I one time posted an album on Imgur of my hobby project. I was hoping it would do well on the niche subreddit it involved.

It did ok on reddit (100 upvotes) but a few thousands upvotes on Imgur and made the front page with hundreds of thousands of views. I was shocked since I didn't even know that was a thing. But my guess is popular with people who are on their phone a lot, are not as tech saavy, or international.

The exact opposite personality type to people that browse HN I'd wager

I used to in college. Extremely bad habit, was easy to spend 4+ hours there just hitting the right arrow.

I recall being in high school (around 2013, 2014) and some of my classmates would browse imgur while slacking off from work. Not sure how big it is these days, but I think some people use it the same way you'd browse r/funny on reddit, or iFunny. Except there isn't really a topic, it's just images of whatever people think is interesting.

Who doesn't? It's the best source of almost everything. Perfect mix of culturally important twitter and news screenshots and entertaining gifs.

Plenty of people, overwhelmingly men[1].

Make no mistake, Imgur is a social network. It has its own memes, regular posting themes, and users recognised by the community[2].

[1]: They are (were?) proud of that and bragged about it in a page describing themselves.

[2]: https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/anewbadlyphotoshoppedphotoofm...

People that subscribe to default subreddits and click the Youtube "Featured" section.

I only now learned that it has such a thing and decided to see it, and I am very confused by the lack of advertisement on it indeed.

People who want to find memes to repost on their social media.

My retired father?

you're forced there if you want to upload something