Imgur needs to decide what it wants to be when it grows up.
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You’ve probably heard of Imgur. The ubiquitous image-sharing platform was founded in 2009 as a way for users to share images on Reddit and other platforms. Since then, it’s swelled in popularity. It’s used to host millions of images across the web. It’s got both Android and iOS apps. It has its own community of people on Imgur itself. It’s over 10 years old now.
But Imgur still hasn’t figured out what, exactly, Imgur is.
Most people think of Imgur as a place to upload images. After all, that is what it was created to do, and, I’d say, what the vast majority of people use it for. It’s simply a repository of images — a place to store your images on the web.
But for some people, Imgur is much, much more than that.
There’s a group of people that call themselves “Imgurians”. And for them, Imgur is much more than simply an image sharing platform. It is a community. A social platform. An online home.
Because while Imgur does offer you a place to upload images, and keep them private, they also offer you a whole other experience. And this is sharing to the community of Imgur.
The problem is, Imgur can’t seem to decide if it wants to be the image sharing platform that it’s known as, or if it wants to be the social platform that Imgurians use it as.
Imgur has features designed for those using the platform as simply an image-sharing service. These include private uploads, easy embedding right after you’ve uploaded, a quick and simple uploading process… You can even search by subreddit on Imgur to find images posted to that subreddit, a feature left from when the site was created as simply an image-hosting platform for Reddit.
On the other hand, it’s missing some stuff that you’d expect to find on an image hosting site. Notably, any sort of image editing. Yes, they offer meme creation, but being able to simply, at the very least, crop what you upload is a feature sorely missing from Imgur. On the whole, though, it works. It’s certainly succeeded at doing this. While it’s not perfect, it works.
“it works” can also be said of the community side of Imgur… although not to the same extent as the uploading service. An uploading service is…