Depending upon how you look at it, social media sites are everywhere. The most popular ones that I can point out are Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat and TikTok while the one that's obscure but obsolete is MySpace. Most of these platforms will have a huge impact and a huge following whereas others might end up falling into the abyss. MySpace did have a following but fell through after the release of Facebook and Twitter. It depends on the competition. For today's post we are talking about Imgur; an obscure sharing site for gifs, images, videos and memes, but does it in the worst way possible as most of these are extremely dated. Plus, many of the memes aren't any good.
History / The Rise:
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| Imgur on December 28, 2009 |
Imgur was created by a guy named Alan Schaaf who is an entrepreneur and the CEO of Imgur. The website was created back on February 23, 2009, way before the poorly drawn memes came into being (that was 2010). During this time period, Imgur only had the ability to share images from people's computers or by finding URLs on various websites. This was also when Imgur didn't require an account to upload any images. They also had a dedicated forum to where you can chat, hangout and upload images to your liking. In 2010, they integrated the account system to where you can create an account to access your saved images, but they still kept the format of finding images from URLs or by uploading them from your computer. In 2012, they removed the forum I guess for security reasons. The idea for Imgur is to host images online.
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| Imgur on December 31, 2013 |
Imgur's layout changes every year but would always stick with their original color scheme, which is between black, dark grey, white and green. Since then, Imgur has gotten the attention from users who want an alternative from just the standard social media sites today or they just want to host images and nothing else. The userbase for the site has been constantly growing every single year and has expanded the line of memes, funny images and so on. In the later years, they would also integrate a comment/voting system similar to reddit with the up and down arrows as well as the ability to share GIFs on the site similar to other GIF sharing sites in the past decade.
The Fall:
Toxic Community / Outdated Memes / Promoting Censorship:
Do I really even need to say it? Well let's start off with the first one and that is Imgur being the most toxic community in terms of how it shows political views and comments. The images shown above are just some of the comments I can find as well as apparently the moderators advertising stuff related to the left. They even go so far as posting stuff related to censorship but unfortunately, it's completely buried in a lot of images. There're tons of comments like this and it's gotten so bad that most of them get promoted on the frontpage of Imgur. No one likes to see politics on an image sharing website because it ruins people's lives.
The website is filled with complete garbage nowadays and nothing is ever good. Most of it revolves around quickies (like videos that are over within a matter of seconds) and TikToks. A primary example is when a user made a Chia Sink made out of the seeds from the Chia Pets. I mean you literally can't make this shit up even if you tried. Like what took you the time to do this shit? Was it because you were bored and had nothing else to do? That's also another thing wrong with the site. People will go all the way to get the most possible upvotes from their images and comments and it's sad. Now let's talk about the memes because that's what most people come to the website just to see them. Most of these memes were from the 2010s and this is the part where the site is dated. Most people use these still and it's constantly on the frontpage of the site.Some dumbass made a Chia Sink, like those things from Chia Pets.
Many reviews for the website were quite bad, shown from Trustpilot and Sitejabber. The Trustpilot reviews were overwhelmingly negative while the Sitjabber reviews were mixbag. Back in 2017 they'd suffer a data breach and 1.7M emails and passwords were exposed. It goes to show on what the site is really like.
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