I just can't get upset about this. Perhaps as the article suggests this is the canary in the coal mine that portends the imminent downfall of imgur as a non sp

I just can't get upset about this. Perhaps as the article suggests this is the canary in the coal mine that portends the imminent downfall of imgur as a non spammy image host. Perhaps. But I don't think so. First of all, imgur needs to make money somehow. So far they've exercised extreme restraint and made no short term or short sightef optimizations that I'm aware of. Second, what legitimate reasons could they have for this behavior? * get people to re-share the images, as the destination page has share buttons * ensure search engines follwing the links pick up the canonical page instead of the raw image page. * get better analytics or tracking data by being able to run JavaScript. -- they are a free service that needs this data to sell ads, if you don't like being tracked, invest the minimal effort to install an anonymizer. * it could be a workaround from something that fb/twitter is doing that inadvertently grabs the raw link when users intend to share the canonical page. I'm sure there are a dozen other reasons, and right now we don't have enough information to know why they are doing this. Given their history of restraint, I'm willing to give them the benefit of the doubt on this one.