Happy 12th anniversary, Imgur!

I posted something similar about a month ago. Had I known it was going to be Imgur’s 12th birthday I would have waited but this gave me a chance to refine my facts. It all started when I was reciting some imgur lore to someone and trying to explain team human, team toaster, poop knife, a fork with macaroni (which shall not be named), cutting a hole into the downstairs apartment and shitting, camp imgur, @sarah plz loading animation, cera guy, Sarah's potato, soaking logs in wood, and realizing I didn't know anything about the before times. Back before @ElbowDeepInAHorse made MLP acceptable. Before the great Favorite Folder Famine (folders are almost here!) and even before favoriting stopped automatically upvoting and there was nudity on the front page. Back before I had an account and you could scroll through the whole front page before the end of the work week. We didn't favorite and we couldn't comment but the number of upvotes, downvotes, and views was always on display! Won't you join me on my imgur archeological journey?

Once upon a time you could only upload a 20mb image at a time unless you had a pro account. 2015 saw an end to that! And if you wanted to post a video but didn’t know how to convert it to gif? Tough luck!

User-submitted wasn't shortened to user sub yet and it came with a warning!

The imgur meme generator let you easily add captions to any pics and there was even a library to pull from!

The loading icon was generic until @AntonChristensen uploaded a strangely hypnotic and soothing gif. It started as a joke but then people started BEGGING Sarah to change the loading icon (imgur servers were ALWAYS over capacity). However, Anton kept uploading MORE hypnotic gifs! IIRC Sarah changed it once more before putting her foot down. This was the era of "Stay Classy Imgur" and @wadjet tumbler dumps. Truly a savage time.
Quick follow up: Did we send some random imgurian… imguror…imgurite?! Giraffe Jockey!? Let’s say lurker (his term) to become a police officer? Not quite. It was some sort of promotion Fox did to promote a movie. The guy went on to become a personal chef as of 4 years ago but read about his adventure here: https://imgur.com/gallery/WXT3h

This was the original loading icon. Awful. Just awful.

Not much change with the appearance of the website between 2015 and 2010. There was no mobile app. Many people couldn't even "surf the web" (as we called it) from their mobile phones back then.
Quick follow up: @PeanutBuddha made it to just shy of 3 million before going dark 3 years ago but back then it took a lot more effort to accumulate points.
No where can I find anything on the Alan bro date (sus).
And the happy couple (@StrayBullet & @wlfqueen07) are still a happy couple!
And Banana’s are still for scale

I stumbled upon this screenshot inception from 2013. That green bar to the right of the points and to the left of the report button (!) showed you how your posts upvotes compared to its downvotes. If you had 0 points total but 4 downvotes and 4 up the bar would be half red and half green. Note: hitting "save" saved a link to the image on your computer, no favoriting yet. And you could comment on an image but not on another comment. If you wanted to reply to a comment you started with that person's username and hoped they noticed (the @ sign hadn't been invented yet).

The imgur logo was almost clownish back in the day. And we didn't have our own identity yet. We were still trying to define ourselves apart from redit.

This was before my time and I just stumbled upon it by accident. I was looking for the oldest accounts and posts I could find on imgur. It seems as though the oldest imgur accounts, those created before 08JAN2010 were moved in what I'm calling "the great migration" which took place from 2010 -2012 for some reason. As you'll see some of the oldest accounts don't seem to have the right creation date.

I investigated his claims of being the imguraffe father. Turns out he was right! When we really made a go at separating from reddit we decided to come up with our own mascot. Back in those days imgur was a pretty friendly, tight nit community and we could be trusted to vote by community (we hadn't heard of Boaty McBoatface back then) and this guy nailed it.

Making the pilgrimage to downvote the infamous comment that shall not be named by @fartharder was a right of passage. Saying you downvoted that fork comment was to Imgur what saying "the narwhal bacons at midnight" was to reddit. But that's another story.

Ah, 2010. Back when imgur was still molten and forming. There were some growing pains but as I said, nudity on the front page so we didn't mind.

After this point til 2015 the gallery looked the same. Before it became what it was they tried a few different things. Top posts were not only ordered by popularity but you could see what place they were in. Eventually they allowed you to suggest tags for posts to make them easier to find. Those were the days of salad and glory.

You could view most popular one week and the next week you'd start back at the beginning and I shit you not you could scroll through all the new posts and find yourself viewing memes you saw the week before. And they weren't reposts either, as reposting hadn't occurred to us yet.

There weren't any comments to fight in. The best you could do was submit a caption. Which was a step up from what came before.

Before the gallery preview was added to the right there was a selection along the top to choose what image you'd see next. Back then clicking on an image didn't upvote. No, it moved you to the next image!

This may seem archaic by today's standards, but it was a vast improvement to what came even before.

Ok, I don’t think it was quite this bad but archive.org doesn't always save all the code, depending on where it's stored. These were very common memes back then (I was always fond of that panda one). A new variety had come along where you'd put the head of an animal or cartoon in front of a 2-tone background. This is where memes like socially awkward penguin and foul Bachelorette frog came from.

This is one of the oldest memes I could still access on imgur. The president of Iran was trying to keep his subjects off the internet and this meme showed how afraid he was of a “mouse”. SNL had a whole love song about him. Strange days.

Maybe you've seen this meme with all the extra inception levels further down but this is the original. We could be pretty dark.

No comments, no description, a title you could barely see. I think this meme still holds up.

Putin has always been a subject of meme ridicule. Always.

Look at that username! Fractions and spaces! My God!

Fun little find while searching for the oldest Imgur account. Horse AND naughty reference? Nice! It’s like a prophecy fulfilled.

I don’t know how I missed this last time! I thought lospro7 was the oldest account on Imgur (excluding the founders) but I didn’t count him because he was a former employee according to his bio. How did I miss @Scoops?!?! Scoops is still active! If he had a user ID number it would be SINGLE DIGIT!
Scoops COULD be an employee but I can’t find any evidence saying they are (There's some guessing in archeology. He may have even had feathers back then). They have one comment like 5 years ago and their most recent post is from last August and it’s a WOW screenshot album! They have 3 posts

and negative points (which used to be called the "forever alone" level but I guess now it's just neutral)! This is probably the oldest active imgur account and it’s nothing but BULL SHIT!!! I don’t know if that’s horrible or perfect! I’m having trouble posting links to his account but here he is: https://imgur.com/user/scoops/

Fun tidbit: I found this account by accident and I don’t know if I was supposed to be able to. I think this might be THE imgur test account!

Here it is! The OG imgur.com homepage. My God.

And now, I rest my old bones. My work is complete for now. G'night 
Edit: @thedownvotefairyisahorriblespecies posted the link I needed to find the imguraffe info. Thx! http://imgur.com/gallery/ulxlSDZ/comment/54744789 Thanks to @Graehall for pointing out @CloakerJosh was the OG behind the OC infographics featured in this post. This is essentially a well curated series of reposts. Truly I stood on the shoulders of giants! One thing I couldn't find, what ever happened to the guy who built a software system on his own, implemented it at work, then got fired because everything was running so smoothly. Problem was he was the only one who could maintain the system and it crashed within a week. When lawyers got involved I assumed a NDA was involved. This would've been around 2013/2014 and was big on Imgur at the time. If you haven't made the pilgrimage yet http://imgur.com/gallery/9h6Zx/comment/230393 don't forget to upvote another comment of his or you will be visited by three spirits.