Who wants to hear my, “Why reddit got image hosting of its own when it did” conspiracy theory? No one? Too bad, posting it anyhow.
Few years ago reddit had a subreddit called fatpeoplehate. It existed to, you guessed it, hate fat people. “Fattie” became an insult du juor. One day they find out an imgur employee is fat, and start in on being shitters. This apparently was the straw that broke the camels back because they finally got banned.
My theory is simple: reddit didn’t ban fatpeoplehate because they went too far. They banned it because imgur threatened to block them and being the image site, this would fuck reddit up. Imagine being a social media site with no pictures. Impossible.
Reddit, not too long after that, adds image hosting. Could it be a coincidence? Sure. Do I think its one? Not really.
Fun addendum, a study was done post-ban and reddit actually became less toxic after the ban. Crazy how denying shitty folks a platform actually makes your site better, whoda thunk?
Yeah, the motivation was fairly straightforward. And it wasn’t just that one sub that was causing problems like that. There were other pretty shitty subs that created the same kind of liability for Reddit. It only made sense that they would eventually start hosting their own images, especially after they realize they could monetize it.
Remember when imgur was just a fun little service made for us to post images on reddit?
Remember […] reddit?
Who wants to hear my, “Why reddit got image hosting of its own when it did” conspiracy theory? No one? Too bad, posting it anyhow.
Few years ago reddit had a subreddit called fatpeoplehate. It existed to, you guessed it, hate fat people. “Fattie” became an insult du juor. One day they find out an imgur employee is fat, and start in on being shitters. This apparently was the straw that broke the camels back because they finally got banned.
My theory is simple: reddit didn’t ban fatpeoplehate because they went too far. They banned it because imgur threatened to block them and being the image site, this would fuck reddit up. Imagine being a social media site with no pictures. Impossible.
Reddit, not too long after that, adds image hosting. Could it be a coincidence? Sure. Do I think its one? Not really.
Fun addendum, a study was done post-ban and reddit actually became less toxic after the ban. Crazy how denying shitty folks a platform actually makes your site better, whoda thunk?
This isn’t a conspiracy theory. It’s just what happened. And it was obvious to all of us exactly why it happened when it did.
Yeah Reddit needed to decide it should not be at the whim or mercy of some other service when there is a disagreement over content policy.
Yeah, the motivation was fairly straightforward. And it wasn’t just that one sub that was causing problems like that. There were other pretty shitty subs that created the same kind of liability for Reddit. It only made sense that they would eventually start hosting their own images, especially after they realize they could monetize it.
Pepperidge farms remembers.