I don't know why reddit would want to take on the burden and cost of dealing with images. It might make it incrementally easier, but with something like RES the entire thing was seamless. Seems like a misplaced focus on a feature that doesn't bring that much value, and a lot more cost. I'll be curious to see how successful this ends up being. If they wanted to concentrate on making the site easier to use, they should have hired the people who made RES.
Mobile. They recently released an official app and the Imgur experience is terrible. Gifs (~%50% of the front page) take multiple clicks to play and are not pre-cached. By hosting their own images they can take control of the user experience and make their app much more pleasant to use.
Reddit basically needs an image hosting service to succeed, and Imgur is now at least as obnoxious as all the previous generation of hosts that lead to it being created in the first place
While I agree with Imgur being obnoxious and a far cry from their early days, they are not as awful as the previous de-facto image sharing site - whatever it was with the green frog as their mascot.
And I still stand by my earlier statement: Imgur has declined, but they have not yet stooped to the level of end-user abuse shack did. (Granted, hijacking direct image URLs is sleezy as hell.)
Imageshack made even uploads a chore. Sure, picking the image from your drive was easy - but then they made every attempt possible to force their inline branding into all inbound links.
Getting a hot-linkable image from shack uploads required extra effort. And they tried to trick you into using their quality-degraded downscaled versions everywhere. It was dreadful. I even remember couple of cases where after the upload there was no way of getting the image link out. At all. All you got was a 80x80 thumbnail and a link to their shitty pages where you could, MAYBE, view the image. (Which was, of course, downscaled and further compressed. The original was gone.)
So no, as far as I am concerned, Imgur has not yet reached the imageshack abusement park level.
The bigger issue is Imgur has been leveraging their monopoly on Reddit's image hosting to build a new social commentary system to replace Reddit. If Reddit didn't do something then maybe in five years Reddit will be dead and Imgur will be the front page of the internet.
I think you're mistaking value to redditors with value to reddit. Clearly the benefit to the average redditor is minimal at best. But considering imgur is creating its own communities at this point, and linkjacking direct images to point to ad-serving pages on mobile, imgur is arguably increasingly a direct competitor to reddit. By serving images directly through reddit, reddit can increase the time you spend there, increasing their ad revenue.
Reddit needs to grow its revenue to be sustainable.
It looks to me as if all recent changes work towards the goal of making reddit a mainstream site platable to the average customer who does not know or care about adblock and innovative marketing techniques.
RES is for the power user who does not generate any revenue.
It won't be very long before we need a new reddit for power users where we can move on to with our guns, cocaine and hookers.
Are they going to host NSFW images also? I wonder how long the darker side of Reddit is going to last in that case. Seems like they're asking for a whole slew of liability issues.
Not any more liability than imgur has. Reddit already removes and ban tons of bad stuff when it's reported to them, even though they host anything.
I'd be more concerned about copyright. Most of the stuff posted on reddit already violates copyright to some degree (e.g. /r/gifs which is entirely people reuploading segments of youtube videos without the consent of the creators.)
Long story short, imgur is no longer just an image host - it is an image-sharing site to compete with reddit's image-based subreddits. Providing significant traffic to it is likely slowly bleeding reddit's image-based communities dry.
Additionally, having to upload images to a different website which isn't linked from anywhere on reddit, needing an entirely different account to manage them, is just confusing. Reddit isn't really a pure link-sharing website, and original/remixed content is important to its users - so managing that should probably be something integrated into the site.
It's basically their way to control the content that gets posted to the platform; I'd be surprised if a lot of subreddits don't get shut down if they switch to using it rather than imgur or reddpics.
