Imgur

What is Imgur?

Imgur [imgur.com] is an image-sharing website.

History

Imgur was originally created to host images for Reddit. Although Reddit supports both image and video upload now, at the time it only supported posts that were text or link. The idea was that you would upload your image to Imgur, then post a link on Reddit to share it.

Imgur then started creating its own community of Imgurians with its own threaded comment section with upvotes and downvotes and user profiles with karma (useless Internet points), much like the community of Redditors of Reddit. The two websites were completely separate, however, to much of Imgurians confusion.

Often, someone would use Imgur only as an image host and post the image on Reddit, but the image would still appear on Imgur as if it were posted to Imgur's community. So you would have a bunch of people commenting on images posted that could often make no sense at all without any context about the image. It was even possible for the Redditor who posted it to not even realize their post was public on Imgur's community. An entire community dedicated to talking to a wall because someone put a picture on that wall.

One of Imgur's feats was creating what it called "gif video," or the .gifv format. As an image-sharing platform, it was common for users to upload gifs, and the GIF image format is a terrible image format. It's so bad that PNG was created to replace it, but that thing somehow survived because GIF supported animation and PNG didn't. Animated GIF files get very huge very quickly. Imgur needed a way to make the GIFs everyone was uploading smaller, so they launched "gif video."

A gif video was just a video file, like a .mp4 file, that had the file extension .gifv instead. Imgur was configured to discretely show a video player when someone tried to access a .gifv file. This video player was configured so that the video looped. This is very important, as GIFs loop.

Technically, GIFs do not necessarily loop. There is a way to create an animated GIF that only plays once. I have never seen anyone in my entire life create a GIF that doesn't loop, but the technology exists.

GIFs are also images, not video, which means they do not have audio. Naturally, the "gif video" files didn't have audio either.

Today, the whole idea of GIFs survived, even though nobody uses .gif files anymore. The modern format for this is the .webm format. If you go to /r/HighQualityGifs, the "gifs" you will see are WebM video files.

If you want to see a real gif, check GifCities.

Decline

Eventually, Reddit started providing the ability to upload images (and later videos) to Reddit without needing to go through Imgur. For some time, Imgur still provided the ability to create image albums, which Reddit didn't have. Now Reddit can do that too, although honestly Reddit's image gallery feature is just terrible to use on desktop compared to an Imgur album.

Imgur's community started disappearing. Posts that used to have hundreds of comments now rarely go past one hundred. They design of the website also changed, for worse, of course.

It used to be that if you upload an image on Imgur, it would work the way you actually expect: the file uploads, you get a link to the image. Instead, they somehow designed it so that if you upload an image to Imgur, it shows the link button BEFORE the image is uploaded, and the URL of the link is a blob: URL. This blob: is a special protocol that exists to allow webpages to use temporary files they create in places where a URL is required by the web browser. As it's a temporary file, it only exists in your computer, it's not actually on the Internet. You're not supposed to ever be given a blob: URL. This is clearly a mistake by the developer.

It's very strange that the main functionality of the image-sharing website has this bug, and has had it for so long.

They also had a very easy to use meme generator that let you just type the name of a meme to find it, like "Bad Luck Brian." And it used to show examples of memes made with the template so people at least had an idea of how they were supposed to write it. Somehow, they managed to redesign this functionality so that you can't search by name, you have to browse thumbnails, and you don't get examples either. And it's so overengineered that this new meme generator that absolutely nobody uses has even got keyboard shortcuts!

It's no surprise that offering free VIDEO hosting was going to cost them more money than they would ever be able to make with ads, so they started deleting content posted without an account, then banning accounts for sharing content in ways that were previously allowed.

It's kind of sad. I think if they limited themselves to images instead of chasing video they would have greater success. Currently, Imgur's front page is infested with politics, just like Reddit. I don't see a single advice animal, so as far as I'm concerned there are zero memes. Gone are the days of bananas for scale.