Ehhh. I think that there’s value to having a large userbase. First, a large userbase means that there are going to tend to be more people to provide quality content. Second, some people contribute content because they want to reach a large audience – I understand that this is one reason that /r/askhistorians decided not to participate.

None of this is to say that this won’t have a negative impact on Reddit. And I think that the observation, which I’ve seen some other places, is that these changes probably disproportionately impacts people who were contributing content. Just that I don’t think that one can reduce the value of having a large userbase to nil either.