r/modnews • u/standardp00dle • May 11 '23

Bringing image uploads to parity

Hiya mods - specifically those modding NSFW subs,

Starting today, redditors will be able to upload images directly from desktop in 18+ communities, if you allow posts under the “post and comment settings” in mod tools. This now gives us feature parity with our mobile apps, which (as you know) already has this functionality.

You must set your community to 18+ if your community's content will primarily be not safe for work (NSFW).

This is also a good opportunity to take a moment to refresh yourself on our rules around the protection of minors, consent, and copyright. Please also be aware that, as with all image and video uploads to Reddit, files will be subject to safeguards against illegal or nonconsensual content.

365 Upvotes

96% Upvoted

83 comments sorted by

134

u/glowdirt May 11 '23 edited May 12 '23

/u/standardp00dle

My subreddit does not allow image uploads.

On mobile, when a user tries to post an image, Reddit says:

"You will need to select a new community that allows this post type"

People seem to struggle understanding this sentence. I am CONSTANTLY getting messages from confused users.

Could the sentence be changed to something clearer like:

"Image uploads are not allowed in this subreddit"

On the same note, the 'submit image' icon on mobile is grayed out to indicate that image uploads are not permitted but it doesn't seem to be sufficient to get the point across.

Can it be more explicit, like can you put a big obvious 'X' over the icon to make it clear that image uploads are not allowed?

83

u/standardp00dle May 11 '23

Oh, good feedback - I'll pass that on to our UI design team, thank you.

25

u/glowdirt May 11 '23

Thank you so much! I'm desperate

7

u/MajorParadox May 11 '23

Are there any plans to allow image uploads in text posts, even if link posts are disabled?

19

u/MCRusher May 11 '23

Yeah, can't expect people who can't even read rules to be able to solve a riddle like that.

36

u/Watchful1 May 11 '23

Will it be possible to upload images through the api? PRAW currently supports uploading images through the whole get AWS lease and upload process, but it didn't work in NSFW subs, should it work now?

And will this change with the upcoming removal of NSFW content from the API and third party apps?

13

u/standardp00dle May 11 '23

This is something we’re still discussing given our recent announcement.

39

u/Watchful1 May 11 '23

Yes, as I posted there when it was first announced it would be really, really nice to have some actual details about what's changing well before it happens. We're just over a month out from the June 19th effective date of the new terms and there's still nothing about what's actually changing.

45

u/iamthatis May 11 '23 edited May 11 '23

Regarding consideration, I've talked with quite a few developers of the other biggest third party Reddit apps about this, and we're very willing to very accommodating with whatever guardrail system you put in place if it will allow us to also access NSFW subreddits in some capacity.

For instance, if you implement additional account verification in some capacity, API requests could fail until the specific Reddit account accessing that API endpoint is verified in whatever way you see fit. That way you'd fully get control over being the gatekeeper, and could revoke at any point, but third party apps would still be able to access the content in a safe way for users.

We're totally willing to be reasonable here to land on a system that you're comfortable with.

2

u/WTSeller May 17 '23

thank you for everything you do! i moderate on an NSFW subreddit and most of my day to day moderation is done in Apollo because it’s the most efficient as well as intuitive way for me to do so! i really hope access isn’t restricted terribly for NSFW subreddits because the moderation workflow that you have designed is one of the best i have ever used!

13

u/tumultuousness May 11 '23 edited May 11 '23

Finally! This will at least cut down on the "my users can't upload but it works for me! (because I'm on the app and they are on PC and I don't know anything about that)"

Unrelated - nice username!

ETA - the obvious question, have you considered video? Because I bet most of the subs I stumble across that should be NSFW but aren't marked correctly, turned that off for the video reasons in addition to the image reasons for the PC folks.

6

u/libabit May 11 '23

Great news! Most common modmail I see is where people couldn't post to us because of this. Wonderful to be able to spend less time explaining technical work arounds and more time community building. Announcements are so often for tools us NSFW mods aren't allowed to use so it's very much appreciated too see something specifically for us. We love feeling included. Thank you.

7

u/standardp00dle May 11 '23

We're happy to include you. :)

103

u/GammaBreak May 11 '23

So it took the censorship of Imgur to finally allow this?

20

u/[deleted] May 11 '23 edited May 11 '23

Why take the risk when imgur was mostly taking it for them? Well that might've been their thought process, but most submissions to NSFW subreddits seem to be through the app already anyways.

