Excerpt:
Most major subreddits show a decrease of between 50 and 90 percent in average daily posts and comments, when compared to a year ago. This suggests the problem is way fewer users, not the same number of users browsing less. The huge and universal dropoff also suggests that people left, either because of the changes or the protests, and they aren’t coming back.
Had they made it part of the original Reddit Gold subscription, or worked that into a new subscription for roughly the same price (~$60 a year) I would have been all over that, no questions asked.
You would have kept most of the power users/mods/whatever and had them be a revenue stream in the process.
Instead they lost both the potential for earnings and the contributions they brought to the site. How stupid did they have to be?