Bad news for Imgur...
All we want is an easy and reliable image hoster. You upload an image, they host it, you can link it, fin.
Perfect plan!
Except for the plot hole of not generating any money this way. That's where the suits creep in. First they finance you to grow and grow quickly you must. Imgur did it. Then you experiment with some methods of generating ad views or other revenue. People realize they hit on a gold mine and business starts to grow like cancer. Then there are some minor changes to optimize revenue. Then some founders start to cash out and jump the ship. Then the suits, loudmouths and ginas slowly but surely take over the company and due process replaces the dictatorship of the personal union of owner and leader. There's guitars and barbecue as the corporate drones dance around the firepit of burning money as they hurry to please the gods of corporate capitalism. A spiral is forming like a siphon circling around itself pulling everything in like a black hole. And it's great.
If you listen carefully in the storm of excitement you can hear a faint voice who still remebers the core of the business: Provide the service and don't fuck with the customer.
Or as some politicians said: You can fuck over some of your customers all the time and you can fuck over all of your customers for some time. Both is a great business plan. But you cannot fuck over all of your customers all of the time. Especially not if you don't have a stranglehold on their necks like a dictator or monopoly has.
The imgur we have today deserves to die.
It may redeem itself by remembering its roots and not wanting to become more than it is. That would be great!
One thing that is more important over the whole debacle is to watch reddit closely and be ready to jump ship quickly as they stumble deeper into the corporate trap. Having a plan B "just in case" for everything important will cost you resources but it pays out for itself in the long run.
The people looking at images for free are NOT THE CUSTOMER.
Hint: the customer pays for service.
Where are the "I'll paint that!" guys when you need them?
(Personally, I'm more the 'abstract art' type of person, for good reason, ahem ...)
I really can't fault reddit for taking this step. They're the ones who have the ad views on pages linking to (or embedding) these images, they may as well streamline things and manage the uploads/hosting in house.
One hopes Imgur could see this coming.
The home page itself is riddled with "viral images". Why would I use imgur like a *chan site? That need is already filled and done much better by other sites.
However, when the barrier to entry for providing a service is low you have to be _very_ careful about making that money by negatively impacting the user experience.
If you make money, that's fine. If you make money by taking advantage of users, you can't really be surprised when a competitor pops up and users leave.
Also money is like a drug. What's wrong with taking a little cocaine in the morning and a little heroin in the evening? Nothing, except there are very few people who can sustain that over an extended period of time. You also wouldn't know about them because they neither become very rich nor very famous. ("Hey look there is the most average guy in the whole country who has no exceptional qualities.") The world belongs to the candles who burn from both ends.
Source: I work for and use Stack Exchange.