Don’t give traffic to reddit. Do what reddit does to everyone else: screenshot it, then post it here in a way that does not tell you the original source. But then be better than Reddit by giving attribution to the original creator. 
Interesting perspective. I don't mind using Reddit as an alternative to catbox.moe, but your approach is interesting. I'm not sure that accessing the picture directly using that link gives them that much traffic, otherwise what prevents them from just using bots to access all of the similar links to create fake traffic?
Would you have the credit to the artist? As you said, Reddit does not usually provide it.
I’m just salty about what Reddit has done recently and grinding an ax a bit. Just so you don’t think I’m coming after you or something. 
The link I clicked was a Reddit URL, so I assume it drives traffic to them. In addition, people on Reddit have a terrible habit of not crediting creators.
Reddit, among other sites like imgur, sometimes do sneaky shit with URL rewriting. Even what looks like a hotlink to an image file can actually just serve up HTML with the image somewhere in it... and, more than likely, some other shit you don't care about, like ads, consent spam, registration.
I'm not sure. In fact, where'd you get that link? The page here (I'm using kbin, FWIW) just links to https://preview.redd.it/gcdh211grbib1.jpg - which then does the shoddy trick I mentioned, serving up a page instead of the image file the URL promises so it can nag you for cookies and registration.
On Lemmy, you can normally click the picture which would then appear. When hovering over that picture, the link of the picture would be the one I pointed above.
In any case, I removed the Reddit link and replaced it with the other one just to be safe.