Imgur's community was in revolt

Imgur having a "community" is still the strangest part of this story.

Every for-profit business needs to earn money somehow, and if you're just "that service that reddit users use for uploading and viewing images", it's really hard to justify your existence in the first place.

And then of course, you add in VC-investments, and suddenly you have external parties forcing you to start extracting as much value from users as you possibly can.

Basically, the same story as with every other enshittificated company that happened so far.

It was originally a lot of Redditors, and then once (a) Reddit implemented image hosting, and (b) the 'big change' at Reddit happened a few years ago, the community grew from there.

Discovering Imgur has its own community and culture is like finding out a group of people live in your closet. You can almost imagine opening the door to grab a coat only to find a dozen people who swear this is the place they bring various outerwear and talk about such things. When you tell them they're in a coat closet, they may get upset and assure you it's more than that, now.

I once discovered a community of people in a PhPBB board I administered - they didn't register on the board itself, but one of the plugins allowed a different type of user registration, and a whole sub-forum itself.

We had no idea, until one day we stumbled into it by accident. It was very much like discovering a family was living in your closet.

i loled and so true

Imgur has had its own community for over a decade. This really isn't a good comparison; who stores their coats in someone else's closet and expect for nobody else to interact with it?

I was quite early on Reddit and watched Imgur grow literally from the announcement thread. It got bigger and bigger and I often used it myself.

But I remember one day being at a friend's house and she was asking me about something I'd sent her, "oh did you see that in Imgur she asked?"

"What do you mean did I see it on Imgur? I saw it in Reddit, it's just hoisted on Imgur."

And she was like, "What's Reddit? I love Imgur, I scroll on there every night."

I couldn't believe it, I went and checked and there was indeed a whole community, leaving contents and voting on things and doing all the rest, and many of them never heard of Reddit

You're right, it does feel strange, there's somehow something very uncanny about it.

The answer is most people using imgur to merely post on reddit do just that

I've always compared it to that tiny alien city in a train station locker from Men In Black II

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A9sd10CHAP8

That is such a fascinating story. I would love to hear more about it.

so bloody true tho isnt it