1. "We need a better image host!"

2. Makes new image host.

3. Uh oh, hosting costs money.

4. Ads.

5. Lawsuits because illegal stuff. Uh oh, lawyers cost money.

6. "We need a better image host!"

To me it seems like it's not necessarily budgeting issue but natural greed kicking in. I'm sure imgur people are not tightening their belts over this.

There are quite a lot of examples in the past (all the way to the Roman empire) of rich people spending their money on community projects just because they wanted some things to exist, not to make even more money.

The problem I see is that once you get even to the scale of a 10th of size of imgur your hosting bills (storage + bandwidth) will cross into the 10s of thousands per month, which would require you to be in the top 1% of Patreon users. I don't think you'd find people lining up to donate for such a service, especially given there are so many copycats.

On the other hand, I think Imgur also pushed way more traffic upon itself by trying to make itself into another social media site. Like, if it just stayed an image host it probably could have stayed more niche and wouldn't have had thousands of casual internet users scrolling through images all day at work.

This is a really important point. From what I can see, Imgur doesn't have a porn community, it just has a lot of porn because it's used as an image host by outside communities. Porn is probably a net drain on profit for them, since they make their revenue off of people who use Imgur itself, not from servicing direct image links posted on Reddit.

This is the cycle of a lot of ad-driven businesses. They start out sleek and quick to load because they’re ad-free. They grow insanely fast and burn runway. Then they begin loading the site down with ads to monetize the users. This leads to a gradual exodus and eventual death (or death in the star-like sense of eternal irrelevance).

It seems to be an unstable equilibrium. If you want to stay on top in terms of users and actually make money you’ve got to have a lean and highly optimized site with non-intrusive ads. On the other hand, if you give in to the temptation to take any ad who wants you then you doom the site in exchange for a short term profit.

It could be that Imgur has already more than paid back its acquisition price to MediaLab[0] and now they are willing to risk killing it in order to not have the NSFW hassle with their banks.

Or not, but it seems like this happens enough that the money people should understand it by now.

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28674883

[0] https://www.wired.com/story/tiktok-platforms-cory-doctorow/

Instagram is victim to this trying to follow every trend and turning themselves into another WeChat that has every feature ever.

People use Facebook because its network effects are effectively impossible for alternatives to overcome.

HN thread on the above article: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34480479

People were uploading lots of porn to gfycat, so the gfycat people basically cloned themselves and split the adult content off onto another domain in order to keep it separate.

You must be joking.

I have been a user of imgur since it was create by mr. grimm ... I have had a paid account for ~10 years...

v.reddit and i.reddit are absolute garbage by comparison.

Now, that is to say, I use imgur very specifically - I have my own albums (and the album management system on imgur is trash and almost unusable) -- but the ability to just use something like greenshot where I do a snippet with PRTSC key and have it auto-upload to my imgur, and then copy the imgur url immediately to my clipboard is dope... but the album management UX on imgur does suck.