Photo from Imgur

To improve user experience and address content moderation concerns, Imgur has released a bunch of updates for Q3 and Q4 of 2024 through a blog post by Martyn O’Neill, the platform’s product manager. 

The platform now holds mature content as those that only consist “consist solely of sexualized or ‘lewd’ content whereas memes containing references to adult humor will not be considered mature,” as stated in the blog post. After a month of implementing this change, the team has seen a 35% drop in the warnings and post removals, with posts initially marked as mature also declining by 50%, and account suspensions have gone down by 60%. 

Add to that, following the release of the notifications feature for your favorite creators last August for iOS users, Android users will be expected to receive this rollout by the end of October.

“For far too long we’ve heard from you all that you often miss posts from your favorite creators unless they go viral. That could happen for a variety of reasons, but we knew something had to be done.  As such, back in August, we released the ability to be notified when your favorite creator posts. This functionality has since been released on iOS and we expect it to be on Android this week,” said O’Neill.

Imgur has also established their Content Controls v2, in which users can block certain categories and only see content they want to see more of by simply selecting. “The biggest benefit of the new system is that it allows the Community Team to update the tags on the fly for a more immediate turnaround,” added O’Neill.

However, amidst these new changes, lies a bad news for many: the discontinuation of Secret Santa in 2024. This is due to the privacy law restrictions across the US and the platform’s inability to find a suitable third-party vendor.

“It is no longer possible for us to continue support of the exchange in light of these requirements and restrictions… Secret Santa might be coming to an end, but that doesn’t mean we’re not doing anything fun in December. Those of you who recall Humans vs Zombies might get a kick out of what’s coming,” wrote O’Neill.

In their continuing progress in addressing bugs and user issues, the team is currently garnering honest feedback about the problems they are facing—in which they prioritize the proper documentation and solutions for. O’Neill then ended the blog post by saying, “If I’m unable to reproduce the issue myself, I may ask for you to share detailed information with us via the bug form in support where we can keep track of any issues.”

As for their plans in 2025, their focus is simply to improve performance and user experience. But for now, here’s what the product manager has to say, “With the abundance of holidays in the quarter, we want to ensure our team gets the break they deserve.”