Then it became all of that on steroids except with a comment section and a weird community that didn’t realize they were living in the plumbing of other platforms like Reddit.
I'm impressed they ever managed to turn it into something.
Once Imgur stopped being a dedicated image hosting service, you had to go out of your way to lock down your posts if you wanted to use it as a dedicated image hosting service. Which I can see being confusing for both sides of the party.
It was plumbing. And then a community formed inside it and wondered why things kept randomly showing up from above.
It’s actually pretty amusing and you sort of proved my point.
(looks like that sub is private now in protest of API changes but I'm sure you can find some old content hosted other places)
On the flip side, it's a real shame so many sites/pages removed comment sections... I had hope for a while that a browser extension for some sort of social media could fill the gap. There was a "free speech" one that had the feature, but the community itself was pretty bad, and there was no comments/shares on the rather technical sites I tend to visit.
Need some sort of cohesion to fill the gap in some way. I saw a bluesky implementation for comments, that used the social media itself in a shared post's replies as comments, which was interesting.