7/11/2023 0 Comments We need to go deeper imgurIn the past year, he'd been picked up by Sarah to work as a contractor for the community support team. ![]() He introduced himself as Isaac Klassen, the inventor of the Imgur Giraffe, the site's mascot. "This place is fucking incredible," he told me when he handed the cup. Every once in a while, a bottle snuck itself in I was beckoned inside one cabin by a camper in a giraffe onesie who mixed me a rum and coke. A team of Imgur developers developed a makeshift trade route through the winding valleys of California wine country, pillaging the markets of Mendocino County of every 30-rack of Bud Light they could find. There were 20 kegs for the event one Imgur employee did a rough calculation that there was enough for every attendee to have six drinks, but naturally they ran out of beer by the second evening. As night fell, the darkness concealed the smoke and no one bothered to sneak away the smell of good California weed hung in pockets around the campfire.Īnd we drank. They're all strangers, but they come from a place where I know I'll be accepted."Īnd then there was debauchery. Hours into day one, groups began to head into the woods and get high. "I feel like I can be myself with anyone here," Krumland told me while we watched a game of capture the flag. He said he'd been to one of Sarah's trial meet-ups at a local San Francisco bar and loved it. There were presentations by notable Imgurians: "Chemistry Doc," a former teacher who's like Imgur's crowdsourced Bill Nye, and a chiseled dude known as Ruffcats, who looks like a well-tanned teen celebrity and runs the confessional series "Stay Classy, Imgur."Īlex Krumland is an Imgurian who competes on the show American Ninja Warrior in a black shirt and green suspenders, a tribute to the Imgur colors. At a solar carving workshop, campers burned portraits of popular memes like Dickbutt and Grumpy Cat into planks of wood before turning the magnifying glasses around to light their cigarettes. It was the community's chance to jump off the front page of the site and into the real world.Ĭamp was filled with activities: a GIF-making workshop, an archery range with detestable faces from Game of Thrones pinned up for targets, a nightly s'mores bar, morning yoga. Sarah had announced the camp seven months prior - a $150 ticket for the first 500 people who wanted to join the first major, national event for Imgur. ![]() My roommate was Imgur's lawyer, Bob Ellis, the Internet-law attorney who's kept Imgur from any successful attempt at a lawsuit. A security guard, carrying a cat paw on a stick, monitored the flood, standing against the camp's main lodge, which housed the cafe and the Wi-Fi. One hour later, campers dragged bags and carts through the billowing dust clouds of Camp Navarro. "They're all strangers, but they come from a place where I know I'll be accepted." Sarah had been planning this for over a year, and she was ready to see Imgur made manifest. Dozens were showing up early, dragging bags and carts through dust clouds toward tents and tiny cabins. We were two hours before the start of Camp Imgur, the site's first attempt at a convention for its gargantuan Internet cult. "I think this week I've been all over the place, and nervous, and." She trailed off. When I first saw Sarah Schaaf - Imgur's director of community, and sister of Alan Schaaf, the founder and CEO - she was standing alone in a glade of redwoods, looking dazed with a megaphone on her hip, staring into the sky. What better way to celebrate than a trip to summer camp? It's the twilight of Imgur's adolescence. Its leaders, a brother-and-sister team from Ohio, claim Imgur can scale without sacrificing its youthful spark or that warm, tight-knit feeling that makes its community so special. ![]() Imgur is betting that it can mature into a full-fledged social network and take its place among the Facebooks and the Reddits, the great Silicon Valley Internet titans. After a steady six-year climb, Imgur is now beginning its second act on the heels of a $40 million investment, and it's found itself in a chrysalis between image-hosting forum and budding media empire. Imgur is the greatest online experiment in mass media in an age when the Internet is getting smaller and smaller.Īnd Imgur is growing up. Imgur is the pinnacle of real Internet culture, the last bastion of cohesive online community. It's where the nicest people on the Internet upvote and curate a daily hub of the most viral, hilarious and inspiring memes and photos. ![]() What is Imgur? If you ask its die-hard users, you'll get a lot of different answers. By the numbers, this humble photo-sharing site is in firm command of the millennial dude, blowing BuzzFeed, Reddit and even Tumblr out of the water with over 150 million monthly visitors and the highest concentration of millennial males in the U.S.īut you wouldn't know it unless you've stared Imgur right in its eyes. There is no more popular online destination for the modern male than Imgur.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |