Imgur Taking Steps to Hide Reddit Porn Images, But No Ban Yet

Imgur.com, the heavily trafficked image-storage site popular with Reddit users who embed images in their posts by first uploading them to Imgur, is taking steps to keep Reddit’s porn-heavy “subreddit” forums at arm’s length, according to a report by the tech news site Gizmodo.But perhaps taking a lesson from Tumblr, which banned porn altogether last year only to see site traffic quickly plummet 30 percent, as AVN.com reported, Imgur also announced that users may continue to upload adult content to the site, and porn that already lives on Imgur will remain there, untouched.Instead, Imgur has implemented what is generally referred to as a “shadowban,” though in the image-hosting site’s case, they’re doing it out in the open. In a blog post last week, the site’s management announced that searches on Imgur for content posted to “NSFW” subreddits will produce no results, and instead hit a generic landing page stating the porn search results will no longer be displayed.“That’s not to say Imgur has banned NSFW uploads wholesale, users will just have to mark these pictures as ‘hidden’ from now on,” the blog post explained. “This keeps it from showing up in Imgur’s public gallery community and will also prompt future viewers to log in and confirm they’re at least 18 before gaining access.”The decade-old Imgur is one of the most heavily trafficked sites on the web, thanks in large part to its symbiosis with Reddit. According to data from SimilarWeb, Imgur was the 101st-most visited site in the world, with nearly 275 million visitors in September alone. Imgur has also developed its own user base independent from Reddit users, as the Gizmodo report noted. Imgur has maintained it status among the traffic-ranking upper-echelon even three years after Reddit began offering users the option of uploading images directly, rather than embedding via a link to Imgur.But despite the shadowban, those links will continue to operate, meaning Reddit porn isn’t going anywhere, at least not yet. And users with direct URL links to adult images posted in Imgur will find that those links still work—though they will now require users to assert that they are at least 18 years old before displaying the images directly.Photo via Imgur.com