[afandian]

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".

[chrisjj]

> 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.

[afandian]

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.

[chrisjj]

> 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.