It's really unfortunate that Imgur took such a turn for the worse. Originally it seemed like Imgur was a benevolent gift to Reddit users... a clean, simple, easy to use image hosting service that everyone could use for free. I guess it was too good to be true, because now it's tricky to link to a direct image (though not impossible), and the standard landing page is filled with unnecessary clutter. As an aside: if yo…
Completely expected as soon as they took money. They are exactly what organic "success" stories online look like. Now they want some of reddit's traffic and so reddit is fighting back at first by embedding images directly on the page and now hosting the image themselves. Reddit is also looking to maximize profit.
reddit is trying to squeeze back some of the juice from the third-party devs who use their API without being too overt about it, because they know the community would revolt. Twitter did the same thing much more loudly when they realized that they were giving away the farm by letting most of their userbase access the content via third-party apps.
This works because imgur and other image hosts are already well-integrated into third-party reddit apps, but reddit's image hosting isn't yet, and they can change things around/break it repeatedly until users get annoyed and just move to the official app to try to get a more seamless experience.