Christ. It's strange to recall Imgur's genesis on Reddit as a simple, lightweight replacement for all the obstacles and mess that came with Imageshack/Photobucket/other popular image galleries at the time. Shame it eventually bloated into the thing it was meant to remedy.

Well it happened in two easy steps: 1. They took VC money, 2. Reddit cut the middleman and offered direct photo sharing.

At that point imgur became less about easy photo sharing on reddit and others, and more about creating its own community.