Let's be honest: Imgur exists because a Redditor decided Imageshack shouldn't make money. They then discovered that, without Conde Nast to pay their bills, they had to become Imageshack. There's no fucking money in image hosting. It's a loss leader. This is why both Google and Yahoo (Flickr) make it so hard to hot-link their shit. This is why Imageshack has always made it impossible. Reddit is pulling away from Imgur because Imgur is focusing heavily on their community, not their images - I've got shit that's been up there for eight years or whatever and suddenly it's got comments on it. A plague on both their houses.
And Imgur sucks for anything high def, 4K or that you want uncompressed, like, say, astrophotos. I'm going to kick in and pay for astrobin once I get the court shit settled and have a solid budget for the rest of the year. The benefit of building a community like Imgur is doing is that it creates a captive audience you can build data on, to sell to advertisers. "If the service is free, you are the product." Bandwidth is cheap. Server farms are expensive and need constant diligence. And an image site needs one heck of a server farm if it want to be big.
Talk to me about why not Flickr. They're an integral part of my backup strategy and I find that they not only compress their online stuff very, very little but they'll actually take camera raw and archive it for you if you want. There are two aspects of Yahoo that don't suck: Yahoo Finance and Flickr. And Flickr sucked for a lonnnnng time.
My theory is that Marissa Mayer took one look at Flickr, decided it would never suit her social strategy, and proceeded to buy and fuck up Tumblr. Meanwhile, the veteran galley slaves left belowdecks at Flickr said "quick! Roll out functionality and featuresets before the coxswain returns!" and created a substantially useful photography site.