>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.