I don't know if what I'm about to describe is a glitch or if I did anything wrong. Imgur won't tell me. I tried to find answers to this but couldn't, having looked on Imgur, in Imgur forum posts, in r/NoStupidQuestions, in the Imgur subreddits, and so on. I haven't gotten any answers from any of these places.

The context is I have some images on Imgur where the image mysteriously vanished. The link to where the post still shows up, and the image title is still there, but the image is gone, and in my gallery, it appears as a light blue square. I tested the download feature and it gives me a zipped folder as it should, but when I try to extract it, an error message comes up because the folder is actually empty.

I know some of the more well-known reasons Imgur removes images, such as a post getting downvoted too much or a post breaking community guidelines (I've had one of each of these and was told a third would trigger an admin notification and possibly my termination), but lately I've seen posts, including one of mine, hidden for reasons that neither of these seem to explain. Despite being told another violation would lead to action being taken against me, this hasn't happened, nor have I received a notification or email for it, leading me to believe it wasn't violation-based, but who knows?

None of these images were NSFW or AI-generated, if anyone was wondering this. Most notably some cosplays were on there, my cosplaying even constituted my most popular of my images/posts, and it was there for almost half a year before this happened, which rules out the unpopularity theory, and suddenly I logged on a few weeks ago and it's not there anymore. The tags are gone too, and the "post" button is blurred signaling it can't be posted as new, unless I am misinterpreting that.

So can anyone tell me every final reason why a post might be removed so Imgur might be able to help me fulfill my duty according to them to make sure they're pleased with the visibility of my images? This either has a very obvious answer or a very unobvious one, in either case I looked everywhere for an answer because I don't know it and have been thrown through some loops,

I've always been curious about this even though I've never been in this situation.

On Reddit, there are things they ban you over if you do them with alternate accounts, like voting for the same option on a poll, adding multiple upvotes to a comment, and so on.

Meanwhile, as being a mod comes with duties, Reddit specifically asks you to approve or unapprove posts in your subreddit. For the most part, approving a post doesn't seem on par with rigging results, but I'm guessing that because posts being approved gives automod the impression that an account is trustworthy, it could be deemed as amounting to an indirect form of rigging.

And yet, on the other hand, it is technically your subreddit, and even your own posts (as subreddit owner) make you choose between approving and unapproving posts.

What happens then if you have an alternate account, use it to post in a subreddit your main account owns, then approve it with your own account which owns the subreddit?