Here's the thing. The overwhelming majority of content that people want to share on the likes of Imgur never actually get that much traffic. Ergo, why not just buy a cheap xyz, be it a turn-key appliance, a Pi and roll your own, or do something more sophisticated? Or if they don't want to do that, why not just host it out of your cloud storage provider?

I don't really understand the niche that Imgur is serving. Past a point, it makes far more sense to have it on your own server (local or cloud), your own CloudFlare account in front of it etc. This weird middleground where people aren't making money off of their content, but still want to share it, but don't actually get that much traffic is a weird one.

Why not just stick some ads on it if you're getting that much traffic or stick it on someone else's ad-supported platform? And if it's porn, why not go through a porn site and monetize legitimately? Surely all legitimate and consensual pornography wouldn't have a problem with that, and they would get more traffic on the ads/subs, and thus more money.