Half-baked idea for metered inline image allowances

This is totally a half-baked shower thought of an idea, and not one that even I am personally persuaded by, but I’m curious to gauge what others think of it.

Sometimes it might be useful to allow images to be inlined in topics or comments instead of requiring users to link to them. If that ability were unrestricted, people would probably use it for frivolous reaction GIFs, memes, etc., which are not wanted here on Tildes. But if we restricted how often people could do it, if we made it costly, they’d be less inclined to waste it.

We already have precedent for metered functionality to discourage abuse: Exemplary labels. That seems to be working pretty well. What if users received one image credit per month? We could allow them to rollover/accrue but maybe cap them so nobody can have more than five(?). That’s certainly scarce enough to make me think twice about wasting them.

We could make them collapsible so they can be hidden with a click (though I’m not sure if it’s feasible to make per-image collapsed states persistent). We could also have a user setting for people who don’t want to see the images. Maybe call it “Inline Image Display” with these options:

• Always show
• Always collapse
• Always collapse unless in <details> blocks
• Render as link to image instead

If we wanted to be really cautious we could default to that last option (basically current behavior) so nobody would be opted-in if they didn’t want it.

I’m not suggesting Tildes should get into the free image hosting business. This idea assumes that the images being shown are already hosted from a place that permits embedding on third-party domains. We might be able to validate that before running the form submit, to surface a warning when an image is inaccessible so people don’t find out it’s broken until after spending a credit for it.

We could also allow these images only in new topics, and not in comments where they’re more likely to be used flippantly. Or charge two credits instead of one to do it in a comment. Or in that user setting we could add “Always show in topics and collapse in comments” as an option.

If we wanted to get fancy we could also allow users to flag whether an image they’re sharing is NSFW, and add a couple additional options to that user setting, to exclude those if desired.

Of course now that I’m thinking about NSFW images in 2026 I’m reminded that all this age-verification hysteria could be brought to Tildes’ doorstep much faster if we directly displayed user-originated images on the site. Not really a battle I’d chose for us (read: Deimos) to fight so that risk alone might render the idea DOA.

I’d still be interested to hear what others think though.