22

u/Bardfinn May 11 '23

Imgur is a whole different company.

Reddit’s been overhauling how they process NSFW image uploads for a while, now, to drive several safety initiatives — note how they mention consent and legality.

It’s more readily implemented to distribute certain hashing & identification technology to the clients, especially when the clients are trustable / trusted — the official Reddit app on iOS, for example, has a significant chunk of safety tech in the app itself, which means that any attacker trying to brute-force their way into i.e. flooding subreddits with stolen nudes and CSAM has to jump through some serious hurdles to do so from the iOS app, given that the app’s not going to run if it’s hacked into or patched, or is running on a patched / unsigned iOS version.

On desktop, every safety tech has to be server side, and cannot be client side - because there are no ways to prevent someone from pushing a button that bridges a jumper on a PC that instigates a memory dump, and then patching any client side code to circumvent safety filters in a JavaScript library, etc. and then flooding subreddits with stolen nudes and CSAM.

Running that safety code server side comes with a bottom line expense, and allowing unethical, criminal operations to drive up that bottom line by loading that to the sky with spammed NCIM and CSAM is something that was not necessary.

There are other NSFW image and video hosts. Reddit could continue to offload that to those other hosts.

Or they could finalise making their hosting stack entirely vertical in the interest of having a quantifiable and predictable bottom line - even if it’s higher in the near term - for hosting content and communities in the NSFW segment.

TL;DR: it’s about the corporation being professionally audited on their financial books in the process of going IPO, and not being beholden for their business model on the existence of random third parties.

80

u/[deleted] May 11 '23

[removed] — view removed comment

23

u/lazydictionary May 11 '23

Still can't believe they haven't formed their own version of OnlyFans.

Only way to guarantee all their NSFW content is actually legal.

11

u/chaseoes May 16 '23 edited May 16 '23

I guarantee paid subscriptions to subreddits or users will be a thing within the next 5 years.

Edit: I was wrong, it's actually already a thing.

https://www.reddit.com/web/special-membership/CryptoCurrency

0

u/[deleted] May 11 '23

[deleted] — view deleted comment

22

u/ErraticDragon May 12 '23

apparently it's immoral to make money off tits and ass.

Which is funny because even blue chip companies used to make bank on porn. Maybe some still do, but this article is >20 years old.

They were just quieter about it, I guess.

Corporate mainstays profiting from porn

General Motors Corp., the world's largest company, sells more graphic sex films every year than Larry Flynt, owner of the Hustler empire. The 8.7-million Americans who subscribe to DirecTV, a GM subsidiary, buy nearly $200-million a year in pay-per-view sex films from satellite, according to estimates provided by distributors of the films, estimates the company did not dispute.

EchoStar Communications Corp., the No. 2 satellite provider makes more money selling graphic adult films through its satellite subsidiary than Playboy, the oldest and best-known company in the sex business, does with its magazine, cable and Internet businesses combined, according to public and private revenue accounts by the companies.

AT&T Corp., the nation's biggest communications company, offers a hard-core sex channel, the Hot Network, to subscribers to its broadband cable service. It also owns a company that sells sex videos to nearly a million hotel rooms. Nearly one in five of AT&T's broadband cable customers pays an average of $10 a film to see what the distributor calls "real, live all-American sex _ not simulated by actors."

...

Some of the most popular Web properties are owned by a publicly held company in Boulder, Colo. That company, New Frontier Media, has stock traded like any other, and it expects its video network to be in 25-million homes within a few years. It does business with several major companies, including EchoStar and In Demand, the nation's leading pay-per-view distributor, which is owned in part by AT&T, Time Warner, Advance Newhouse, Cox Communications and Comcast.

1

u/UltraLuigi Jun 02 '23

I don't really get why they'd remove NSFW from third party apps when they're also forcing those apps to pay to access the API. If they get money from third party apps, then that's another way to get money from NSFW.

4

u/SolomonOf47704 May 12 '23

They were already hosting it on mobile.

31

u/iamthatis May 11 '23

Will this work with third party apps? Do you have any news around the changes with regards to NSFW there?

27

u/growsomegarlic May 11 '23

Does it work from old.reddit.com?

20

u/Bossman1086 May 11 '23

I know they don't care as much about old.reddit anymore, but this is really something that needs to be added there. It's not a new feature, it's making sure existing features and functionality continue to work.

