thefrogman:

This is not my problem alone. I wouldn’t make a huge public fuss about this if it was my singular problem. There are a great deal of content creators who have their work hosted on imgur without any way of claiming it. 

Maybe I took some silly pictures with my dog and you don’t feel that is worth anything. But their are people who spend hours, days, weeks creating amazing art, beautiful photography, or hilarious web comics. Imgur has no attribution system. Even 9GAG has an attribution system. No one uses it, but at least they have it. Canvas has a google image search feature built into their system so you can try to track down the creator. But with imgur, content creators can either have the image deleted and look like an asshole… or they can just accept it. They can’t contact imgur and say, “Hey, I don’t mind you sharing my image, but could you attribute that to me?” 

As an experiment I posted my work on imgur and reddit. It reached the number 1 spot on the front page. 

Here is the view count on imgur.

Here are the visits my imgur/reddit post generated for my site.

Content creators want their work to be shared. Not because we are greedy money grubbing bastards, but because we want to entertain, inspire, or move you. The money aspect is to keep us in business. It does not buy us sports cars. It pays for food and rent. In my case, quite a few dog toys.

Our work does not cost our audience anything. We freely give it to the gods of the internet. All we ask is that if you know we made it, put a link at the bottom that leads to our website.

Simple attribution. That’s all.

This guy right here… I LOVE THIS GUY!!! (I kind of feel bad though after reading this because I discovered him on imgur)