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Imgur's community was in revolt

(www.404media.co)
163 points miiiiiike | 1 comments | 02 Sep 25 13:33 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source
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Workaccount2 ◴[02 Sep 25 14:27 UTC] No.45103567[source]▶
What's interesting about imgur, and telling of how times changed, was that it was created mostly to fill the gap in unreliable uploading of images to reddit.

Which begs the question: What the hell was reddit doing that they didn't immediately implement an image hosting feature to keep users on the platform? Imgur rose to fame because it was the darling image host of reddit users, and it wasn't long before imgur needed to pay hosting costs and started sucking users away from reddit and into their own "imgurian" sharing hub.

I guess the internet back then was still in the "Open effort to make the internet awesome for everyone" phase, and hadn't yet gotten to the adversarial "Capture users and never let them leave" phase.

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1. dec0dedab0de ◴[02 Sep 25 15:53 UTC] No.45104738[source]▶
The other responses are correct, but they're not including an important detail. Reddit was originally a replacement for all of the niche bulletin board sites that had cropped up around the internet. It was a way to create and manage a community without the cost and technical expertise required for phpBB. It also gave you access to existing users without them having to create a new account.

All of those previous Bulletin Board sites did not host images themselves either.