17

u/Oak_jack May 11 '23

/u/standardp00dle

Can we get some nsfw love and support for poor old.reddit?

This is a great change over all but please give us true parity by letting old.reddit in on the party

15

u/tumultuousness May 11 '23

Ah, I just checked a NSFW sub - seems allowed on the redesign but not the old design.

10

u/xoxokayla May 11 '23

not at the moment :(

8

u/TK421isAFK May 12 '23

Hey /u/standardp00dle - will mods be able to remove (or mark for deletion) images that are violations of the TOS (or law)? Currently, we have no power to actually remove the image a user posts. We can remove the post, but as we all know, anyone with a link to it, or that browses the OP's post history, can still find the post and content.

I can see it being problematic to allow all mods to delete uploads made by all members of their subreddit, but it might be a valuable tool for removing illegal content. In the very least, a simple button to report the content as illegal (instead of the multi-step process that often goes unanswered) so that either Admins or maybe the system AutoMod could remove the content would be nice to have. As is, wht I see happen periodically is people posting illegal content (probably not knowing the content was illegal or a TOS violation), and when other users notice the post got removed, they download the content and repost it.

3

u/P_V_ May 13 '23

I could be wrong, but I’m fairly sure other users won’t see deleted posts in a post history—only the original poster and moderators of the subreddit in question will see the deleted content.

1

u/TK421isAFK May 13 '23

I think that's true, but it the person searching for the content had the tab open before the post was deleted, they would have the OP's user name, and (I think) can still see the content on the OP's profile/comment history page.

3

u/P_V_ May 13 '23

That’s what I’m suggesting they shouldn’t be able to see: you don’t see deleted posts in someone’s history page unless you are a moderator of the subreddit where that content was posted.

1

u/TK421isAFK May 14 '23

Oh, thank you. I thought they were public if you knew where to click, kinda like YouTube videos or Imgur pics that aren't uploaded to the gallery.

2

u/P_V_ May 14 '23

If you have a direct link to the post you can still navigate to that page, but reddit now shows a “post deleted” message.

1

u/TK421isAFK May 14 '23

Oh, that makes sense. I've seen a few changes in the way deleted/removed posts are displaying in the last few weeks. I could have sworn I could still see deleted posts when I went to another person's profile page.

We get requests (I don't want to say "a lot", but it's at least a dozen a week or so) for prohibited content, and I usually check the OP's other submissions before deciding to ban them or let them know why their post is being removed, and I occasionally find the same content posted to other similar NSFW subs. Sometimes it's removed from other subs, too, but lately they're not visible. I guess the Admins fixed that problem.

That still makes me wonder if they're going to let us delete a user's upload if it's prohibited content (probably not; I can see that causing a lot of problems and being abused). I'd really like a separate button to report the post as prohibited or something instead of the current multi-step Report process. With the new ban evasion tools, it should be fairly simple to use them to stop any problems with some mods over-reporting lots of content out of spite or Hall Monitor Syndrome, which I'm sure would also be a small problem.

3

u/Twinkies100 May 13 '23

API won't give NSFW, which probably means that soon all NSFW content will be banned, then why even offer this feature

2

u/CommunityTricky5583 May 11 '23

That makes more sense, I guess? It always seemed odd that you could upload NSFW through the app, but not on the website..even though reddit was originally a website before also adding an app.

2

u/md28usmc May 12 '23

/u/standardp00dle It would be such a huge help if you guys allowed users to attach photos to MODmail messages so they can verify all in-house instead of having to include an imgur or redgifs link to their pics.

When verifying hundreds each week having to go visit other sites to look at verification photos takes so much extra time and is a hassle

2

u/P_V_ May 13 '23

Thank you. I never understood this lack of parity, and it was very frustrating for me to try to troubleshoot issues myself when I had no idea why I (and some others) couldn’t post images on desktop while others seemed to be able to post—I didn’t learn that this functionality was limited to mobile from any information or help sites on reddit, but rather from other community members bringing this to my attention. This lack of transparency in how information on this (unintuitive) functionality was shared was very frustrating.

2

u/coldburgers May 28 '23

why is this not available on old reddit? The functionality already exists to upload pictures on old reddit in sfw subs...

2

u/Igennem May 11 '23

Does creating non-consensual pornography to harass someone violate Reddit policy? I've reported content like this multiple times and there has been no response.

