News: 0178918596

  ARM Give a man a fire and he's warm for a day, but set fire to him and he's warm for the rest of his life (Terry Pratchett, Jingo)

Imgur's Community Is In Full Revolt Against Its Owner (404media.co)

(Thursday August 28, 2025 @05:22PM (msmash) from the enshittification-continues dept.)


Imgur users have [1]flooded the image-hosting site's front page with pictures of John Oliver giving the middle finger to parent company MediaLab AI. The revolt follows staff layoffs that eliminated human moderators and the breakdown of core site functions including video playback for non-logged-in users and failed image uploads.

A former employee confirmed MediaLab AI laid off Imgur's moderation team without notice and reassigned remaining staff to other projects. The company acquired Imgur in 2021 after founder Alan Schaaf departed. MediaLab AI faces lawsuits from Schaaf and other former site owners over allegedly withheld acquisition payments.



[1] https://www.404media.co/imgurs-community-is-in-full-revolt-against-its-owner/



too late, completly enshittified (Score:1)

by Anonymous Coward

I uploaded a 28kb png file there the other day. Imgur displays this for other users as a 77kb lossy webp file. Not only wasting effort doing a conversion, but making everything worse in the process.

suddenly looking for a new throwaway image host

Re: (Score:2)

by Smidge204 ( 605297 )

As a chronic Imgur user I can confirm two things;

1) Imgur does not share your images to others unless you explicitly select "Share with community." There is a separate field to copy just the link to the image you upload.

2) Imgur will not recode your image to webp. As far as I'm aware, Imgur doesn't even support webp - you definitely cannot upload them so I can't imagine they'd serve them.

=Smidge=

Re: (Score:1)

by Anonymous Coward

> How often has there ever been an acquisition that didn't result in employees and customers getting fucked? Almost never.

I'd have thought it happens all the time with small, private, unsexy businesses. Businesses you'll never hear about or care about because they're so boring. These acquisitions-going-sour make headlines, uneventful purchases don't.

Re: (Score:2)

by drinkypoo ( 153816 )

> I'd have thought it happens all the time with small, private, unsexy businesses. Businesses you'll never hear about or care about because they're so boring. These acquisitions-going-sour make headlines, uneventful purchases don't.

I hear a local burger and hot dog joint in Fortuna CA was saved by being sold and is now successful again. I spoke with the prior owner on several occasions because I was working on his trailers (that was my prior job) and he was planning to close it because he allegedly couldn't afford to pay the cooks.

And that's great, but it mostly affects some high school students in one town and just a few employees, so there's no reason for anyone else to care.

At the big corporate level, M&A really do always seem

Re: (Score:2)

by packrat0x ( 798359 )

> ...walks away with lots of money...

Except that didn't happen. Per TFS:

"MediaLab AI faces lawsuits from Schaaf and other former site owners over allegedly withheld acquisition payments. "

So Imgur isn't completely sold, and may revert back to its previous owners.

Good riddance (Score:2)

by pak9rabid ( 1011935 )

Imgur is a cancer to the Internet that deserves to die

Making one brilliant decision and a whole bunch of mediocre ones isn't as
good as making a whole bunch of generally smart decisions throughout the
whole process.
-- John Carmack