Imgur unveils meme generator days after Reddit banned Quickmeme

The Redditors among us noticed something off a few days ago – the absence of Quickmeme images. This happened following a discovery that the company was using bots to manipulate upvotes and downvotes for self-serving purposes, provoking the banhammer. Soon after, users began requesting that Imgur – which also enjoys quite a presence on the website – launch its own meme generator.

The entire scheme unraveled when a moderator on the sub-reddit r/AdviceAnimals named "gtwo8" was discovered to be one of the founders of Miltz Media, which owns several websites. The other moderators in the sub-reddit began sleuthing and discovered that the account was being used to hock those websites. That would certainly be enough to get anyone banned, but then another discovery was made: vote bots.

The vote bots were used to upvote links submitted from Quickmeme, and to downvote links submitted by other websites, with the obvious goal of helping push Quickmeme up in the rankings and, thusly, exposing it to more users. As such, not only was the account banned, but also all of Quickmeme with it. Anyone who tries to post a Quickmeme link will receive a big red notification telling them that the service has been banned for "manipulation of reddit".

While the ban has certainly been a serious blow to Quickmeme, Imgur has no doubt never seen better days, now not only being the dominate presence for most of the images posted on Reddit, but memes as well. Quite a few have already been made, with the service displaying the most popular one on the generator's main page. As far as meme generators go, it is simple to use.

Users can choose to use an already established meme theme, such as the one above, or to upload their own image. From there, text boxes are positioned over the image for text. Dragging resizes the text, while a simple button click publishes it. There is an option to keep the meme image private or post it for everyone to enjoy.

SOURCE: Imgur Meme Generator and Reddit