Can I just say something super weird? I was recently looking for a solution to an issue I had and I needed to look at an image that I could see clearly so I had to zoom in, but because if I’m in the Reddit website, zooming in actually zooms into the Reddit UI, I did what I used to always do and opened the image in a new tab. No longer does that open the image only. It now opens the image AND some Reddit UI around it so guess what happened when I tried to zoom in? That’s right, I zoomed into the UI so I still couldn’t see the image!!! What the hell, Reddit, it’s almost as if you don’t want people to use your website anymore??
Yeah, I believe that was a change they made not long after shafting 3rd party apps. I had a couple older iOS devices with their own older versions of third party apps, and that change effectively made any post with a Reddit uploaded image unviewable. Incredibly infuriating and I can’t understand the logic behind it either.
I will say that further to that, a few years ago Imgur made a change that does the same damn thing if it detects you’re on mobile. Unless you tick “Show Desktop Site” in your browser, it’s impossible to actually standalone view a direct image.
Presumably to disable that hot linking from other websites/apps. Especially if they use scrapers.
But yeah, bad ux.
Obfuscating the image file like that is usually completely transparent to scrapers actually, as the image URL is almost always in the HTML. You can find the direct image link yourself if you poke around in the element inspector for a bit.
It’s just to make it harder to copy and increase to amount of people that link the full site URL (with the tracking and analytics ofc) instead of the image directly.