Broadly, Reddit needs money to survive, and they need goodwill to get money. Burning $X of goodwill to make $10X dollars is kind of what they're trying to do now, but it's a very delicate move on their part. If you kind of build some simple mathematical models in your head it's not hard to see how delicate this move is, since "goodwill" is also people visiting. As large as the site is, it is not very many exponential processes from 90%+ losses. It is one of great perils of social sites in general, they can't help but transmit social contagions by their very design. There's quite a number of sites that have been wiped out by these forces (MySpace), and a larger number of sites that nominally still exist but are shadows of their former selves (Slashdot, Tumblr post-porn removal, Digg).

I suspect Reddit management is making a classic mistake and operating with a linear model of their options when in fact the situation is very non-linear because of the fact that goodwill feeds back on goodwill. It's only locally linear and they can leave the linear domain quickly and irreversibly.