Show HN: Avoiding Imgur Link Rot

[rvavruch]

Over the last decade I've built a number of different digital asset managers (mostly media files) that met the needs of my companies at the time. It is an area I enjoy working in. A month ago, when asked what was next for me, I jokingly said I would build another DAM.

Then on Saturday, two weeks ago, I learnt that Imgur was going to delete all anonymous & NSFW files on the 15th of May. It was pointed out that this would mean broken links in communities that had relied on Imgur. By the Sunday I had decided that I would build another DAM, initially with the intent of avoiding Imgur link rot.

It was challenging to find time to spend on this, the project was put together over about 8 evenings. It still has rough patches, this is an early MVP (a Michael Seibel "brick").

I have many ideas of where to take this project, but for now it only does one thing: backup Imgur files and produce new links that are easy to swap out for old soon-to-be-deleted Imgur links.

[_a9]

> Well done, you’ve defeated link rot

Until this site succumbs to the challenges of being a free image host?

FWIW ArchiveTeam is grabbing as much as possible so it could eventually show up in the wayback machine. Though what they have now, 47TB, is a drop to the petabytes imgur probably has now. There was an estimated 376 TiB in 2015.

- https://wiki.archiveteam.org/index.php/Imgur

- https://tracker.archiveteam.org/imgur/

[stavros]

Free image hosts just aren't sustainable, the costs are high and it's fairly hard to make that money back. I made a paid image host a while back (https://imgz.org) exactly because of that reason.

[rvavruch]

My intention is not to be a free host though - that's not sustainable. I hope to fund it through donations and potentially a subscription for enhanced features.

[cantsingh]

Could it be configured so if I go to, for example, https://i.haasie.com/something.png and you haven't already backed up from imgur, you back it up when that URL is hit?

[Sakos]

Definitely agree. It also feels like this would be perfect in combination with something like ipfs for a decentralized way to store and access these images.

[jonhohle]

Yeah, a read through cache seems more obvious than opt-in.

[rvavruch]

That's a fantastic idea, thanks!

[csydas]

Interesting service, but an earnest question about your Terms and Conditions[0].

How closely did you read this? Since I see you used an TOC generator (which was nice for me learn about), I'm just curious how closely you read some of the conditions.

I just may be reading the Prohibited[1] section too closely as well as the User Generated Content [2] section, but it seems like your stated goal about protecting the NSFW content from Imgur, as I guess such content is potentially obscene, lewd, lascivious, filthy, violent, harassing, libellous, slanderous, or otherwise objectionable (as determined by [you and your team]).

I'm not here to trash your service or trying to "gotcha", just since you're responding in the thread, I'm only curious how closely you've read the TOC and if you stand by all the elements of it.

0 - https://haasie.com/terms_and_conditions

1 - https://haasie.com/terms_and_conditions#prohibited

2- https://haasie.com/terms_and_conditions#ugc

edit: fixed link formatting

[rvavruch]

Fair question. I did read the TOCs, and studied the current TOCs of Imgur as well as my hosting company to make sure Haasie's covered the most important aspects.

Imgur atm still allows for NSFW, although presumably this will change. But as it stands the contents of these TOCs are not dissimilar from Imgur's or any other file hosts that allow for NSFW content.

To clarify Haasie is not intended to be a specifically NSFW host - like RedGIF someone here mentioned - but rather to host any legal content, which includes NSFW.

Emphasis here is on legal. The intention behind the TOCs is to specifically prohibit the use of the service for anything illegal or otherwise prohibited by the hosting company. And to state that Haasie will act on any content that is found to be in violation of the TOCs.

[quickthrower2]

First off: great work!

The age old question is how you afford to run this, and how if you get popular do you not become an imgur yourself and have their same pressures to delete, moderate and make money.

[flangola7]

I say we need basic universal internet infrastructure in the same way we have roads, libraries, hospitals, mail service, etc. Fundamental services like email, image and video hosting, backup storage, small cloud nodes, and so on. All partially or fully publicly funded, with no bloat or wasted overhead trying to commercialize it into an advertising platform filled with spyware and dark patterns.

[rvavruch]

Thank you! My thinking is to start with donations. There is no such thing as a free service. If people get value from using it to upload anonymously and they want to keep it going, makes sense to donate.

In the future I could also add a subscription account for additional features, access to an API, bigger upload limits, transformations, greater ability to organise, etc.

[pabs3]

Could you export a list of all imgur URLs saved, so that ArchiveTeam can help save those to archive.org too?

https://wiki.archiveteam.org/index.php/Imgur

[rvavruch]

Thanks, I will check them out.

[gkbrk]

> Well done, you’ve defeated link rot!

Except you haven't, because anyone that wants to view these images where they are linked needs to know to change the URL to Haasie instead of Imgur. So all the links are still broken.

And on top of that, even if the users know about Haasie, it only works if someone went to this website before the original image was deleted, and enter the URL on a form. Non-popular images will be long gone before people do this manually. Perhaps accepting any URL and transparently fetching it from Imgur would improve this a little. From my manual testing, this doesn't seem to be the case, just gives an S3 error from bucket ID haasie01, and nothing shows up there even if I wait and refresh.

All of this is assuming this website won't go down or go bad. Probably the Archive Team, and Archive.org can handle this task better.

[nicklaf]

Interesting work! Thanks for putting this together.

One potentially problematic thing about the new Imgur policy is that it will break machine learning projects that depend on Imgur for NSFW data. For example, here's a project relying on Imgur links in order to train a classifier that detects adult content:

https://github.com/alex000kim/nsfw_data_scraper

https://github.com/EBazarov/nsfw_data_source_urls

[rvavruch]

Thanks for all the questions. It has really gotten me to thinking about how to navigate the future of the project.

I have a question for all of you. My approach is that we are all understand that there is no such thing as a free service, and that for something like this to be long term sustainable donations (or some source of revenue) is crucial. If people get value from the service then it only makes sense to give back to the service to sustain it.

With this in mind, I'm toying with an idea that I would like to get a temperature check from HN on.

How would you react if, when donations are too low, Haasie serves a single image that requests donations to sustain the service in place of the original anonymously uploaded content, until the required donation level is reached? Once there are enough donations normal service is resumed.

[MayeulC]

That makes me think something like this could be a nice phpbb plugin.

Let forum admins compile a list of linked imgur posts that should be archived. Storage and bandwidth are cheap compared to what they used to be, so some may be able to self-host images now.

[tennisflyi]

Is RedGIFs not Imgur for porn?

[teej]

Imgur hosts a lot of porn and was the preferred image host for some popular NSFW subreddits.

[CamperBob2]

Only a matter of time until the same thing happens there.

[newjersey]

Red gifs is a gfycat product though, not an Imgur one.

[rkagerer]

Curious why not a "recycling" approach where images that are about to expire on Imgur are simply reposted to Imgur gaining a fresh URL?