Imgur bans porn and nudity, while Reddit suffers

He may no longer have an attraction to other times, but Imgur It remains one of the most popular image upload sites in the world. The ability to download content without opening an account has made it very useful, especially for sharing on Reddit. However, from next month there will be drastic changes in it: will ban images of nudity, pornography, or sexually explicit content..

The decision was announced through an update to its terms and conditions. The change will take effect from the next May 15, and promises to cause a lot of controversy. Recall that back in 2019, Imgur decided to “hide” all subreddit-related NSFW subsections. However, it was still possible to download legal sexual content if it was marked as “hidden”.

This time the company decided to go for broke and expel porn and nudity from your library. Thus, starting next month, everything that no longer complies with the rules of the service will be eliminated. And, as we said at the beginning, the biggest impact will be seen in Reddit’s “+18” communities, as most of the adult content shared there is hosted on Imgur.

It has been explained on the platform that allowing explicit content has always been a risk to both the community and your business. Therefore, the decision to ban it is aimed at solving this problem and protecting users. In addition, Imgur indicated that they would implement mixed system of automatic detection and review by a person to find and remove images that violate your new terms.

The important point is that the service will continue to allow artistic nudity. However, they have already announced that they expect problems in the first weeks of the new pornography policy. What does it mean? That the work of some artists can be identified as prohibited by their automatic tools. At least until they manage to optimally calibrate them.

Imgur changes hit Reddit beyond porn and nudity

While Imgur’s most notable change is its ban on porn and nudity, the new policy will have a much broader impact on Reddit. The thing is, in addition to adult content, the platform announced that will remove all “old, inactive and unused” content“ which is not associated with any user account.

As we mentioned at the beginning, one of the things that made Imgur such a popular service was the ability to upload images without creating an account. Especially at a time when Reddit still didn’t allow them to be posted.

This means that the changes, which will take effect on May 15, will affect not only NSFW subreddits, but also all those that once depended on the service. Thus, years and years of images that Imgur shared for all sorts of publications – tutorials, memes, etc. – will go down in history..

Those with explicit content associated with their accounts will be able to download them before the new terms of service are implemented. It remains to be seen whether the ban on pornography will have consequences for Imgur similar to those experienced by Tumblr. What can we expect is endless broken links on countless subreddits starting next month.