Imgur won’t support Reddit’s NSFW communities anymore because they put its ‘business at risk’
2Reported today in The Verge.
Imgur won’t support Reddit’s NSFW communities anymore because they put its ‘business at risk’
In a blog post published earlier this week, image-sharing site Imgur wrote that it won’t display any content from Reddit’s NSFW communities on its site.
If you search for, say, r/NSFW on Imgur, you’ll hit a landing page that reads: “As of Oct 2019, Imgur will no longer display NSFW Imgur r/subsections associated with Reddit subreddits.” They also helpfully link to a couple alternatives that you can use in Imgur’s place.
No content, however, has been deleted or moved, and any NSFW images previously uploaded to Reddit and hosted on Imgur are staying at their original URLs. You can also still upload NSFW images to Imgur as long as they’re marked “hidden.”
The move came because, as Imgur wrote in its post, “over the years, these pages have put Imgur’s user growth, mission, and business at risk.” That’s oddly strong language to use, and it points to Reddit’s own problems with moderation.
Though the site has lately been quarantining or outright banning subreddits that break its terms of service, it’s possible that Imgur doesn’t like the risk to its brand that comes with being intimately associated with Reddit. The site was founded in 2009 as a solution to Reddit’s image hosting problems; over the years, it’s grown into a community in its own right. (Some “Imgurians,” as they’re known, even attended Camp Imgur, a camping trip the company threw in 2015.) Today, the website gets about 274 million visits monthly, which makes it one of the most popular sites in the US.
Imgur’s decision to stop hosting Reddit’s NSFW content came about, in the company’s words, because they wanted “Imgur to be a fun and entertaining place that brings happiness to the Internet for many, many years to come.” That emphasis on longevity is a hint: it means they don’t see Reddit as necessarily the best way forward.
For Reddit, on the other hand, it’s hard to say what impact the move will have. The site introduced native image hosting three years ago, so the effect will likely be cultural. Imgur’s move, however, is an indication that Imgur and Reddit might be grown up enough to part ways.