[ebiester]

Every time you upset your user base, you give them an opportunity to leave. Or, you turn your advocates into neutral. They stop being willing to do free work for you.

Reddit is dependent on free work. Moderators are a significant portion of that process, and they are the ones who depend on the API the most. If your moderators decide to do less work, your community starts going down in quality. If the community goes down in quality, they will make the decision that a smaller community is better than a poorly run community and someone else will capture that use case.

The question is if that will happen before an IPO. Given the climate, that IPO may be two years away.

[monksy]

Not only does it rely on the labor of mods and dealing with a lot of bad behavior. However, the admins also enforce a "code of conduct" on the mods and threaten the loss of the sub for lack of compliance.