Imgur's community was in revolt

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.

I was an early Reddit user. Very early Reddit was a popular spot for programming discussion because it was mostly tech people using it.

That quickly flipped, as /r/NSFW became the most popular subreddit. You could avoid it by browsing as a guest or by curating your feed, but porn was everywhere.

Early Reddit also had a strong attitude about minimal moderation. The early days were characterized by a feeling that anything goes as long as it wasn’t illegal or too extreme to defend. Combined with the popularity of porn on the website it created strange situations where a lot of subreddits were focused on things like legal-enough photos of underage children. There were also a lot of weird alt-right and white supremacist forums. There was an unofficial (if I recall correctly) “Subreddit of the Day” that attracted controversy because it actually highlighted one of the “jailbait” subreddits and even a white supremacist subreddit.

So if you were there at the time, it was obvious why Reddit wasn’t going to host their own images: It would have been a legal nightmare with all of the porn (copyrighted material), the creepy underage stuff, and white supremacist memes

Reddit did a decent job of containing this stuff out of view of the average user and later removing it from the site. It took many years.

If you peeked at /r/all or browsed new during the early days it would have been clear why image hosting would have been out of the question at the time.

You can read a lot more about this on Wikipedia, most would be surprised at just how bad parts of it were -

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Controversial_Reddit_communiti...

Some that come to mind to me from the old days (some less old than others):

- "Street fashion" subs, where photos were NOTICEABLY of underage girls taken on the street candidly, usually from a long distance (telephoto lens), and everyone talked about "fashion" in ways you figured out pretty fast were not about fashion. There were a number operating at the same time as a sort of redundancy as they would vanish from time to time.

- CSAM investigation type subs, where users who REALLY knew the lingo and details of CSAM talked about how they were investigating CSAM elsewhere on the internet ... like they were amateur police, but it was kinda indistinguishable from them being connoisseurs. They also would tell each other very suspicious stories about their investigations, like something a jr. high student would make up because they don't know how the world works. It was like they thought they were setting up some sort of plausible deniability or something...

- Gamergate and that whole bizzaro world spanned subs but it was absolutely insane how emotionally charged the devotes were about something as inconsequential as ... video game reviews.

> how emotionally charged the devotes were about something as inconsequential as ... video game reviews.

There's a good reason the phrase "it's about ethics in games journalism" was used to mock gamergaters. It was so transparently not about that in the slightest. I'm not one of those "gamergate caused trumpism" domino meme people but they are related phenomena. GG was a revanchist political movement based on using the novel organization structures of social media to harass women and minorities out of gaming culture.