[masklinn]

> 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.

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.