Campaign against ‘censorship’ hits front page of image-sharing website popular on Reddit, after it finally acts on rules banning obscene and explicit comments

Image-sharing website Imgur accidentally sparked a user revolt on Tuesday, after it began removing obscene and sexually explicit comments from the site.

Imgur, which is in practice one of the largest social networks on the internet with 5 billion page views each month, has always had a rule in its community guidelines, under the rubric “always be civil”, which bans obscene and sexually explicit comments – but until recently, the site’s enforcement of the rules was lax.

On Saturday, however, one user reported seeing a post removed for breaking community rules for the first time, and over the next few days, protest at the supposed crackdown on “not-safe-for-work” (NSFW) comments increased.

By Tuesday evening, the protest had grown so large that much of Imgur’s front page was full of that most 21st century of cultural artefacts, the campaigning image macro. Mic’s Jack Smith IV captured the site at full-takeover:

On Tuesday morning, Imgur’s community manager Sarah Schaaf says she woke up to discover the revolt, and posted an explanation to the site’s community.

Schaaf explained: “the rules have always been around and have never permitted NSFW content, but in the past they lived offsite, they were infrequently enforced, and reports were only made as attacks on other users”.

Previously, she explained, community enforcement involved the complete removal of a comment, with no evidence left that it had ever been there, and even a “shadow ban” of the user, hiding their posts from others without informing them that action has been taken.

“Now, Imgur is a much larger team (we have 65 people working here), and the resources to respond to user reports has gone up. To increase the transparency around what’s being done, when a comment has been removed you’ll see a little blurb about why. This will only happen when the comment has been reported multiple times by other users.”

“This is not meant to turn Imgur into a G-rated shell of itself, nor is it meant to bring down a ban hammer on our most active users”, she added. “We value free speech and self-expression incredibly highly, and the sometimes crass humour, ridiculous puns, and don’t-take-ourselves-too-seriously attitudes make Imgur what it is, and we love this community. There is a place for dickbutt and fine art and weird gifs and information here – nothing will change about that.”

The hasty apology underscores the importance to Imgur of keeping its community onside. Unusually for a site of its size, Imgur’s growth is almost entirely self-funded: the company took no venture funding until April 2014, when it accepted a $40m investment from Silicon Valley VCs Andreessen Horowitz to grow.

Instead, it achieved its size by beginning its life as a simple appendage to larger sites such as Reddit, offering free image hosting, before piling on the social features and becoming a social network in its own right.

But the community, which has a reputation as even more of a wild west than Reddit itself, can be a hindrance as much as a help. A proliferation of pornography is unappealing to advertisers, who Imgur has started to court in a serious way, and it may hurt attempts to grow beyond a particular type of audience.

Unaffected by the changes – for now – is Imgur’s position as a destination for pornography in its own right. A large proportion of porn posted to reddit’s numerous porn subforums is hosted on Imgur’s site, but don’t expect that to be ‘cleaned up’ any time soon.