Imgur is about instant gratification. As you cycle through the best images on the web, there's an oddly satisfying instant gratification effect after each one. This is the reason for both having 1 piece of content on each page, and having 140 char comments.
The longer the comment, the longer it takes to read. Ain't nobody got time to read walls of text on the Internet anymore. People want their Internet quick fixes, and 140 char comments allow you to skim through and continue on.
In Imgur's case, people visit for their quick fix, and end up getting lost in a rabbit hole of viral images. Fun fact: When people visit the homepage and start browsing from there, they average 44 pageviews over an average time of 22 minutes!
While Imgur don't have "subimgurs", it does have tags. Like game of thrones? Check out the best game of thrones images on the Internet: http://imgur.com/t/game_of_thrones/top/year
I don't want to split the community into subcommunities where you have to follow certain ones over others. This would lessen the affect of discovering something you didn't know you liked, and would lessen the instant gratification affect imho.
Also, I disagree that the user submitted section sucks, and for those wondering, just over 50% of front page "viral" content is from user-sub: http://imgur.com/new/viral
The tagging functionality does mirror the formal organization of a forum. It would be nice to see it formalized a bit more on imgur. Maybe a bar at the top of the screen with trending tags? Or heck, maybe even just in the sidebar.
Oh and the real exciting question... when is imgur going to branch into a "simple video sharing" service. Youtube gets more cumbersome and annoying each year (dialog boxes that pop up all over the videos? I mean come on!). The perfect opportunity is arising for imgur to step in at what it does best, keeping things simple. In addition to imgur users, I bet all OC video content on reddit would immediately switch to using an imgur video service.
The longer the comment, the longer it takes to read. Ain't nobody got time to read walls of text on the Internet anymore. People want their Internet quick fixes, and 140 char comments allow you to skim through and continue on.
In Imgur's case, people visit for their quick fix, and end up getting lost in a rabbit hole of viral images. Fun fact: When people visit the homepage and start browsing from there, they average 44 pageviews over an average time of 22 minutes!
While Imgur don't have "subimgurs", it does have tags. Like game of thrones? Check out the best game of thrones images on the Internet: http://imgur.com/t/game_of_thrones/top/year
I don't want to split the community into subcommunities where you have to follow certain ones over others. This would lessen the affect of discovering something you didn't know you liked, and would lessen the instant gratification affect imho.
Also, I disagree that the user submitted section sucks, and for those wondering, just over 50% of front page "viral" content is from user-sub: http://imgur.com/new/viral