Counter-counter point: for years Reddit has been pushing for fewer article links and more locally hosted content.

They started hosting their own images, then their own videos. This is expensive to do, but perhaps they felt that it was worth it to keep users on their site instead of risking them wandering off to Imgur.

And the new design discourages actually reading the article. When you click on a "link", it sends you to the comment page which has a small embedded thumbnail and blurb. (The old design took you to the article directly).