Is that bad? Resorting to a dedicated party for rich content? I enjoyed reddit more when it was like that honestly. Business wise it is the wrong decision though.
It's bad in that the media is completely disconnected from the posts. If the media provider you chose goes down, nobody will be able to see the stuff you've posted anymore. If that subreply server you're using gets taken down, you'll have lots of orphaned stuff on that media upload website.
> If the media provider you chose goes down, nobody will be able to see the stuff you've posted anymore.
Imgur was started because the founder was annoyed at sites like ImageShack and Photobucket killing viral images and/or preventing hot linking. It was Reddit's official-unofficial image host until Reddit started hosting images themselves.
Imgur also rugpulled in the end, think it was adult content at first but didn't they recently delete a ton of old content and content not tied to accounts.
Ultimately you can never trust the parasite image upload service because eventually they'll try and supplant you like how imgur is now a reddit-like/ifunny-like type site instead of just a "dumb" image host.
I think you're right that Imgur went on a binge of deleting content not tied to registered accounts in the recent past. It's amusing Imgur went full circle, starting because they disliked inaccessible content and then making content inaccessible.
It's hopefully a lesson people learn that were too young to experience ImageShack/Photobucket's issues.
That you enjoyed it more when it didn't have a "native" image integration is probably unrelated to that fact but just that the site changed in a lot of other ways. How does the hostname where the image gets loaded from matter?
It matters when external images were not embedded into the page, but internal ones are. This leads to at least one (probably two, to go back) extra clicks per image.
For discussions among technical people, it might not be bad! It works well on HN. Unfortunately, interfaces that developers love are often not appealing— maybe not even useable in some cases— for other users.
