After Quickmeme was banned across the entire site for manipulating upvotes, Reddit users have been looking for a new place to get their fix of Impact font on cat pictures. Luckily, your very favorite image hosting service, Imgur, has stepped up to the plate and released their own meme generator today, pre-programmed with all the classics you know and love. I’m using the word “classics” here loosely, of course. In Internet time that means they’ve been around at least a week.
Speaking of Internet time, this development has apparently been in the works for quite a while. “Our community has been asking for an Imgur meme generator for a long time,” founder and CEO Alan Schaaf said in a statement. “It just makes sense that, as more content is hosted and shared on Imgur, we continue to hand over content creation tools to our community.”
The Imgur blog has tips on how to create your own meme using their tools, but if you’re a regular Reddit user that’s dealt with either Imgur or meme generators before, then you can probably figure it out for yourself. Unlike Quickmeme, however, they’re being pretty transparent about their intentions, as evidenced by this gem here:
Quickmeme, you’ll remember, was banned from Reddit when mods of r/AdviceAnimals discovered that one of the meme generator’s founders was using bots to downvote any competition on the subreddit and beyond. Given that Imgur is already the preferred method of image uploading for most Redditors, to the point where users used to create memes elsewhere and then still upload them to Imgur in order to share them, it’s a safe bet that they won’t run into the problem Quickmeme’s currently facing.
This news comes only days after Imgur announced their new Android app, so it seems like the business is doing well. They expect to launch an iOS app to match sometime in the future.
(Imgur via Venture Beat)
- Here’s some more scathing evidence of Quickmeme’s treachery
- Let’s hope this doesn’t get co-opted into some awful viral marketing campaigns
- We did a Q&A with Alan Schaaf a few years back
