I'm not very active in Reddit anymore -- HN is my last distraction now -- but I did watch that situation carefully because it was interesting. I got the sense that the outrage died down only because Reddit promised to migrate its paid features into the "free" arena. Until then, a lot of people were angry that there was going to be some kind of "elite" class on the site.
Practically speaking, even if Reddit had managed to permanently piss off this chunk of its userbase, I doubt they would have left altogether, and even if they did, there's no way to gauge what fraction of Reddit's traffic was really represented by these guys. It could've been (and probably was) just a tempest in a teapot.
But either way, in that specific case, there would have been some vocal rebellion if the paid-for features stayed locked behind a paywall.
As a Charter and gold reddit member... not really. It was well understood early on that most of the "gold" features would be stuff that was too expensive (computationally) to give to everybody (especially before the server upgrade), at least from the start.
The great fear gripping everybody was truly that Reddit would somehow become "for-pay", and that content previously free would now become non-free (a fear which didn't make much sense as the community is the one providing the content, and the admins might not be too media and ad-savvy, but they're not stupid)
> But either way, in that specific case, there would have been some vocal rebellion if the paid-for features stayed locked behind a paywall.
Doubtful. 1000 comments/thread is a nice feature for instance, but it didn't exist (at all) before gold and it's not exactly a deal-breaker.
Edit: Was mistaken. Assumed the parent was responding to the entire comment, rather than just a part.
