Comment by afandian
7 months ago
Transactional services (I don't know if that's the right word), where you have a known user, is different from passively providing web pages that people can read and you don't track them or ask them to register for an account.
But I think that distinction was pretty moot when web 2.0 came along.
Imgur's entire purpose is clearly to host user generated content though, so you can't argue it's not "providing services".
> Imgur's entire purpose is clearly to host user generated content
Not at all. Imgur does the passive side too. And by number of operations, it is by far the biggest one.
Without user-generated content there is nothing to host. And in any case they long ago turned from an image hosting site into a social media site. There's reactions and commenting as a core part of the service now.
> Without user-generated content there is nothing to host.
So what? Without the passively-read content there'd be no user-generated content.
> There's reactions and commenting as a core part of the service now.
It is totally optional.