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Comment by AngryData | Hacker News Reader

Yeah, when imgur came about reddit was 99% text on the site. Hosting images would have been a huge step up in cost considering the user count. Then of course people realized that if imgur can make money on ads thanks to reddit's traffic, reddit could potentially make even more and it has been all down hill from there.

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Not to mention the liability of hosting users' media, which would have needed costly moderation to ensure nothing too illegal made its way in.

Nowadays just hosting text can get you in trouble if it is too pornographic in nature.

It’s probably now a lot easier to detect porn and automatically reject it. Set the filter to lean towards rejection for edge cases. You will lose out on racy bikini pictures, but maybe that is an acceptable compromise.

How much protection do platforms have against user media submissions? If you implement a dcma/illegal report button tbat instantly takes the media down, maybe even logically, is that sufficient?

It might, but then you’ve created a whole new set of problems: if anyone can take down anyone else’s content with one click, they’ll do it against anybody they dislike just for the hell of it (this was the case on Tumblr for a brief period: the Report button almost automatically banned the user, until they immediately realized this was unworkable). So if you don’t want everyone to ban everyone, you need a moderation team anyway to handle false reports, and you’re right back where you started.

Agreed. I was mostly asking about any legal issues.

The problems are like you stated. We even see this happen with invalid dcma complaints in moderation-heavy environments. There are certainly safety rails such as rate limited reports per user, etc., but then you need some moderation anyway.

But if the legal requirement is, "take down media if the fbi comes knocking", maybe it's just easier to deal with it that way if there is no budget for moderation.

fyi it's DMCA

Reddit was a link aggregator till the recent shitty redesign. So image posts were just a post with a URL. You needed RES if you wanted to open the image inline with the post and comments.

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