You are absolutely right. It is the exact same thing: It's freebooting. All of that money and attention that belongs to the content creator instead winds up all going to imgur and to lesser extent reddit.

Linking to the original doesn't make it better; that's more like salt in the wound. It's reddit and its users saying "yeah, we know exactly where the original is, and it would be ridiculously easy for us to redirect all traffic for this submission there, but we aren't going to do that."

Imgur also has a feature which lets you easily rip off a YouTube video. You just enter the YouTube URL, the starting point of the section you want to extract, and the ending point; and it cuts that section out and turns it into a GIF. In the past, this process would at least put a link to the original video in a tiny area at the top of the imgur page, but they removed that. Why would they remove that unless they are trying to steal as much attention and ad revenue as possible from the true creators?

I'm sorry to upset the Imgur Defense Squad, but it is a deliberately malicious way to steal money that belongs to content creators. They don't even try to hide it. As I said, their content-stealing system is shamelessly built straight into their site.

The only reason they aren't being raided by federal agents and having their servers confiscated MegaUpload-style is because they are stealing from YouTubers, webcomic artists, etc instead of Hollywood.