A little off-topic, but clicking imgur "direct" links on mobile redirects you to...

severine · on June 4, 2018

Maybe you'd like this web extension, Imagus:

https://addons.mozilla.org/es/firefox/addon/imagus

https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/0Bx8fnUCX4W2IN0E1UFN4... (versions for Chrome, Firefox, Maxthon, Opera and Safari)

You just press $key when hovering over an image (edit: or image link) and voilà!

bryant · on June 4, 2018

They started enforcing this pretty strictly in the last few weeks. It's a massive turnoff as a service, but considering they're a "social network" now and not just a reddit-specific image host, it's not a surprise.

TeMPOraL · on June 4, 2018

Ah, the undending cycle of image hosting services. First they start clean and useful, then they gradually degrade in an increased effort to be profitable, then they get replaced by something new that's clean and useful...

Cthulhu_ · on June 4, 2018

Only for as long as initial investor money lasts I guess. There's just no money to be made in 'free' image hosting without starting to do some nasty tactics, mostly involving direct (hot) linking.

TeMPOraL · on June 4, 2018

How do you make money off hot linking? I thought hot linking was the thing users want to be able to do, that's inherently impossible to monetize.

marksomnian · on June 4, 2018

Which is why you directly charge the users for it. cf. Photobucket

TeMPOraL · on June 4, 2018

Which is what makes people not want to use the service, and switch to whoever allows hotlinking at the moment. That's how imgur came to be.

larkeith · on June 4, 2018

They've been doing this for a while now; at least requesting the desktop site will still redirect you back to the actual image.

Still enough for me to dislike any imgur link, however.

saurik · on June 4, 2018

(This also happens on non-mobile browsers.)