Imgur: Funny Memes & GIF Maker

I was just silently banned this week with no warnings, no notice, no emails. I’ve used imgur for years to simply upload photos to share on forums. There is no questionable content and nothing that goes against their new ToS (I’ve heard many were banned for nudity posted years ago but are just now banning those people). It’s the most innocuous set of photos ever on my account and a large portion are set to link only so not public. I’ve (politely) written support asking for an explanation of why I was banned and if they can reinstate my account, and have gotten no reply for over a week. After looking into it, I am clearly not the only one who experienced this. Imgur has ruined the good standing unused to have and is another casualty of corporate higherups ruining a service that used to be good. On top of that, when you look at the reviews here you will see a majority of negative reviews/ratings, but the overall score is 4.4? Dig deeper and many positive reviews appear to be botted, and I wouldn’t be surprised if the ratings without reviews are botted too. There is literally no reason to use imgur anymore. It killed its own identity, it is removing long time members with no explanation and has turned into yet another corporate slop takeover. Just waiting for it to completely fail at this point and shut down for good. I don’t recommend anyone spend their time on this app because quite simply there is no reason to anymore, and your account can either be deleted for no reason with appeals ignored or the site will simply shut down eventually and take all your content with it.

For several years now, the app has been progressively getting wide and worse. It’s too the point bias that regardless of the device I’m on, I have maybe 5 minutes before the app stutters and crashes. That entire time it’s making my devices burning hot and draining battery like nothing else I’ve ever used. That’s when I’m not getting punted to external sites or the App Store by increasing intrusive ads. The app is simply unusable, and over the course of YEARS it’s clear Imgur is either incapable or unwilling to provide its users (and their ad revenue) with a usable app experience. Even using their website, it’s nothing but crashes and hangs and failures to load, when ad loading doesn’t jerk the page location around almost continually. I’m not sure what Imgur’s aversion is to not tormenting their monetary base, but it’s ridiculous and a wholly broken model. And now they want us to buy paid subscriptions? Why should anyone pay a single penny for something you can’t even access without hours of frustration and a dead battery in an hour? This is simply a complete failure of an app, and a complete failure of a company to provide any kind of reasonable user experience.

Latest review: If I thought the ads were bad before… now they are on another level. This app used to be good years ago but now it’s not. I unfortunately have to delete it because you shouldn’t have to pay to get rid of intrusive ads. Imgur went downhill and it’s not coming back up. I’m sad, but it’s how it is. Updated review: I read the latest update will have ads, and although I understand the reasoning behind such an action it's still disappointing and it alienates people. I won't be surprised if many delete the app after this. It's a shame. Old review: So I like imgur. I tried to delete the app because it can be distracting, but as they say, time you enjoy wasting is not wasted time. You don't need an imgur account to enjoy the features (it gets you really sucked in if you do have one though). People tend to fave/forget, recycle similar jokes and photos over and over, repost, have pity posts, mature posts (good thing there's the settings menu), and there's not a lot of originality. However, it's great for getting short bursts of info, (like news, opinions, stuff going on in the world/other places), it has a generally good community, lots of photos/gifs and video recommendations as well, funny posts, personal posts and it is a whole medium of itself. It's kind of connected to Reddit, its origin, but it has gone its own (mostly) separate path. Imgur makes you laugh, angry, informs you and much more. It's not perfect, but has constant updates and it's better than using the regular version on Safari on your phone. Warning: can be addictive.