We contacted the main person behind 'Images Worth Seeing', Hannes, and he was kind enough to tell Bored Panda more about it.
"It all started when I was bored sometime around the first Covid lockdown," Hannes recalled. "I had built up such a huge collection of random weird images that I just needed to share it with the world."
"That's when I started the page, and I thought, 'Why not make a Facebook group attached to the page?' This way everyone can share their own 'weird images worth seeing'. And it kinda worked."
Unfortunately, this fun online project has had a fair share of setbacks too. "At some point, the group hit 100,000 members and we allowed a few posts per hour to keep the content quality and visibility high," Hannes said.
"But our friend Mark Zuckerberg didn't really seem to like some of those posts. The Facebook algorithm became very strict and things like a bare butt from 100 meters away eventually got us banned."
For the second installment of the group, Hannes and his team tried to be more strict when they were approving posts and at first, they were doing really well; the group ballooned to 120,000 members in no time. However, Facebook still thought it was too edgy for the platform.
"After three images were flagged (out of the hundreds of post requests we were receiving every day), our second group got deleted as well."
Hannes added that he has seen that a lot of other large Facebook groups suffer the same fate.
Finally, this roller coaster of a story brings us to the third version of the group. Only now it is running in tandem with an Instagram account.
"The core principle of our content is that it has to be worth seeing, and the weirder it is, the better," Hannes said. "There isn't really one category of images that stands out in popularity, [the submissions] just need a powerful aura, I guess."
In fact, the feed is so random that even now, Hannes can rarely predict how well a certain image is going to do.
I don't know about you, but at least to me, these images have a pretty similar vibe to all those weird stock photos. And that maybe the reason why they're so popular.
When Shutterstock had a chat with their contributors, the creators said that uniqueness in a photo can be more important than its technical quality—people who are buying photos have highly specific needs and will often opt for something that stands out from the crowd over one that is high quality, but otherwise standard.
