In fact there is a running gag that imgurians are like a tiny world populated by a people that is oblivious of the fact that there exists an outside world (Reddit) and that they are constantly being observed by people in said outside world.

Only that I had no clue there was a community or comments for a long time. Imgur was the reddit community image bucket and nothing more, until I learned people use it as a lilliputian version of reddit

They've been drifting apart for a while now. Reddit now has its own image hosting and Imgur has been distancing itself from Reddit and promoting itself as its own platform.

As someone who couldn't care less about their shitty platform, what alternatives are there? I can remember when Imgur was first launched as a super-simple image host that wasn't full of crap and watermarks like Photobucket. Now it seems as if history has repeated itself, with Imgur becoming the very thing it sought to displace.

I think that means one of two things, with two different outcomes:

A. Creating a super-simply image host that isn't full of crap and watermarks like Photobucket or Imgur will yield a profitable business.

B. A is in fact not profitable, and adding crap and watermarks is part of the normal evolution of an image hosting business once you gain moderate amounts of traction that starts to stress your finances.

It's like Jamie Zawinski's Law of Software Envelopment, but applied to image hosting sites: "Every image host attempts to expand until it is no longer able to host images. Those image hosts which cannot (or refuse to) so expand are replaced by ones which can."

It's a modern day Plato's cave it seems

Pics or it didn't happen.

People have been comparing it to the civilization inside the locker in Men in Black. Kinda hard to find comments, but here is one:

https://www.reddit.com/r/interestingasfuck/comments/ag2vpg/a...

Little known (?) fact: buying knock off anything from outside the country is a great way to be excluded for eligibility in Global Entry. They see you as an importer of counterfeit goods, regardless of the quantity you are importing.