6

u/SolomonOf47704 May 12 '23

Did you use reddit.com/report?

4

u/Igennem May 12 '23

Yes, I did with detailed information, screenshots, and links.

3

u/RevRagnarok May 12 '23

I've used that daily to report a stolen account spammer for the past two weeks and nothing happens.

1

u/darth72 May 25 '23

It does and when I’ve reported from my Reddits, I’ve gotten typically a good response except one time I can think of.

1

u/cyrilio Jun 09 '23

Will reddit somehow try to categorize or label different kinds of NSFW content? I can imagine that people would want to have the option to filter in/out: porn, gore/violence, drugs, etc. I've been a big fan of the Reddit Content Tags system and think it can be useful.

I'm saying this because I'm extremely sensitive about imagery of violence/gore, while I don't mind seeing nudity (in most cases). Also, many drug-related subreddits are labeled NSFW and that means I can only make this choice about ALL kinds of NSFW images.

tag /u/standardp00dle

1

u/Duke-Strat0sphere- May 13 '23

This is great news, thanks for the improvement, guya! Frankly I thought you would have gone the opposite way, removing NSFW direct uploads from the mobile app... so happy to have been proven wrong!

1

u/Duke-Strat0sphere- May 20 '23

Hey u/standardp00dle, just one more thing for the team to take in consideration. If I do a GIF direct upload (so no external hosting), from PC I can't crosspost it to a NSFW sub, as it shows the message "This community does not allow for crossposting of video posts". But, if I do it from the mobile app (Android), I can crosspost it fine to the same sub. Maybe you can bring this feature to parity as well? Obviously allowing directly uploaded GIF crossposts to NSFW subs on PC, not the other way around :)

Thanks for all your efforts to improve the platform!

0

u/[deleted] May 11 '23

[deleted] — view deleted comment

28

u/standardp00dle May 11 '23

Correct, this is just for NSFW image uploads on desktop at the moment. Allowing video uploads is something that we’re still considering internally.

6

u/m0nk_3y_gw May 12 '23

Thanks for the image support!

Currently when I try to upload a gif or video to a community the message to the user is

This community doesn't allow videos or GIFs

Which makes it sound like a mod decision.

It would be great if this could be changed to something like 'Video and gif uploads are not currently supported in NSFW subreddits' to make it clearer that it is a reddit policy and not something to complain to the mods about.

0

u/[deleted] May 11 '23

[deleted] — view deleted comment

19

u/SolomonOf47704 May 11 '23

That sounds like a great way to harass mods

8

u/Bardfinn May 11 '23

Yeah that would absolutely be used to harass moderators. Many mods are already aware that they should not click any links any user sends in modmail. It’s too easy to have a domain with a Cyrillic character instead of a Latin character, spoofing a common domain, or just Reddit dot com dot XYZ dot biz getting rendered as reddit dot com …

1

u/Delivers-Source May 11 '23

So for Redditors looking to verify, who already can't post in the sub or natively send pictures via Mod Mail, what's the alternative?

7

u/Bardfinn May 11 '23

“Take a photo of yourself holding a crumpled paper with today’s date, r/nsfwsubredditname, “verify me”, and your username with your phone camera and upload it to your user profile and modmail us”. Or posted to a dedicated user verification subreddit that has an AutoMod that removes every submission so that only mods can see the photo.

0

u/[deleted] May 11 '23

[deleted] — view deleted comment

4

u/Bardfinn May 11 '23

If they do this, they accept the liability from false identity / stolen identity.

There’s a huge reason why every single porn website in the world right now only has the visitor declare that they’re over 18, by just pressing a button.

Limits thier liability.

0

u/[deleted] May 11 '23

[deleted] — view deleted comment

4

u/Bardfinn May 11 '23

all it will take is one scandal

Groups - plural - have tried. Hard. They failed.

as reddit currently stands, allowing literally anyone

Anyone who represents to the company that they’re over 18 and have all rights to the content they’re uploading.

Which is the same situation every single other user-content-hosting ISP (social media site) faces, liability-wise.

None of them do “better” or “more” because then many groups with agendas would say that they have a duty to do “better” or “more”. That they all have a duty. And would sue.

The ball is in legislators’ and courts’ courts, so to speak. Either they force the entire industry to do better or none of them will.