What if reddit and imgur had a baby? Well, that might be a little weird. imgur was more or less or borne by reddit because existing photo sharing services like Photobucket and ImageShack were difficult to use.
But let’s just say that reddit inspired imgur (so technically, they’re not related) and the two parties decided to shack up. We like to think their offspring would be something like Ninja Post: great for collaborating with both text and images.
Here’s some background on reddit and imgur, and how they came to coexist:
reddit is an extremely popular discussion platform. Users submit content in the form of hyperlinks to interesting content (news items, photos, etc.) posted on external sites or text-only posts, such as a questions or comments.
reddit does not support images directly. Instead, users must create hyperlinks that link to images hosted outside of reddit. When a user wants to discuss a picture on reddit, the image is often uploaded to and hosted on imgur. When imgur founder Alan Schaaf launched his service, he actually posted an announcement to reddit:
I got fed up with all the other image hosts out there so I made my own. It doesn’t force you to compress your images, and it has neat things like crop, resize, rotate, and compression from 10-100. It’s my gift to you. Let’s not see anymore imageshack/photobucket around here 😉
While still closely linked with reddit, imgur has evolved as a destination for humorous and interesting content in its own right. Users can comment and vote on images posted to the service. However, on imgur, an interesting image is a requirement to start a discussion.
With reddit, there is an obvious desire demonstrated by users to post pictures in conjunction with their discussions. With imgur, there is an obvious desire to create and upload interesting visual content. The two services are complementary but distinct entities. Wouldn’t it be cool if there was a product that supported all types of discussions and could quickly serve rich media such as photos and videos?
Great forum software achieves this aim. With Ninja Post we are determined to provide the best of both worlds: discussions that are easy and rewarding to join and super fast support for all types of rich media.
