I only briefly read it but it seems they'll still support uploading legal NSFW for any subreddit just marked as hidden so it doesn't show in their public gallery, which makes sense to me.
There is a weird segment of "imgurians" who comment only on imgur posts. They're a bit of a joke on some communities, like /r/repsneakers where users buy replica designer sneakers (aka fakes) and post them to imgur with titles like "Couldn't afford rent this month but got these" and the imgur people flame the imgur comments.
In fact there is a running gag that imgurians are like a tiny world populated by a people that is oblivious of the fact that there exists an outside world (Reddit) and that they are constantly being observed by people in said outside world.
Only that I had no clue there was a community or comments for a long time. Imgur was the reddit community image bucket and nothing more, until I learned people use it as a lilliputian version of reddit
They've been drifting apart for a while now. Reddit now has its own image hosting and Imgur has been distancing itself from Reddit and promoting itself as its own platform.
As someone who couldn't care less about their shitty platform, what alternatives are there? I can remember when Imgur was first launched as a super-simple image host that wasn't full of crap and watermarks like Photobucket. Now it seems as if history has repeated itself, with Imgur becoming the very thing it sought to displace.
Little known (?) fact: buying knock off anything from outside the country is a great way to be excluded for eligibility in Global Entry. They see you as an importer of counterfeit goods, regardless of the quantity you are importing.
I once posted some random photo on Imgur to share with a larger group of friends, and I guess I left the display option set to the default of public. Next thing I know, I get a comment from an Imgurian who found it through the Imgur image listing saying something like "What is this? Why did you think I would care about this?"
If I'm reading correctly, you will also need to log into Imgur. "any pages that we know to contain NSFW content will now require that a user log in and acknowledge that they are 18+ years of age in order to view."
So this is making the Reddit -> imgur experience more crappy for people browsing Reddit.
Imgur has been on a trend of walling off their garden, first deprecating the Mobile Web experience in favor of their frigging app, and now this. I can understand why they want to reduce their footprint for NSFW image hosting, but if you just wanted to look at an NSFW subreddit to see some images, this is going to make things more annoying.
So long as you can load images on reddit itself I don't see the problem