The company behind self-hating web community Reddit has chose to abandon its long-standing partnership with image hosting site Imgur in favor of offering its own image upload service.
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The hosting service will begin to roll out to certain Reddit communities within the week. The new tool allows you to upload images up to 20 MB in size, and GIFs up to 100 MB in size. Imgur, which has always been the de facto image uploading service for Reddit, supports images up to 20MB and GIFs up to 200MB.
The communities getting the feature now include GetMotivated, EarthPorn, Gaming, Space, OldSchoolCool, Sports, Art, Aww, Dataisbeautiful, Food, Funny, Gifs, mildlyinteresting, movies, photoshopbattles and pics.
While this will mostly be seen as just be another upload option for users, it’s also another tactic by Reddit to try to keep its users on its own site.
The launch could help Reddit boost traffic in a critical year, following a tumultuous 2015 marked by trouble with its content policies clashing with offensive subcultures it hosts, and a community staffer firing leading to a mutiny by Reddit moderators who blacked-out parts of the site.
Heads up, Reddit users: A big change related to image sharing is coming your way.
Image-hosting site Imgur could lose a lot of page views and revenue if enough users favor Reddit’s tool. Redditor’s will not have to use other image hosting services anymore like the popular with redditor’s imgur.
Despite the new tool, the website will continue to allow users to share images hosted on third-party uploading services. We’re super focused on our mission to surface up the world’s most entertaining content and making Imgur the best visual community in the world.
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However, for users that are not yet willing to let go of Imgur and other image hosting websites, they will still be given the option to use them instead of Reddit’s in-house image hosting platform. – Something which does not make much sense when you consider that Imgur has nearly become a direct competitor to Reddit.
