But most of imgur's audience is not even seeing the site or is just looking at a quick picture and then going back to reddit or some other referring site.
I think you're mistaken here. As a reddit user you might think that, but there's actually a fully functional imgur community that votes on images independently from reddit and comments on them on imgur independent from reddit.
Parent said "most of", and I think that's pretty much correct regardless of how vibrant of a community Imgur has. Most traffic to imgur is via embeds or links from another discussion forums. The former case obviously provides no exposure to Imgur community, and even in the latter case most people are there only to look at the picture, not to engage as an Imgur community member.
The whole point of this discussion thread is that Imgur is f*ed because they aren't independent enough. Otherwise there's nothing to worry about, right?
