While I agree with Imgur being obnoxious and a far cry from their early days, they are not as awful as the previous de-facto image sharing site - whatever it was with the green frog as their mascot.

Do you mean imageshack? It's exactly like that.

Though imageshack's biggest crime was delete everything (maybe except stuff from paid accounts) at one point in time.

Yup, that was it. Thanks for the name reminder.

And I still stand by my earlier statement: Imgur has declined, but they have not yet stooped to the level of end-user abuse shack did. (Granted, hijacking direct image URLs is sleezy as hell.)

Imageshack made even uploads a chore. Sure, picking the image from your drive was easy - but then they made every attempt possible to force their inline branding into all inbound links.

Getting a hot-linkable image from shack uploads required extra effort. And they tried to trick you into using their quality-degraded downscaled versions everywhere. It was dreadful. I even remember couple of cases where after the upload there was no way of getting the image link out. At all. All you got was a 80x80 thumbnail and a link to their shitty pages where you could, MAYBE, view the image. (Which was, of course, downscaled and further compressed. The original was gone.)

So no, as far as I am concerned, Imgur has not yet reached the imageshack abusement park level.

The bigger issue is Imgur has been leveraging their monopoly on Reddit's image hosting to build a new social commentary system to replace Reddit. If Reddit didn't do something then maybe in five years Reddit will be dead and Imgur will be the front page of the internet.