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Joined 10 days ago
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Cake day: September 28th, 2025

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  • I will say I don’t like the direction imgur went, but to play devil’s advocate, I don’t think there was any way around it.

    The problem is that being an image host used by millions of users is incredibly expensive, and between needing to pay for the infrastructure, content moderators, and (in this case) regulatory compliance, it all adds up.

    The only income model they have is ads, which is why they needed to re-tool the UI to hinder users’ ability to direct share images, and converting it to a more social media type of format keeps users on the site so they can cycle in more ads for more revenue.

    An ideal internet would not need to rely on ad money to work, but I’m struggling to think of what else could be done at the scale imgur operates, as donation models can barely even keep Lemmy instances above water. If ad money wasn’t a thing, would sites like imgur be able to exist? Maybe they shouldn’t, I don’t know.