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Comment by degenerate | Hacker News Reader

Correct. ImageShack was the most widely used host on reddit and had recently disabled hotlinking (after nearly a year of ad bloat on their main site) so user MrGrim on reddit created Imgur and announced it on Reddit 12 years ago:

https://old.reddit.com/r/reddit.com/comments/7zlyd/my_gift_t...

He did an AMA 3 years later: https://old.reddit.com//r/IAmA/comments/y81ju/i_created_imgu...

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Holy crap, I have not thought about imageshack for a decade. It was hot garbage: slow, ad ridden and if I recall correctly they would disable your hotlinked images if they used too much bandwidth. Imgur was something of a godsend at the time. Now it's commodity unfortunately.

The disabled hotlink images are the only reason I know imageshack exists. How’s that for marketing?

I remember when ImageShack was the best of all the bad options. TinyPic and PhotoBucket were super slow, and I remember popular forums back then either didn’t support image uploads, or they were even slower to load than external hosts. So much internet history has been lost to “this image has exceeded its bandwidth limit” placeholders from PhotoBucket and TinyPic.

Imgur really did change everything.

And now Imgur has disabled hotlinking. Depending on device and/or image.

And has an interstitial ad to wait through before upload. I don't think even ImageShack thought of that one

It was one specific date which imageshack decided to essentially ban all images being linked on Reddit. Imgur filled the void and grew via their own social.

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