Imgur’s story starts in 2009 with a very legitimate purpose: to provide the Internet for a space to house images, when websites of that type did not abound. Your innovative vision became a standardand the service grew like essential livelihood of countless online communities. The corruption and reorientation processes of the classic websites of the Internet, however, have ended up affecting it, and now their users are on a war footing.
What was needed. In 2009, Alan Schaaf, a student at the University of Ohio, tired of how difficult it was to upload and host images on the Internet, which generated countless problems of usability and disappearance of files. Created imgur as a simple solution for Hosting of images and in its first five months he came to add a million pages seen. For more than a decade, Imgur was the de facto standard to share images, especially in Reddit and other forumswhere you have tired of seeing the call to Imgur when an image disappeared or did not carry.
Sustained growth. Imgur prospered as a company: in 2013 I already had ten employees, and in 2014 They had got 40 million dollars of an investment firm and lived from advertising and payment accounts, which included unlimited space of upload and storage. Free users could create albums and edit their multi-way images, in addition to sharing them, thus becoming a great success proto-instagram.
The purchase. Imgur faced his first noticeable crisis when in 2016 Reddit began to host the images locally. It was the beginning of the end: they had ceased to be a standard of storage, and when other websites followed Reddit’s example, in 2021 the company was forced to sell, being acquired by mediabwhich caused the company’s exit from the company. Medialab AI also has the genius and worldstarhiphop song lyrics repository, an impact news website, both heirs, such as Imgur, of more innocent and simple times on the Internet.
IMGUR shit. What follows is a shitting process (translation of the concept of ESHITTIFICATION from Cory Doctorow of which We have already spoken on other occasions) Book. The shit It is a pattern in which products and online services decline in quality over time due to the influence of large TECH companies and social networks, which follow benefits search processes that deteriorate the structure of the websites and the relationship with shareholders and customers. Following the guidelines of this process, Medialab AI has made a series of decisions that have been denounced by users and employees:
- Mass dismissals without prior notice
- Replacement of human moderators: Users believe that moderation is being replaced by unreliable AI systems.
- Technical deterioration: systematic failures in basic functions such as notifications, rise in images, and others.
Users react. The community has responded to this phenomenon with a Block reaction which has caught attention for the use of images (that is, the unity of expression in Imgur) as a form of complaint. Many users have posted a meme by John Oliver raising their middle finger and saying “Fuck you, Business Daddy”. There is also a movement asking for the boycott, asking users not to enter the web on September 1. Currently, the main page overflows in black images with derogatory messages towards Mediabs.
They are regular reactions to Degradation of classic Internet sites that we have been seeing for a few years. With Imgur not only an essential piece of that original Internet, but the symbol of a time in which the foundations of social networks were settling, when they were still an honest point of contact between users and not a mere succession of ads, sponsorships and collection of private data.
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