I agree that they haven't succeeded in removing their dependency on reddit, but you can tell it is certainly something on Alan's mind.
I really don't understand why they have taken steps that really limit the community for no real good reason. For example, comments are limited to 140 chars, which de facto means the discussion is going to be incredibly shallow. The only reason I can think of is maybe Alan was afraid of reddit thinking he was trying to steal their users and cutting him out entirely by creating their own image hosting solution, so he purposely limited imgur's ability to develop its own community to not upset reddit stakeholders. (EDIT: It appears imgur has recently taken investment money from reddit, so now this threat is much less of a concern).
For example, why hasn't imgur adopted a subreddit style model to help organize the content on the site? It's a no brainer to help develop individual communities with actual focus instead of having one giant "random" feed. Anyone who argues that would be stealing an idea from reddit clearly hasn't been to a forum before. All forum's are divided by topic... except imgur.
|Most of users base browses the sites "Viral" gallery. Which is nothing more then a "Reddit's 24 hour greatest hits", a surprisingly low number of images make it into imgur's gallery from imgur itself.
Additionally, using a subreddit approach would allow imgur to bridge the gap from "reliance on reddit" to all content coming from within the imgur community itself. That is, if imgur was to switch off content from reddit right now, the quality of the site's content would plummet. User's would be confused (as most it seems don't actually understand where the content comes from) and there would honestly probably be a huge drop in the userbase. However, if they adopt a subreddit approach, with the first/main "subimgur" being "viral" which stays the exact same as it is now, then as the additional subimgurs that get created increase in quality they will naturally begin to take over more and more of the homepage allowing for a seamless transition away from reddit content to entirely imgur content.
Lastly, the layout of the site could use an upgrade in my opinion. I would prefer a hot ranked layout with full size images in descending order, basically reddit+RES with all images expanded, but with comments expandable under each post (or show top 3-5 comments under each post with clickable button to expand all -- or have the comments as a sidecar to each post when site is viewed on a desktop/tablet), which is a better user experience than having to click from image to image. Alan might be afraid that layout would kill their monetizable page views, since now they get a pageview per image where they can display a new ad. But the fact of the matter is, the impressions/pageview model of online advertising is dying fast. Using a feed instead of displaying one image at a time means imgur could integrate a native advertising solution, which pays much better than traditional display ads. If Alan is afraid of immediate drop in revenue that would come from transitioning to a new (though significantly better longterm) ad model, maybe it's time for imgur to actually take in some investment capital that VCs are constantly trying to throw at it.
EDIT: It appears imgur has taken $40 MM in investment this year, I wasn't aware of that.