In the case of imgur, I think the problem was financial.
Running an image hosting site for you to share memes or screenshots with a couple friends is cheap. But becoming the primary method of posting images to reddit gets extremely expensive fast!
Imgur had to expand. They had to become more. They also had to discourage being only used as a direct image linking site, as they needed a way to serve ads.
Running an image hosting site for you to share memes or screenshots with a couple friends is cheap. But becoming the primary method of posting images to reddit gets extremely expensive fast!
Imgur had to expand. They had to become more. They also had to discourage being only used as a direct image linking site, as they needed a way to serve ads.
The alternative was to go bankrupt.