Image host Imgur announced a change to its terms of service on April 19 that will ban NSFW content, as well commence the deleting of an unspecified number of older images “not tied to a user account.” The announced changes are set to take effect on May 15. Imgur did not respond to a request for comment in time for publication.

Imgur was founded in 2009 as a way of hosting and sharing images intended for other social networks⁠—for a long time, it was the default way to attach images to Reddit posts, for example, but also saw extensive use on other sites and forums. Though the site declined in relevance following Reddit’s rollout of its own, internal image hosting service, Imgur is still widely used. The company itself boasts of 300 million unique visitors and “billions” of pageviews a month, while a Fast Company story in 2013 stated that the site already had a library of over 650 million images just four years after its founding.

Imgur’s explanation of its upcoming terms of service update primarily focuses on the banning of NSFW images, “Most notably, this would include explicit/pornographic content,” the post reads. In 2019, Imgur already effectively siloed off NSFW content related to pornographic Reddit communities⁠—you could still upload and navigate to such posts via a direct link, but no longer access them through Imgur’s own gallery navigation. At the time, Imgur argued that “Over the years, these pages have put Imgur’s user growth, mission, and business at risk.”

Regarding the upcoming change, Imgur says that the distinction between “Community Rules,” which applied to Imgur as a social network in itself where you could not access NSFW content, and “Terms of Service,” which covered all content posted to the site, including those marooned NSFW posts, “caused some confusion among Imgurians, we hope this change will make policies more clear and more consistent across Imgur.” Though, the company does still acknowledge the questions of legal liability and monetization: “Explicit and illegal content have historically posed a risk to Imgur’s community and its business, disallowing explicit content will allow Imgur to address these risks and protect the future of the Imgur community.”

Imgur’s announcement rhymes with similar moderation shifts at other social networks, most notably Tumblr and OnlyFans. Advertisers and credit card processors are notoriously skittish when it comes to pornographic content, and a desire to avoid hosting or even monetizing illegal content is certainly a legitimate concern. Tumblr’s highly publicized blanket ban on pornography, however, blew up in its face: the site’s value and user base cratered, partly due to the removal of pornography itself, but also because the imprecise, opaque, and often automated moderation that came with it negatively impacted the overall user experience. OnlyFans, a user-driven, primarily pornographic website, tried to ban porn. That change did not last long.

Imgur, for its part, asserts that “Artistic nudity will continue to be permitted, as it was permitted under the Rules previously⁠—however, since we’re calibrating automated detection in these early stages, some content that may have been permitted under “artistic exceptions” previously may not apply here.” Imgur does seem to acknowledge the inherent messiness of this sort of moderation, though, mitigating its effects on user accounts and leaving open channels for appeal: “We will not be issuing any warnings, account suspensions, or bans in relation to these automated flags⁠—but this may impact what is allowed to be submitted or uploaded.”

Afterimage

That change is concerning and uncertain enough, but a one-off sentence in the announcement raises a whole other set of issues: “We will be focused on removing old, unused, and inactive content that is not tied to a user account from our platform.” Essentially, this seems to jeopardize an untold number of those hosted images on secondary sites and forums⁠—Imgur’s original raison d’etre and the source of its ubiquity on the internet. It’s not clear how far-reaching or exacting that cleanup will be. 

Deleting thoroughly-forgotten, never-seen images to save storage space and money doesn’t sound so unreasonable, at least when judging Imgur as a business, but there remains the possibility that this new policy will have harsh enough criteria to delete useful or worthwhile content. I can imagine the dark path of broken links and borked images, old forum threads and handy Reddit how-tos rendered incomprehensible. This is an issue that has cropped up with image sharing websites before: previously, ImageShack drew criticism not only for deleting old images to free up space, but also linking advertisements to where they were previously embedded.

The post-2007 internet is an ephemeral thing, and that extends to games⁠—you can still pull up the server browser of a GoldSrc mod like The Specialists, but good luck if you want to access a matchmade multiplayer shooter from the Xbox 360 generation or, god forbid, a second-order live service game that came out within the past few years.

It’s another exhibit for the argument that “the internet is like the Library of Alexandria burning down every day,” and comes just weeks after a devastating blow to the preservation and circulation of free information. Though the Internet Archive is appealing the decision, a federal judge in the US ruled in favor of publishers regarding the site’s lending of ebooks, potentially threatening the entire operation and proscribing future frontiers of digital lending. Keep your physical media safe, gamers, and maybe consider investing in a home server.