Ultimately I think Imgur is destined to the same fate as TwitPic.
If anything, Reddit was the parasite because its users used a ton of Imgur bandwidth and by direct linking, didn't give anything in return.
Once Imgur decided to actually try to become a sustainable business, they had to change how that worked by trying to ensure that people coming to the site also saw ads. Then they started building their own community and working to become a direct competitor to Reddit.
At that point, the right biological metaphor is probably too organisms with the same food source in the same ecosystem, competing for resources.
Given that, it's no surprise that they are both working to sever ties to each other.
If you look at the numbers, after the beta Imgur was starting to grow again. It was a hit yes, but not an exodus.
It was absolutely a parasite. It would not have survived to grow to the size it did without Reddit. Parasites can offer a beneficial service to the host but cannot live without it.
It has since evolved into something possibly capable of existing on its own but only time will tell.
My guess is it lives for a few more years at best.
It's true that Imgur has to grow its product now to something bigger. I won't even give them many years if they don't do that for a product that simple and ephemeral. They have challenges here.
The parasite metaphor does not include the idea of being a "copy-cat"; parasites in the real world do not do the same things as their host. Indeed, that is the entire point of a parasite, in some sense; to take advantage of the host setting up various expensive systems to survive and just using them instead of developing their own.
Incidentally, this is not what biologists consider parasitism. To a biologist, a parasitic relationship is one that benefits one while harming the other. Do you think that reddit was harmed by imgur? If imgur benefited but reddit was not harmed, their relationship was commensal. If they both benefited, their relationship was mutual.
To capture the idea that imgur was totally dependent on its relationship with reddit (but not vice versa), you would say that their mutualism was obligate for imgur but facultative for reddit.
Parasitism is when one party benefits while the other is harmed.
Well… sure, you could say at first it was more of a symbiotic relationship, though probably providing more benefit to reddit than to Imgur, the latter absorbing the former's bandwidth costs and not getting much in return.
The parasitical part comes with
> but now Imgur has its own community
because, in order to ensure its survival, Imgur has tried to grow itself into an independent community on the back of reddit, to eventually be self-sustaining.
Now that reddit's cutting it off, maybe it actually will be self-sustaining. All the more power to them if that works.
But I don't think “parasitical” is an unfair characterisation of how things have worked so far. It's not really intended as a value judgement on my part.
Too bad for any of the artists or photographers or content-creators who were depending on Imgur, but, 'Mister you knew I was a scorpion when you picked me up' as the story goes.
I think a lot of people in this thread don't know that one of the primary definitions of parasite can include not harming the host and generically mean: "an organism living in, with, or on another organism."
And if you question the dependency part of Imgur being a parasite, just wait until you see how things go for Imgur the next few years post Reddit handling its own images. One can thrive without the other, it's obvious which that is.
Given that many subreddits have in their rules that people submitting images and blog posts should copy and paste the content into Reddit rather than linking to the actual creator, it seems more accurate to say that Reddit was a parasite on Imgur.
This is true in exactly the same sense that "pastebins are essentially parasites on freenode". Which is to say, kinda not.
Pastebins are merely text hosts.