If you’ve been worried about how you’re going to upload explicit images from your desktop to Reddit after Imgur’s May 15 ban and purge, you can now rest easy. On Thursday, Reddit began uploading not-safe-for-work (NSFW) desktop images to communities restricted to users 18 and older, as noted by TechCrunch.
“This now gives us feature parity with our mobile apps, which (as you know) already have this functionality,” says Reddit’s announcement on the r/modnews subreddit.
As of May 15, the image-hosting site Imgur will no longer allow nudity, pornography, or sexually explicit content and will remove all images that fall under that umbrella.
The expected impact is remarkable, given Imgur’s decades-long reputation for hosting high-resolution images of all kinds. It’s also notable for Redditors engaging in naughty posts. Although Reddit started allowing users to upload images directly to the site in 2016, many users still used Imgur for their explicit image needs. When the developer of the third-party Reddit client Apollo learned about Imgur’s impending ban, he noted that Imgur had been the “prime place for uploading NSFW Reddit images, as Reddit didn’t allow explicit uploads from the desktop.” But with Imgur days away from a major purge (including inactive content not tied to Imgur user accounts), Reddit will pick up on the opportunity and give its desktop users an option.
In April, Reddit announced that it will “restrict access to adult content through our Data API as part of an ongoing effort to provide guardrails for how sexually explicit content and communities on Reddit are discovered and viewed.” When asked this week if enabling explicit desktop image uploads meant users would be able to upload images via the API, a Reddit admin said this is something Reddit is “still debating”.
The developer of Apollo responded by saying that the developer community would be pleased with the ability to access NSFW subreddits “in some capacity”.
Either way, Reddit’s new policy won’t sit well with anti-porn groups like The National Center on Sexual Exploitation (formerly Morality in Media). As reported by Vice earlier this month, the group, which highlighted concerns about explicit content involving or being seen by children and victims of sexual abuse, was already urging Reddit to update its policies, including by “strongly implement a policy against hardcore pornography and sexually explicit content due to Reddit’s inability to ever sufficiently verify the age or consent of people depicted in such content” and to “ban users who upload sexually explicit material”.
Disclosure: Advance Publications, which owns Condé Nast, the parent company of Ars Technica, is Reddit’s largest shareholder.
