Reddit, the self-proclaimed front page of the internet, is for the most part a collection of links to other websites — including websites like Imgur that rely almost entirely on Reddit’s current link-aggregating design. But today, Reddit has unveiled its own image hosting service, which will likely take a huge chunk of traffic away from Imgur and keep a lot more eyeballs on Reddit’s own site.
All safe-for-work communities will now have the ability to host images in the original post of threads, with static images of up to 20MB and GIFs of up to 100MB supported. You won’t have to download that 100MB GIF to view it, thankfully: Reddit’s image hosting supports MP4 transcoding, cutting a 10MB GIF down to a 1.5MB web video in the example we’ve seen.
Of course, this won’t kill off Imgur straight away, but it will impact it heavily. When asked what prompted the change, Reddit’s admin representative said that it was all about choice: “You can still use third party image hosting services to upload, but we wanted to provide an option for a smoother experience.”
Of course, not all Reddit users are happy. Here’s one user’s alternate explanation for the change:
Here’s how it works, courtesy of Reddit moderator Amg137: