Comment by Elfener
2 years ago
I mean, the reddit company did go public, so things like this were inevitable.
Also things like the API fiasco, and also small annoyances like the fact that when you click on an image on reddit, it now goes to a wrapper html page instead of just the actual image (this was one of the reasons reddit was better than most social media...).
It used to be that Reddit didn't host images and you'd have to link (often shitty) external image hosts. The someone created imgur to host images for reddit. And slowly but surely imgur became just another shitty image host (and social media site for some reason). Then reddit wanted some of the dough imgur was pulling in (probably just making losses) and added their own image hosting. At first it worked just like you are saying with you getting direct links to the image file. Now they also turned into yet another shitty image host.
Part of the blame for the redirect-to-wrapper page lies with browsers. If browsers didn't let servers reliably differentiated between a direct request and an <img> embed then this practice would not be as widespread.
Maybe it's just me or something temporary (I use Old Reddit, like all right-thinking folk) but for the past couple of days the image wrapper page seems to have been sent to the glue factory. I'm just getting the image now, unadorned.