwidth were way more expensive in 2009.

Storage multiplies and becomes more expensive once you're replicating across regions, backing up into an eternally growing corpus, and so on.

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.

And yet imgur, with no revenue at all, managed to fill that gap.

They made hotlinking increasingly difficult, turned the site into a social network and sold ads against content. It is no longer a "image hosting site" the way it was back then, it was going bankrupt as well.

It still is the same old imgur for making posts. One button to upload, you get served your album link, right click image for direct link. Same as its been for 15 years. Just used it as such last week.

Imgur deleted a huge number of old reddit posts when retroactively banning nudity.

They broke the social contract of being a trusted host, that's the biggest change.