> Imgur wasn't a parasite, it was offering a service that Reddit didn't offer but we needed. Well… sure, you could say at first it was more of a symbiotic rela

> Imgur wasn't a parasite, it was offering a service that Reddit didn't offer but we needed. Well… sure, you could say at first it was more of a symbiotic relationship, though probably providing more benefit to reddit than to Imgur, the latter absorbing the former's bandwidth costs and not getting much in return. The parasitical part comes with > but now Imgur has its own community because, in order to ensure its survival, Imgur has tried to grow itself into an independent community on the back of reddit, to eventually be self-sustaining. Now that reddit's cutting it off, maybe it actually will be self-sustaining. All the more power to them if that works. But I don't think “parasitical” is an unfair characterisation of how things have worked so far. It's not really intended as a value judgement on my part.