The users on Imgur is incredibly protective of their little cornor of the internet, but as you point out also extremely toxic, making even Reddit look half-way

The users on Imgur is incredibly protective of their little cornor of the internet, but as you point out also extremely toxic, making even Reddit look half-way decent. I wouldn't recommend Imgur, sure some of the images and comments are fun and lighthearted, overall though, it has become a dark place. The frontpage is overrun by US politics, everyone is depressed, have some sort of mental disorder or disability and work minimum wage jobs. When Imgur was created I doubt that much thought went into why it's so difficult to build a good image hosting site. There's no profit in it. You need to add a social layer, or some other hook that make people stick around and watch ads. As storage and bandwidth has become cheaper, it makes sense that a site like Reddit just went ahead and did their own image hosting. Imgur has become disconnected and needs to find its own audience, which is has, it just so happens that their audience is terrible. 4chan looks downright cheerful compared to Imgur. Maybe they managed to carve out a niche? One that could be profitable if they get rid of X amount of storage, hence deleting NSFW content and older anonymous uploads.