That's decades of the public internet that would be permanently erased; billions of dead links pointing nowhere. HN alone would lose ~32,000 images from its archives,
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
Is it not hubris to call it "no loss" if, say, 3 hours ago, "Design of a LISP-based microprocessor / Page 22 has a map of the processor layout:" was forever lost to humanity, as collateral damage to some techbros' dispute?
Decentralization can't arrive soon enough.
https://web.archive.org/web/20230427181813/https://i.imgur.c... (link is already dead at Imgur)
Wayback will have them, as is tradition. A crawl (non IA) has been kicked off to reconcile to ensure maximum coverage of Imgur links on HN.
(Accessing Imgur archives in Wayback is as trivial as a browser extension for your average user; Imgur has raised $60M and only does ~$30M/year, they will eventually be sold or close as the user experience degrades as operators and investors attempt to squeeze more from the enterprise)
…
> service
Money is good for goods and services…
If people give them money or cough ad revenue and get the service they want, that’s called a business.
Personally even if the IA didn't have a copy, I'd still say "marginal loss" and "inconvenient". imgur is just another in the line of image hosting sites that have come and gone. Much of what it hosts isn't actually high value, and isn't actually the sole copy.
Not sure what you're pining for with respect to "decentralization" -- we already have it, nothing stops someone from uploading an imgur image elsewhere, either the original uploader or someone downloading and reuploading somewhere. There are other image hosting sites. And yes, the internet is filled with dead URLs, privatized or deleted forums and discords and twitter accounts that host or previously hosted unique discussion or media, etc. etc. and any number of other minor tragedies. imgur totally dying would be among the least of them.
https://www.privateinternetaccess.com/blog/internet-archive-...
The government requires that ISPs provide some opt-out adult filtering, but archive.org being blocked seems like an over-zealous third party moderation list, not government censorship.
