Cash not Jesus, Bladewire...
Porn is bad for business: Imgur spent years as a bootstrapped pet project of Alan Schaaf's, but in the past year, it's raised millions of dollars from prominent venture capital firms in order to turn its burgeoning community into a business. Imgur will be rolling out a new promoted ad campaign later this summer, and it's been hiring more salespeople to build a sort of user-generated Internet magazine of the future.
And although they want to keep the Imgurian identity intact,
having a content free-for-all with porn everywhere is a major turn-off for premium advertisers. It's no coincidence that the new rules about NSFW content came at the same time as a major app release and announcement about new native ads. (Pornographic content hosted on Imgur ? much of which is accessed via Reddit ? is unaffected for the time being.)
Imgur Community Revolts After Site Tightens NSFW Controls - Mic
There is push back coming to adult from many sides: Govs, mainstream, religious nut jobs. Bottom line is they believe it diminishes their financial returns when porn is mixed too heavily with mainstream. Twitter just caught that, Pinterest seems to already know it and now imgur, wanting to grow has to slowly curtail some of the hardcore and links.
People in the porn business should be happy about this as it pushes the free-loaders/thieves into being consumers. Sure, people will continue to try and scam but the penalties are getting more stiff...so to speak.