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Reddit ditches Imgur and hosts its own images
The company behind self-hating web community Reddit has decided to abandon its long-standing partnership with image hosting site Imgur in favor of offering its own image upload service.
“We’re super excited to begin rolling out in-house image hosting on Reddit.com to select communities this week,” Reddit product team member Andy wrote in an announcement post on the website. “For a long time, other image hosting services have been an integral part of how content is shared on Reddit — we’re grateful to those teams, but are looking forward to bringing you a more seamless experience with this new feature.”
Here are is Reddit’s list of what users will be able to do with the new image hosting feature:
- Upload images (up to 20MB) and gifs (100MB) directly to Reddit when submitting a link.
- Click on a Reddit-hosted image from any listing (such as the frontpage, a subreddit, or userpage) and be taken directly to the conversation and comments about that image.
- View gifs within Reddit’s native apps with less taps and without leaving the app.
The new feature will initially be available for a selection of 50 popular subreddits, including communities like Funny, Movies, GetMotivated, and others.
While the people who run Reddit may be excited about offering this new feature, some members of the community are somewhat ambivalent about it. After all, redditors have been almost exclusively using Imgur for their image hosting needs for roughly seven years, ever since it was originally created by a redditor as a gift to the community.
Another consideration is the fact that a number of Reddit’s “Not Safe For Work” communities (ie the ones with porn) rely heavily on Imgur, and it seems unlikely that Reddit will take the same hands off approach to that sort of material the same way Imgur has.
Still, with the ability to upload images directly from Reddit’s submission screen, the new image hosting feature could deliver a serious blow to Imgur, as many Reddit users will likely choose whatever is most convenient.
Image by Antonio Zugaldia (originally posted to Flickr as Reddit) [CC BY 2.0], via Wikimedia Commons
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