Believe it or not this is the strange story of how I got into the furry fandom.

I mostly stayed away from social media sites for the first part of my life, I knew enough about tech to be wary of entrusting that much personal information anywhere on the net. But there came a time I got addicted to scrolling on Imgur. I understand now how these social media sites are setup to game the dopamine system in the brain to encourage habitual use, also at the time I was going through a depressing time so I was primed up for it. That combined with my then undiagnosed ADHD meant I got really sucked into a strange fixation with Imgur as a means of avoidance from my real life problems.

I initially didn’t even have an account, I was just scrolling the feed and reading the comments. But pretty soon I was logged in scrolling for hours, and it didn’t take me very long to end up all the way down at the bottom of the feed in “user submitted”. In user submitted you get to see what people are posting basically right as it’s uploaded, or at least that’s how it was back when I was using it the experience may be different now. Imgur didn’t really have subs and nobody really used tags back then, it was just one feed and the pics that got the most upvotes or the fastest upvotes (typical mystery algorithm) got to go up to “most viral” which was the front page. Of course you weren’t getting the real raw Imgur experience unless you were in user submitted, that was where all us cool kids hung out. You had to be a special kind of crazy to sit there and scroll for hours through some of the most mundane and random crap looking for that one gem. You see Imgur was originally built and used as an image hosting site for reddit, but once they got big enough they decided they wanted to be a social media company as well. Unfortunately the way they added the social media aspects onto the interface caused a lot of people to post images in the social media part actually intending to just upload an image to share it elsewhere. That lead to a lot of strange stuff coming through user submitted as you can imagine.

As it happened a good bit of furry art was accidentally posted to user submitted and fairly often, that was my first exposure to furry art. I’d heard of furries before of course, but all I’d ever heard about furries was not being spread by people who liked them so it was mostly bad information and pics of really badly done fursuits. So the vibe I got kinda just gave me an icky feeling about furries in general like many other under-informed people. But when I was exposed to the actual drawn artwork through Imgur (SFW as NSFW was banned in the public feed), I found it was actually quite appealing to the eye and started drifting toward the furry sphere. The pathOwOgen was spread.

As I was now opening all these furry posts to look at them I kept noticing a strange phenomena. Someone called GBMaker would show up and comment a command and then shortly a bot would come and drop a whole lot of @ names in the comments that had the effect of sending notifications to a bunch of other users. I eventually came to understand that GBMaker was using a bot to call out too other people whenever there was a piece of furry art posted. In the absence of subs or proper tags this was a way for someone to call a bunch of interested furries to see what had been posted, as furry art never made it to the front page of course. It turned out he had been doing this for a long time, manually in the beginning and later a bot was written to automate the process. This was tacitly allowed by the admins as there didn’t seem to be any harm in it, and it had been going on for quite a while. Eventually I got the confidence enough (I hadn’t done much communication online and had some online social anxiety) to ask him if I could be added to the taglist and if he would mind me giving him an @ mention for any posts that I saw the he didn’t. That started me down a path that I could’ve never imagined.

I took it to a whole new level of obsessive. First I was already spending hours searching user submitted for new furry art, but I eventually also got access to the API and started writing programs to scrape the API directly. I was a fairly novice python programmer but over the course of several months I ended up writing a scraper that constantly pulled the post’s metadata and preview images from user submitted and pushed them all into a mongodb database. I then had a script that when ran would format it all into a local html page with preview images that I could peruse later at my leisure. It would’ve been completely unmanageable except I implemented an image hashing algorithm to automatically remove common reposts and meme templates that actually worked surprisingly well given my relative programming ineptitude (thanks stackoverflow). There was a point at which I was seeing basically every unique image posted to Imgur every day, seeing all the unique posts from the last time I’d run the html generator script to the latest one. The ingress script was constantly running on an old computer so the ingress had no gaps. Of course this maximized the amount of furry images I could find to tag GBMaker to get him to activate the taglist. I often wonder what he must have though of me, I got the feeling he had a bit of a strange personality as well (though that could’ve just been me projecting) and we didn’t really speak about much except the taglist. He never actually gave me direct access to call the tag bot myself (though I never asked) and I can’t really blame him as I must’ve looked like an absolute crazy person, if the shoe fits I suppose…

Unfortunately over time it all came crumbling down, as some of the other user submitted dwellers who were of a more anti-furry persuasion felt the taglist was gaming the system and boosting posts that would’ve otherwise got downvoted and autoremoved, and instead kept the furry posts they so loathed in user submitted where they had to soil their eyes looking at it. /s They eventually commenced to reporting GBMaker and the taglist bot account in a coordinated fashion to the admins which finally culminated in GBMaker loosing the ability to have any taglist’s anymore. Yes that’s taglist’s plural cause he ran a number of taglist’s for a variety of different niche interests. I felt absolutely awful, devastated, I felt it was all my fault. If I hadn’t ever come along the volume of furry images tagged by the taglist wouldn’t have been nearly as large and I felt that without me finding so many extra images for the taglist the anti-furs wouldn’t have been as irritated and wouldn’t have had the necessary motivation to raise enough of a stink to get it shut down. Before I came along GBMaker was having a fine time running his taglist without me, something that he must’ve enjoyed or at least felt was very important given amount of effort I know he put into it, and I felt that had I not come along he might still be doing it even to this day. Although I suppose eventually at some point Imgur would’ve made some changes that made the taglist impossible to run, but at least it’s demise wouldn’t have been hastened along by me. There were others that he tried to hand the taglist duties off to as he was allowed to do so by the admins, but I doubt it worked out to well as the software that ran the bot was somewhat unwieldy and I doubt anyone else would’ve had the determination to baby it enough to keep it running properly.

As for me I didn’t know what to do so I did the worst thing possible, I ghosted GBMaker and everyone else and completely stopped using Imgur. That was definitely not the way to handle that but I had never caused such of a calamity as that before and I didn’t know what to do. I still feel horrible about it all, but I can see now how even though I played a big part, it wouldn’t have mattered about the increased volume of furry posts if the admins would’ve just stuck up for their minority users and told the anti-furs to go kick rocks, or if people wouldn’t be such hateful bigots to be anti-furs in the first place.

After moping for a while eventually I moved over to reddit and started over. This time I mostly stayed away from the furry spaces (still subbed there but not many comments) and tried to leave helpful comments for people asking questions in technical subreddits. You can see my post history back at my reddit userpage with the same username if interested, and now that reddit has begun disintegrating here I am. It looks like hopefully I’m on the path to get my life back on track finally. I just recently got diagnosed with ADHD and I’m about to start medication for it so hopefully I’ll finally be able to get my s**t together and start living life properly (the first half of my life has been a complete train wreck). Thankfully I haven’t quite gotten sucked into anything quite like that since and I haven’t managed to cause anymore calamities, at least so far.

I seem to have rambled on quite a bit more there than I intended, but I guess this has been a long time coming and it’s somewhat cathartic to put it down in writing. GBMaker If you read this I am very sorry for what happened, and also very sorry for ghosting you. I wish I could undo the damage I caused.