>user hostile UX

They've been pretty hostile for a while. Look at this disgusting behaviour:

  # Mobile UA
  $ curl -v -H "Accept: text/html,application/xhtml+xml,applciation/xml;q=0.9,*/*;q=0.8" -H "User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Android 10; Mobile; rv:68.0) Gecko/68.0 Firefox/68.0" https://i.imgur.com/6WAZZpN.jpg
  < HTTP/2 302 
  < retry-after: 0
  < location: https://m.imgur.com/6WAZZpN?r

  # Desktop UA
  $ curl -v -H "Accept: text/html,application/xhtml+xml,applciation/xml;q=0.9,*/*;q=0.8" -H "User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:71.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/71.0" https://i.imgur.com/6WAZZpN.jpg | file -
  < HTTP/2 200 
  < last-modified: Wed, 18 Sep 2019 20:45:26 GMT
  < etag: "21d323ddb1c1926ab0d7a5bb9786c996"
  < content-type: image/jpeg
  ...
  /dev/stdin: JPEG image data, baseline, precision 8, 2250x1500, components 3

Note that they redirect mobile users to https://m.imgur.com/6WAZZpN?r in order to serve them ads, encourage them to install their PUP on their device and break their ability to zoom on the image (the image embedded is thumbnail size).

They use UA sniffing to disguise this behaviour from technical users on desktop. They also detect if you're using curl and spoofing a mobile UA (which sends Accept: * / *), in which case this dark UX pattern is disabled.

It's especially ironic taking into account how imgur came to be: as a simple image hosting website for reddit without ads/fluff. Now it's the polar opposite.

Still, Imgur is vastly superior to the old image hosting sites. Even though the redirects and low resolution images on mobile are annoying.

They serve a lot of traffic, and the bandwidth expenses are probably quite big.

I also find it much faster than Reddit's own image/video hosting.

I’m on a slow connection. The ad images loaded first before the actual content.

The company is prioritizing ads over user content and I can see no world where users desire this.

The "users" are the ad exchanges that are buying ad space on imgur. They probably have contracts and SLAs about how slowly ads are allowed to be loaded. In a pinch, ads will always be loaded first. Happens on every site.

Imgur has taken in $60 million in funding and the founder has had the usual delusions of grandeur regarding their "mission" (I interviewed there). The grand ambitions haven't panned out and I'm guessing that the VCs now want some return on their investment.

Reddit adding image hosting couldn't have helped them with anything other than bandwidth costs.

Imgur for a while has been hostile to non users for a while but never enough for me to outright dismiss a link simply because it's Imgur. They ride the line between functional and hostile tightly.

They've crossed the line for me by redirecting direct image links to the post.

Eg: When I click an i.imgur.com/xxxxxxxx.png link I expect to be taken to the image file, not be redirected to the horrid, slow and bloated mobile UI.

I straight up quit halfway through because the videos/GIFs would take forever to load.

That and the ever present obnoxious prompt to download the app.

how could they not be going broke?