Imgur launches as Reddit's de facto image host

In February 2009, Ohio University computer-science student Alan Schaaf announced a side project to Reddit's community: a no-frills image-sharing site called Imgur. He built it as a direct response to the usability problems and broken links Redditors faced when posting pictures through existing hosts, and he announced its launch in a Reddit post. The community adopted it almost instantly, and Imgur reached a million total page views within its first five months.

Though never owned by Reddit, Imgur became inseparable from the platform's culture for years, serving as the default home for the memes, screenshots, and reaction images that fueled the front page. It grew into the largest image-sharing community in the world, claiming more than 150 million monthly active users by 2015. Imgur's rise illustrates how much of Reddit's early growth depended on third-party tools created by its own users, and how the platform's link-aggregation model spawned an ecosystem of companion services it did not control.